NetBrain Technologies in Burlington offers their network automation and management platform, emphasizing dynamic and accurate network mapping and automated troubleshooting and basic security analysis, as well as integration with an existing CMDB.
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.
I would recommend all system administrators use some form of network monitoring if they are not already doing so, and I'd definitely recommend people consider OpenNMS if they're shopping around. Small businesses will benefit from the low-cost of entry (it's free!), whilst getting all the enterprise features. Larger businesses can benefit from paid support plans.
However, there's no getting around the fact that you will require some advanced networking and sysadmin knowledge to get the most out of OpenNMS, or at least, be prepared for a steep learning curve. If you don't have the resources to devote this time initially, you may struggle.
I haven't quite figured out how to make topologies work yet, but I haven't spent a ton of time on it either.
We've also had a bit of trouble importing some MIBs, but that usually boiled down to working with the vendor to make sure we had the right MIBs and dependencies.
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.
OpenNMS's more attractive GUI and its price break were the main reasons our company chose to explore and use this product. However, it never managed to actually replace Nagios which had a much more established hold within the company. Perhaps we were over-monitoring, but our company claimed a $100k loss per hour of downtime.
Initial adoption required quite a lot of resources and time to get everything right. Totally worth it for us; just be prepared for a gradual process that will get better and better with time.
Once setup and running smoothly, it provides us with all the reporting we could hope for, at near zero cost.
With OpenNMS, we're able to offer a much more reliable service to our customers, and spend a lot less time dealing with issues.
