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OpenNMS Meridian

Score8.9 out of 10

14 Reviews and Ratings

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What is OpenNMS Meridian?

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.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about OpenNMS Meridian.
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Initially complicated but well worth the effort.

Incentivized
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Can monitor practically anything. Service availability, performance, latency, network interfaces, routing, hardware, and so on, and via different methods. If you need to monitor something on your network, you almost certainly can with OpenNMS.
  • The OpenNMS web-based dashboard is very comprehensive and offers a ton of detail, covering everything you are monitoring. The ability to get a reassuring overview of the entire network is great, and to be able to whittle down the data to specifics, is a game changer.
  • OpenNMS has a great online community, with a massive amount of support available via countless forums, blogs, YouTube, etc. If you get stuck on an issue, you'll find someone who's been there, done that, and detailed a resolution.
  • Available free and open-source (with paid support and plans available for those who require it).

Cons

  • It takes a fair amount of experimentation to fine tune information collection.
  • Configuration can be quite cumbersome with a steep learning curve. It would be nice if more of this could be done via the web dashboard.
  • The reliance on Java will put some users off. However, in fairness, it does mean it runs on a wide variety of hardware.

Most Important Features

  • Free and open-source.
  • Ability to monitor practically any device or service on our networks.
  • Comprehensive web based dashboard provides a wealth of information and ongoing 'health' check.

Return on Investment

  • 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.

Alternatives Considered

Grafana

Other Software Used

Grafana, Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator CC, Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Android Studio, Godot, Blender, Sequel Pro, Oracle VM VirtualBox, MySQL, MariaDB Platform, Apache HTTP Server, NGINX

OpenNMS is a good freeware package

Incentivized
Verified User
Executive in Corporate (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

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

Cons

  • The MIB management is weak and MIB compiler
  • Needs more online configuration and less by command line
  • More performance troubleshooting

Return on Investment

  • It is not costly out of the box
  • It works on many platforms.
  • It is easy to use with the right hardware

Alternatives Considered

Zenoss Cloud, HP BTO (formerly OpenView) Discontinued and IBM Netcool Network Management

Other Software Used

Zenoss Cloud, PRTG Network Monitor, HP BTO (formerly OpenView) Discontinued

OpenNMS--You can't beat the start up price.

Incentivized
Derrick BarnsdaleView profile
System Administrator in Information Technology at University of Michigan (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • When we used OpenNMS you could download the base package for free and configure it fairly easily for your own environment. You can't beat that kind of price break.
  • OpenNMS had a very nice looking GUI that was easily navigated and fairly straightforward to understand and configure.
  • There were a wide variety of add-ons available for download and implementation.

Cons

  • Perhaps it was our new configuration, but OpenNMS seemed to produce a lot of network traffic. This could cause problems on networks with limited bandwidth.
  • During the discovery phase of implementation, it is very easy to get overwhelmed with the amount servers discovered in the environment. It might be better to limit the breadth of the discovery when beginning.
  • Paid support was difficult to justify to management on a product that we downloaded and implemented for free.

Return on Investment

  • Since we implemented OpenNMS for free, the ROI was probably considered very high as it was simply the cost of my time and the installation was successful.
  • If this was the only package we were using to monitor system basics, this would have been a very adequate program and would have done the job "out of the box" with very minimal configurations, but an administrator with prior SNMP and MIB installation experience could cut our installation times down and greatly increase the impact that OpenNMS could have on an environment.
  • OpenNMS also had a very nice reporting tool that could produce good looking uptime, availability and usage reports for clients.

Other Software Used

Nagios, Foglight, Tripwire Enterprise

OpenNMS works great to monitor your network and improve your customer's experience.

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

  • Collecting information from various vendors and platforms.
  • Displaying the information that's collected in an easily readable format.
  • Notifying us of problems as soon as they arrive so that we can address them as quickly as possible.

Cons

  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • We've been able to improve our customers' experience.
  • Because we're able to respond to issues quicker, we're able to better meet our SLAs.
  • We are able to see smaller problems and address them before they become big problems.

Alternatives Considered

Zabbix

Other Software Used

Cisco ASA, Cisco FabricPath, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, Cisco Catalyst, Palo Alto Panorama, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Palo Alto Networks URL Filtering PAN-DB, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series

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