Checkmk vs. SolarWinds ipMonitor

In our organization which is a mash up of different hardware, software it was important to use an independent tool that wasn’t linked to one manufacturer incase a piece of hardware was dropped from support for example, we also value open-source software highly in our field. It’s important to in our IT environment to be able to customize and tweak software that we run. We don’t use the cloud monitoring aspect so Cannot comment on that side of the software.

Incentivized

SolarWinds ipMonitor is well suited in situation where customer do not wants to hold the responsibility of underlying monitoring infrastructure management such as Servers, Database, website and their high availability. And of course when you need Network, Servers, Services fault and performance monitoring. When you have specialized network monitoring requirement such as Configuration backup, netflow traffic analysis then this is not the right tool.

Incentivized

• Device Management
• Monitoring Network Quality
• Device Quality of Service
• SNMP
• IOT Monitoring

Incentivized

• Both network devices and servers may be easily located on the network.
• It notifies the user whenever any network device undergoes a change in status.
• Powerful reporting capabilities that provide vital data about your network's devices (uptime, space, utilization of resources on your devices)

Incentivized

• Updates
• mobile interface
• Agent for android devices

Incentivized

• It is a very complete and versatile software, but its price can be somewhat high for small companies.
• During the analysis of the collected data the process can be somewhat slow, so it takes more time than expected.
• Its configuration process can be somewhat complex since it requires several configurations so having prior knowledge is helpful.

Incentivized

Very helpful software and I highly recommend to have on hand as a tool for testing, troubleshooting, and monitoring.

Incentivized

I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products

Incentivized

Overall Checkmk is a great product that is made and ran by a European company that is open source and highly customizable, great support if needed. On prem support is a must for our organization which Checkmk supports. Our organization has been using Checkmk for over 5 years now Performance of the software runs excellent on its own Linux server, for any company with a good Linux admin, you can have a lot of un tweaking and creating custom checks for every aspect of your environment.

Incentivized

SolarWinds ipMonitor is a perfectly decent network mapper and performance metric gatherer, but it is held back by the UI, which can be hard to navigate once you have more than a couple dozen assets in there. It is fairly priced, but it also sometimes takes a really long time before results come in.

Incentivized

Although I had not much support ticket with ipMonitor support team but I can share my overall experience with SolarWinds products and support team. I am working with SolarWinds support team since last 7 years and in last 2-3 years I have seen a significant improvement in knowledge documentation which is helping end users to troubleshoot problems by themselves. Apart from this SolarWinds phone call based support is very nice as tickets and emails might take some time but a direct phone call can get your job done quickly comparatively.

Incentivized

Checkmk free version is far superior to PRTG free version. For the paid versions PRTG was more efficient and easier to use. Checkmk provides unlimited services on their free version while PRTG is limited. We like to use the free version to avoid monthly or annual costs while still utilizing the same SNMP features.

Incentivized

We were trying to evaluate different providers and ipMonitor suited us because we had on-prem and cloud instances and management decided to check the paid tool. The ipMonitor is a very responsive tool and it served the purpose well but as IT is evolving and needs are changing, we discontinued the ipMonitor and shifted to Zabbix due to the customization which was the need at the time.

Incentivized

• avoid downtime
• Plan updates based on usage of a VM or network switch to avoid impacting users
• User satisfaction increased due to less visible downtime or issues with our IT infrastructure.

Incentivized

• We currently use an outside service to monitor critical network nodes. We will do away with that service shortly.
• We no longer have to wait to hear from our users if there is a network device down. We will be proactively alerted and we can begin to remediate immediately helping to limit downtime.
• After initial setup and some tweaking, it requires little to no time to maintain.

Incentivized