Overview
Great tool for monitoring Network devices.
Observium Review
Observium - Great NMS capability at a low (or free) price point
Observium for Enterprise Network Monitoring
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- No setup fee
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- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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What is Observium?
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(13)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
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Observium is a versatile network monitoring software that delivers stability, flexibility, and scalability to its users. By maintaining the last live state of Switch configuration, it provides a reliable solution for small and large businesses as well as home labs. Users commend Observium for its accuracy in viewing and comparing various types of data, making it the preferred choice over other open-source alternatives. The software's ability to handle unlimited devices and provide specific historic data viewing capabilities contributes to its robustness.
One of the key use cases of Observium is network traffic monitoring with notifications, which offers users a comprehensive visual look into switched network traffic. This feature allows them to track network traffic easily and integrate it with external applications for comprehensive network monitoring. Troubleshooting networking issues becomes simpler with Observium as users can utilize its monitoring and alerting functionalities. Moreover, the software fills the gap between lacking statistics and expensive commercial products by providing an overview of the network and devices.
Observium is widely used by various sites across Europe for monitoring and alerting purposes on network infrastructure, servers, virtual machines, and wireless Access Points. With its lightweight nature, compatibility with Linux distros, and excellent visualizations, Observium is favored by IT departments to record and present performance data on a wide range of devices. Its capability to display information such as user logins, router processes, and optimization data makes it a valuable tool for daily network management tasks.
Real-time analytics and config management: Many users have expressed their delight in the real-time analytics and config management feature of Observium. They appreciate being able to view minute attributes of a device with life monitoring, which makes it easy for them to analyze and manage their network efficiently.
Easy first-time configuration: Several reviewers have mentioned that the easy first-time configuration of the server is a standout feature of Observium. They find it user-friendly and appreciate how quickly they can set up the system without any hassle.
Extensive device support: Users have highlighted that Observium provides extensive device support, allowing them to have control over the status of their networks. The clear and intuitive interface makes it easy for them to navigate and access relevant information.
GUI Lacking: Many users have expressed their dissatisfaction with the GUI of the product, stating that it lacks functionality and needs improvement. They find it challenging to manage maps and perform tasks efficiently due to the shortcomings of the user interface.
Difficult Maintenance: Users across all levels have encountered difficulties in maintaining the Observium server. The mapping feature, in particular, has been criticized for lacking clarity and causing confusion among users.
Steep Learning Curve: A significant number of users have reported a steep learning curve when using the software. They believe that additional documentation would be helpful in easing this learning process and making it more accessible for new users.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-4 of 4)Great tool for monitoring Network devices.
- Automatic device discovery.
- Scalability
- Real-time monitoring.
- Customisation on dashboard.
- User mapping requires more clearly.
- Support for custom graph and polling of devices.
- It is good for DC admin.
- Only positive impact.
- Highly recommended.
Observium Review
- SNMP monitoring
- Easy to set up initially
- Alerting
- Documentation
- Community support
- Easy to set up but hard to customise fully
I would more likely recommend LibreNMS, which is a fork of Observium and is going in (in my opinion) a better direction than Observium. The dev team for LIbreNMS is more approachable for help and advice also.
- Alerting
- SNMP monitoring
- Interface statistics
- 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
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm)
Observium - Great NMS capability at a low (or free) price point
- Observium produces simple, attractive and clean performance graphs. Expensive commercial products either do this about as well as Observium, or much, much worse.
- Observium does a good job of discovering your network via SNMP/CDP/LLDP. Provided your network is set up properly and the software has the correct settings, it can do this very quickly and very well.
- Observium provides immediately actionable data, on a LARGE swath of products in the field. In 4+ years using the product, I've found maybe 2-3 products that didn't work "out of the box" for data collection. This is way better than any commercial product I've used.
- 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.
- If you are on a budget, this is one heck of a tool for the price (including the ~$200/year for the Pro subscription).
- If you are OK with maintaining and updating open source tools, this is a great tool.
- If you are afraid of the Linux command line or live in a Windows-centric world, this might not be the tool for you.
- If you can't stand things occasionally not working, this is probably not a good fit.
- We still have devices on our network that Observium had no trouble dealing with, but our expensive commercial NMS can't figure out what to do with the data or how to present it. It's worth the $200/year subscription just for that.
- It provides a sanity check against our commercial NMS. There have been numerous times where we've seriously questioned what Solarwinds was reporting, and were able to either show it was right or wrong by comparing to Observium.
- I tend to think "Observium can probably do that" a lot more than I do about any of our other tools.
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, OP5 Monitor, WhatsUp Gold, Intermapper, HP BTO (formerly OpenView) Discontinued, Zabbix and Nagios Core
Observium for Enterprise Network Monitoring
- 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.
- The UI is pretty robust and succinct. It might be beneficial to have favorites for complex network schemas.
- Historical searching based on X time frame.
- More customized dashboards.
- Observium is enterprise-level network monitoring without the cost involved.