Observium vs. Safe Systems Vendor Management

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

• 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

• 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

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

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

• 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