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OpenNMS Meridian Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.9 out of 10
Score
8.9 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for OpenNMS Meridian are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Cost-effective solution: Several users have found OpenNMS to be a cost-effective solution as it offers a base package that can be downloaded for free. They appreciate the great price break and the ability to configure the software easily for their specific environment.

User-friendly GUI: Many reviewers praise the visually appealing and user-friendly graphical user interface of OpenNMS. They find it easy to navigate and straightforward to understand and configure. This positive experience with the GUI contributes to their overall satisfaction with the software.

Wide variety of add-ons: Users value OpenNMS's wide variety of add-ons, which allow them to collect information from various vendors and platforms. They specifically mention the ability to display collected information in an easily readable format, enabling quick assessment of network status.

Reviews

4 Reviews

Initially complicated but well worth the effort.

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use OpenNMS to monitor all aspects of our networks, identify issues and to alert us of any problems. The level of detail is great, and we can often spot and deal with potential issues before they actually manifest as a problem. When we do find ourselves with a network critical issue, OpenNMS alerts us within seconds and tells us where to look. Once you have everything running, you will wonder why you didn't do it sooner.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

<div>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.</div><div>

</div><div>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.

</div>

VU
Verified User
Employee in Information Technology (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
OpenNMS Meridian
6 years of experience

OpenNMS is a good freeware package

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

[OpenNMS] is our central NMS for all networking gear, routers and switches. It supports our network operations to maintain services to our customers. Additionally, the system provides reporting capabilities for our customer SLAs. We also use it to help slice our network into different segments to help us track and identify areas of service issues.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Large network environments with few types of devices. The system is great but getting all of the MIBs loaded and to try and create unique rules /alarm type. Alarm correlation is doable but it takes too much manual work and XML configuration. I do enjoy the dashboard and surveillance categories.

VU
Verified User
Executive in Corporate (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
OpenNMS Meridian
10 years of experience

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

Rating: 9 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're using OpenNMS to monitor our network gear across the globe. It allows our NOC to see problems quickly and engaged the proper teams within our large organization quickly when there are issues. As a result of implementing OpenNMS we've been able to improve response times and improve our customers' experience.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

We've been using OpenNMS for network monitoring and have been fairly happy with it. There can be a bit of a learning curve to the setup and installation which might turn some people off, but if you can work through the learning curve it's a pretty powerful tool at the awesome price of free (paid support is available).

VU
Verified User
Professional in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
OpenNMS Meridian
4 years of experience

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

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At Federal Mogul, we used OpenNMS as an alternative to Nagios. We used it to do snmp monitoring across several platforms, including AIX, Red Hat and HP servers. This tool was also good for monitoring system uptimes, CPU and memory utilization and also Tomcat availability and Java memory and heap dumps.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

For the initial cost, OpenNMS is difficult to beat and the quality of the GUI is a big plus when presenting the product to management types. In a start up position or a smaller company OpenNMS could be a very valuable asset to monitor systems and maintain availability. In larger businesses where funds may be more readily available, there are products that are more easily configurable and prettier to look at--at a cost.

DB
Derrick Barnsdale
System Administrator in Information Technology at University of Michigan (10,001+ employees)
Vetted Review
OpenNMS Meridian
2 years of experience
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