OpenNMS Meridian vs. VMware Skyline

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

VMware Skyline is free yet is priceless. Skyline gives you the health of your VMware products in a single pane. Here you not only get issues pointed out to you but the suggested solutions for each issue. Doesn't get better than this.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Easy setup
• Stable
• Data collection

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

• Sometimes the recommendations do not make sense.
• Sometimes the advice is general, but not for us.

Incentivized

It's super easy to use.

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

I've used other products such as VMAN and such yet Skyline is different. This is not aimed at your virtual machine's internal usage but at the VMware / Hypervisor level. This looks and monitors at hardware drivers, VMtools versions, and VM hardware versions. If you have Horizon it will look at versions and current vs minimum driver versions.

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

• Weekly reports helps gain long term statistics
• service requests can be easily resolved

Incentivized