Nmap vs. Observium

Nmap is the ideal solution if you are working alot in network environments. If you come to grips with the syntax and the most-used features (the online community helps alot), you will be able to much more quickly and thoroughly troubleshoot networks or check for security vulnerabilities, for instance. It is free to use and is available for Windows and Linux, so I would say it is very much warrented for any network administrator or sysadmin to take it out for a spin.

Incentivized

It is a very good overall monitoring solution for any kind of SNMP network device. Fast and simple to set up. It is an easy, robust, and quick monitoring system. The easy-to-use user interface provides advanced capabilities for the statistical display of data, as well as diagrams. This is a great way to add auto-discovery and geographical representation of the network.

Incentivized

• Nmap is very good at discovering systems on your network.
• Nmap is very good at guessing a systems operating system with a high degree of accuracy.
• Nmap is good at validating externally facing systems to make sure that unauthorized access is not allowed.

Incentivized

• You can see the bits per second that are happening on the ports, which is fantastic.
• Between logical interfaces, you can see how much bandwidth is being used per second/minute/hour.
• You can infer power consumption and conflicting routes. Great tool to aggregate and visualize your distributed network.

Incentivized

• exporting, There's a serious lack of ability to export the information in a readable format to present to VPs and such. I always find myself doing a lot of data massaging to get it in a pretty format
• some scans can trigger sensitive IDS/IPS
• SYN scans can be particularly aggressive and cause problems on remote systems.

Incentivized

• The documentation needs help. This product, like many other IT products, likes to skip the "101" stuff, assuming that you just inherently know how to do something, and the documentation is just for reference.
• I have not been able to rely on the alerting engine as our primary way of knowing if devices are up or down. I'm sure that's just as much my fault as the software, but this is one area where commercial products tend to shine in comparison.
• The autodiscovery of VMware virtual machines does not work properly if the ESX-level name of the VM doesn't match the VM's hostname. FileServer234 will be discovered, but "Server234 - File and Print" will not.

Incentivized

Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.

Incentivized

There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.

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

A similar but more basic alternative is available on Android, called Fing. It's very useful for diagnosing issues on networks when you only have your mobile device to hand.

A graphical user interface alternative to Nmap, is Zenmap. It's the official GUI for Nmap and does use Nmap under the hood. It makes things a bit more 'point and click'.

Incentivized

Observium is easier to use and "prettier" than most of the other open source tools out there. It's also significantly cheaper than most of the mid-range NMS products out there, and several orders of magnitude cheaper than the big boys. It tends to be my go-to NMS for these reasons, even when budget isn't a huge concern.

Incentivized

• NMap being free of charge has a positive impact on our budget. It is an enterprise-class tool that anyone can download and use.
• NMap, both command line and GUI, is a very advanced tool that is easy to use, so there's very little learning curve involved, which has a positive impact on productivity and security.
• A valuable feature that is a huge time saver is that you can compare scans. This saves hours of searching manually for differences in scan results. Faster results means faster mitigation of problems, which can be a real money saver.

Incentivized

• Allows us to react immediately when issues occur
• Paying for enterprise support is relatively cheap and we have found benefit from it
• Lots of time spent customising the product has been challenging

Incentivized