Observium vs. PingPlotter

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

It is well suited for performing monitoring and testing from a single device. It is less appropriate if you have to monitor from multiple different endpoints. That type of deployment would be more of an enterprise application. If you are looking for an end user monitoring solution then PingPlotter is the one for you.

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

• Monitor traffic in network
• Measure stops when contacting network locations such as websites
• Measures the lag and latency it takes to contact network locations
• Gives you both induvidual measurements as well as good oversight
• identifies when network lag or disconnect occurs

• 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

• Its a little confusing to see which targets are currently running pings and which ones are displayed in the plots.
• Starting and stopping pings requires a right click and that would be better with a play/pause button I think.
• Ability to drag and drop the graphs to reorder them.
• more columns to show which targets are running and which are displayed. Currently this is done with symbols so you cant sort by just the running targets for example I've found.

Incentivized

I installed it and it just started working. I realized I could then tweak it to show what I needed but didn't have to spend a long time configuring it before use, editing YAML files etc. Maybe that's fine for a network professional, but I only need this software if something goes wrong, and then need it to work quickly out of the box.

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

I have not had much contact with the PingPlotter support, only one time have I went to them and it was a positive experience. The questions I had were answered quickly and professionally. I have no issue with the experience I had with the Support team. This was from before and after the purchase of the product.

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

I used Ping.app and UptimeLog.app on the Mac. These both provided different aspects. These two had a menubar to show me green or red for multiple connections. UptimeLog showed me very clearly when my connectivity was on or off and for exactly how long

• 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

• Great ROI, troubleshooting time has been reduced by 90%
• Network Discoveries used to take 2 to 3 hours and were inconsistent - now it is a matter of minutes
• lacks integration into our MSP toolkit, and we now use it as a stand alone product

Incentivized