OpenNMS Meridian vs. Tivoli Monitoring (legacy)

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

If you are looking for a software that looks decent but is not something you truly rely on, this is it. I have had bad experiences with IBM Tivoli Monitoring reporting on system errors that were not evident on the systems themselves at all. There is a lot of specific alerting you can set up which is nice.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• The GUI is easy to read.
• The software is fairly easy to configure.
• Almost real-time.

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

• The software is not reliable at all.
• Reports errors that are false-negatives.
• Hard to configure alarms/alerts.
• Bulky installation (takes up quite a bit of space).

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

We selected IBM Tivoli Monitoring as a bundle deal, other than that I would have probably gone with another vendor. We use Brocade Network Advisor for our SAN also which I would suggest to anyone over this software. The software has not been that reliable for me since we started using it.

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

• I would not purchase this again.
• Other software monitoring tools have been more reliable and easier to manage.
• Difficult to manage, if you patch the server the software is installed on and have to reboot it, IBM Tivoli Monitoring does not come up clean.

Incentivized