LiveAction vs. Observium

From a packet tracing standpoint, it was easy to setup and analyze an issue we were having with eigrp errors between 2 data centers. Took a few minutes to stand up on both sides and compare the traffic to determine hellos weren't being sent. On the other spectrum, had it had the analytics of such products as Extrahop, it could have recognized and alerted us of an internal DNS attack we had.

Incentivized

• If you are on a budget, this is one heck of a tool for the price (including the ~$200/year for the Pro subscription).
• If you are OK with maintaining and updating open source tools, this is a great tool.
• If you are afraid of the Linux command line or live in a Windows-centric world, this might not be the tool for you.
• If you can't stand things occasionally not working, this is probably not a good fit.

Incentivized

• Network QOS Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network L2/L3 Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation
• Network Security Assessment, and recommendations, and point-and-click remediation

Incentivized

• Automatic device discovery.
• Scalability
• Real-time monitoring.

Incentivized

• I use it primarily as a monitoring tool from a security standpoint, so one complaint is that the filter creation process takes a little time to learn.
• In the digital days of printing less, I do still need to print network diagrams for compliance documentation and some of the larger network diagrams documents do not print easily.
• I wish the network connection lines were easier to see. They are typically very light and you have to drill down to see them more clearly.

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Community support
• Easy to set up but hard to customise fully

Incentivized

Can't really rate this, we never had to call support. The product wasn't complicated to setup and learn. We have a high level of network knowledge so the product was self-explanatory.

Incentivized

It's open source. Your mileage may vary. Sometimes the provided documentation is beyond frustrating, other times it's right on the mark.

Incentivized

There is not any other product that does exactly what LiveAction does. Some come about halfway close, like scrutinizer by Plixer. However, there is a gap with that product as it doesn't give proper quality of service recommendations, or to update l2/l3 configs to head off problems. Plixer's scrutinizer product costs about the same. It was a no-brainer to pick LiveAction.

Incentivized

I haven't used other products that are similar to Observium. Observium is an open tool, with a robust feature set. There are elements of comparable monitoring across other tools, but nothing I've seen that is a complete parallel in terms of feature set and visualizations. If I were asked, I wouldn't have another tool to recommend over Observium.

Incentivized

• Real time insight to network issues whether security related or not.
• Great reporting features for executives.

Incentivized

• It is good for DC admin.
• Only positive impact.
• Highly recommended.

Incentivized