OpenNMS Meridian vs. Zenoss

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.

Incentivized

Overall I would say that we have been very happy with Zenoss. It has been a great server monitoring tool. There are certain aspects that we would like to expand into, such as Capacity Planning, Network Performance Monitoring, and log analysis. We have coupled Zenoss logs with Splunk for external log management, but would like to start using some of the built-in analysis tools.

• Report on SLA
• Group network areas
• Discovery of elements

Incentivized

• Monitoring Windows, Unix/Linux, Infra apps, storage, virtualization, converge infra etc..
• Integrate with other monitoring tools and receive events for aggregation and correlation
• Integration with ITSM( SNOW) for auto ticket creation

Incentivized

• We've had a few issues with delayed alerting.
• 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.

Incentivized

• Hard to troubleshot and fix the issue.
• More development for monitoring storage systems.
• Load balancing on Zenoss instance.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Our ROI was excellent, but the company has also implemented other tools that compete with Zenoss.
• Zenoss has a long history of excellence in monitoring and alerting
• Overall observability is easier to manage due to our comfort with the tool set