NetBrain vs. Observium

Great for our large global environment. Works well with our legacy and newer equipment. Ease of install was exciting compared to other products we POC'd. Less of a learning curve when training Teams on how to monitor and troubleshoot while in production. Service desk were able to capture the logs and load into our ticketing system with ease.

• 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.

• Network Issues Troubleshooting
• Visualizing the root cause using color coding
• out of the box runbooks available

• SNMP monitoring
• Easy to set up initially
• Alerting

• Not all devices are integrated with the same quality.
• Not all steps are self-explaining.
• The updates were difficult (but thanks to the help of support no real problem).

• The UI is pretty robust and succinct. It might be beneficial to have favorites for complex network schemas.
• Historical searching based on X time frame.
• More customized dashboards.

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

The others were cumbersome, slow and there is a huge learning curve for the installation, configuration and just daily monitoring. NetBrain was the easiest of all to setup then let it run and build our network and map it out. Once it was complete, we immediately identified several circuit issues that we were unaware of within our network. With the maps and information gained, we were able to present to [management] and prove a case that we needed larger circuits in several areas.

SolarWinds does when Observium can do but for a much larger price tag. That is what the decision came down to.

• Enhanced Network troubleshooting for our Network tea
• Out of the box pre-build runbook reports with all required details
• Additional cost for troubleshooting feature

• Observium is enterprise-level network monitoring without the cost involved.