Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Manager, formerly from CA Technologies, is a unified tool for systems monitoring and analytics. It offers multiple deployment options for IT teams and MSPs .
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Nagios Core
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Nagios provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components. Multiple APIs and community-build add-ons enable integration and monitoring with in-house and third-party applications for optimized scaling.
I've been really happy with the amount of performance data and reporting options that I've been able to get out of UIM. Performance hardware statistics take no more than a few mouse clicks. Also, as mentioned in the pros section, deployment and configuration is very intuitive and easy.
Nagios is simply a very configurable and rock solid monitoring engine. For these reasons I would recommend it to any IT professional in any medium to large organization where creating custom checks and programming ones custom needs into the configuration is practical. I would be more hesitant to recommend it as a first monitoring solution for a small business which is usually accompanied by a less experienced and/or more time constrained admin.
Server performance can be done exceptionally well with UIM. It monitors various OS flavors: POSIX (Aix, HPUX, Linux, Solaris, zLinux), and Windows.
With just a handful of probe s(CDM, NTevl, NTservices, NTperf, processes, logmon) your dashboards can be populated within minutes after installation of the product and discovering servers. One particular feature I like is MCS which allows you to perform template based monitoring which allows for implementing standards and including exceptions.
The SNMP collector monitors anything that is SNMP capable. With the ability to build a template out of templates here as well, you can standardize monitoring by device, vendor, or model regardless of device type: routers, switches, storage, load balancers, etc.
The UMP is the presentation layer. Without OOTB dashboards, you see quickly how your environment is performing. And with true multi-tenancy, you can separate data by customer.
It's built by engineers for engineers so setting it up and configuring it is relatively complicated. It could really use a simplified configuration approach, or a GUI to set it up instead of editing config files.
I'd like to see the option to have service notification settings inherited from the host setting notifications. They have to be set up separately but they are often the same, so it would be nice to have less redundancy.
We're currently looking to combine a bunch of our network montioring solutions into a single platform. Running multiple unique solutions for monitoring, data collection, compliance reporting etc has become a lot to manage.
The Nagios UI is in need of a complete overhaul. Nice graphics and trendy fonts are easy on the eyes, but the menu system is dated, the lack of built in graphing support is confusing, and the learning curve for a new user is too steep.
I haven't had to use support very often, but when I have, it has been effective in helping to accomplish our goals. Since Nagios has been very popular for a long time, there is also a very large user base from which to learn from and help you get your questions answered.
Basically, these other tools were easy to setup, I think sometimes even more that Nimsoft in some scenarios. But after you need to expand the size of the environment, or in big environments, for me, Nimsoft is the tool that allows you to grow with them. All of the other tools start to present problems in the database. When you need to think in bigger machines or start to "code inside the tool" to solve some performance problems, and other problems that appear. Nimsoft comes with a big set of documentation, and the support really works, as fast as you need, even as higher as you pay.
We have tested several other monitoring products which were able to monitor the basic matrix (Memory, DiskUsage, CPU%, UpTime, Running Service Status, Port 80 Up/Down). Although some offered far better UIs, they lacked the ability to monitor ANYTHING. Zabbix, being the only contender worthy of competing, is a good alternative to Nagios. We also tried Zenoss Core & OpenNMS which were good enough for non-Linux engineers to get started with. OP5 was another service-oriented monitoring solution we evaluated. Apart from Nagios, Consul is heavily used to monitor & register the micro-service systems & end-point URLs. Due to the time invested (9+years) in Nagios, we were able to get more components installed/configured easily than alternatives.
With it being a free tool, there is no cost associated with it, so it's very valuable to an organization to get something that is so great and widely used for free.
You can set up as many alerts as you want without incurring any fees.
