Name: Observium
Rating: 9.9 (13 reviews)
Author: Observium

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### Network Monitoring Tools
Users generally praise Observium's network monitoring capabilities. They appreciate its efficiency in auto-discovering and supporting a wide range of devices and operating systems. The software's prompt action and support for SNMP devices have been highlighted as time-saving features. However, some users have noted that the tool can sometimes overwhelm with excessive data, making monitoring tasks challenging. Additionally, configuring alerts may not be as straightforward as expected. Despite these minor drawbacks, Observium remains a popular choice for network monitoring in various settings, from small businesses to large enterprises and even home labs.

### Device Management
Users consistently highlight Observium's efficient device management capabilities, particularly its support for a wide range of devices and operating systems. The software's auto-discovery feature and SNMP device compatibility are frequently commended for their time-saving benefits. Despite some users noting limitations in dashboard customization and custom graph support, Observium's ability to monitor and trace network devices, including printers, NAS storage, and network devices, is widely appreciated for aiding in diagnosing and tracking usage trends.

### Auto Discovery Features
Some users praise Observium for its efficient auto discovery of networking equipment, enabling quick setup and data display. Others appreciate the auto-discovery feature alongside extended device support, threshold alerting, and disaster recovery planning. However, there are mixed opinions on the overall effectiveness of Observium's auto discovery capabilities, with some users expressing reservations or finding room for improvement in this aspect.

### Graphs and Visualization
While some users appreciate Observium's ability to showcase the network status on a map with clear indicators, others find the GUI in need of improvement and struggle with managing maps effectively. The tool's auto-discovery feature and quick dashboard setup receive praise, but the lack of customization options for graphs and dashboards is a common concern. Users highlight the accuracy of data displayed but express frustration over the limitations in creating custom graphs. The mixed feedback suggests that Observium's graphs and visualization capabilities have room for enhancement to better meet diverse user needs.

### Customization and Dashboards
While some users appreciate Observium's ease of use and network monitoring capabilities, there is a recurring sentiment that the customization options for dashboards are lacking. Users express a desire for more flexibility and features to tailor their dashboards to their specific needs. The absence of support for custom graphs is highlighted as a significant drawback by multiple reviewers. Additionally, there are calls for improved documentation to assist beginners in navigating the learning curve associated with utilizing Observium's dashboard customization tools.

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.

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.

OpenNMS Meridian is a scalable open source network management platform with network traffic analysis, network discovery, alerting, and monitoring. It's presented as a solution to monitor enterprise network performance and ensure the availability and performance of critical network services.

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Observium

Network Monitoring Tools refers to the activities, methods, procedures, and tools utilized in the operation, administration, maintenance and provisioning of networked systems.

Network Monitoring

Observium Video Demo

Likelihood to Recommend

Support Rating

Observium is an autodiscovering PHP/MySQL/SNMP based network monitoring which includes support for a wide range of network hardware and operating systems including Cisco, Linux, FreeBSD, Juniper, Brocade, Foundry, HP and many more.

Observium has grown out of a lack of easy to configure network monitoring platforms. It is intended to provide a more navigable interface to the health and performance of your network. Its design goals include collecting as much historical data about devices as possible, being completely autodiscovered with little or no manual intervention, and having a very intuitive interface.

Observium is not intended to replace an up/down alerting system, but rather to complement it with an easy to manage, intuitive representation of historical and current performance statistics, configuration visualisation and syslog capture.

Auvik

ManageEngine AD360

Observium 2024-01-15 00:59:37

HP BTODiscontinued

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3Com Baseline Switches (Discontinued)

SGI InfiniteStorage UNPUBLISHED

Jama Connect

Senior System Administrator

Observium 2019-10-25 15:22:07

Observium 2021-04-27 17:45:05

Domo

Kemp Flowmon ADS

Bandwidth

Observium 2017-06-12 15:52:18

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Community support

Time frame

Customized dashboards

Documentation needs

Needs help

Virtual machines

Using the product

Data collection

Power consumption

Set up properly

Actionable data

Home

Network Monitoring Tools

We are monitoring the usage and utilization of network device resources using this tool. It shows the exact info with details of what we want. It includes: - resources like CPU and port usage. - bandwidth utilization report. As we compare with other tools which already in market. but didn't find this tool's features.

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.

We utilize Observium within the IT department primarily to record and present performance data on a wide variety of devices across our network. It fills a gap between no statistics and expensive (and sometimes cumbersome) COTS products that do roughly the same task.

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.

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 is being used to provide monitoring to a number of sites across Europe. This includes on site network infrastructure, servers, virtual machine estates and wireless AP's. It is currently in use by only one department, the IT team. The problems it addresses is providing monitoring and alerting for the company.

SNMP monitoring
Easy to set up initially
Alerting

Documentation
Community support
Easy to set up but hard to customise fully

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

We use Observium as a network management software. It's nice because it's a lightweight tool that is a Linux distro, and allows for some great visualizations. The flexibility to load up our equipment and network paths, then view a high level overview of the traffic and netflow statistics, is critical in our choice to use this software. You can see things like user logins, processes on each router, and obtain optimization information for daily network management.

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.