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OpenNMS--You can't beat the start up price.
June 03, 2016

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

Derrick Barnsdale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with OpenNMS

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
OpenNMS's more attractive GUI and its price break were the main reasons our company chose to explore and use this product. However, it never managed to actually replace Nagios which had a much more established hold within the company. Perhaps we were over-monitoring, but our company claimed a $100k loss per hour of downtime.
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.