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Observium

Observium

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Observium is a versatile network monitoring software that delivers stability, flexibility, and scalability to its users. By maintaining …
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Observium Review

2 out of 10
April 30, 2021
Incentivized
Observium is being used to provide monitoring to a number of sites across Europe. This includes on site network infrastructure, servers, …
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Product Details

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Reviews and Ratings

(13)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

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)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 a very good overall monitoring solution for any kind of SNMP network device. Fast and simple to set up. It is an easy, robust, and quick monitoring system. The easy-to-use user interface provides advanced capabilities for the statistical display of data, as well as diagrams. This is a great way to add auto-discovery and geographical representation of the network.
  • It is good for DC admin.
  • Only positive impact.
  • Highly recommended.
Observium provides a free version and free trial, while others provide a free trial only. Live online training and documentation are available for observing, while others do not have these. It provides bandwidth monitoring, baseline management, resources management, server monitoring, SLA monitoring, and uptime monitoring, while others have limited features. It provides cross-platform integration, while others have limited integration support.
April 30, 2021

Observium Review

Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Currently I would not recommend Observium to anyone else. Not when there are extremely similar and if not better products out there.
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)
SolarWinds does when Observium can do but for a much larger price tag. That is what the decision came down to.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm)
Derek Dolan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
Observium is easier to use and "prettier" than most of the other open source tools out there. It's also significantly cheaper than most of the mid-range NMS products out there, and several orders of magnitude cheaper than the big boys. It tends to be my go-to NMS for these reasons, even when budget isn't a huge concern.
It's open source. Your mileage may vary. Sometimes the provided documentation is beyond frustrating, other times it's right on the mark.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 great for medium to large network sizes. If you have a mix of public and private servers, this is a great tool. If you want to be able to visualize your routes, hops between, and bandwidth consumption, this is the right hammer for the job. If you have a smaller network, this tool might not have as large of value.
  • Observium is enterprise-level network monitoring without the cost involved.
I haven't used other products that are similar to Observium. Observium is an open tool, with a robust feature set. There are elements of comparable monitoring across other tools, but nothing I've seen that is a complete parallel in terms of feature set and visualizations. If I were asked, I wouldn't have another tool to recommend over Observium.
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