Nmap vs. OP5 Monitor

Nmap is the ideal solution if you are working alot in network environments. If you come to grips with the syntax and the most-used features (the online community helps alot), you will be able to much more quickly and thoroughly troubleshoot networks or check for security vulnerabilities, for instance. It is free to use and is available for Windows and Linux, so I would say it is very much warrented for any network administrator or sysadmin to take it out for a spin.

Incentivized

It is well suited when you have a large number of machines and you need a reliable monitoring mechanism. You need to check certain components of each server and have different alerting levels. OP5 Monitor is good in sending alerts to multiple recipients and you can customize the alerts for each check.

Incentivized

• Nmap is very good at discovering systems on your network.
• Nmap is very good at guessing a systems operating system with a high degree of accuracy.
• Nmap is good at validating externally facing systems to make sure that unauthorized access is not allowed.

Incentivized

• System health monitoring
• Customized application monitoring
• Network connectivity
• Alerts
• Reports

Incentivized

• exporting, There's a serious lack of ability to export the information in a readable format to present to VPs and such. I always find myself doing a lot of data massaging to get it in a pretty format
• some scans can trigger sensitive IDS/IPS
• SYN scans can be particularly aggressive and cause problems on remote systems.

Incentivized

• Setting up the monitoring
• Better customization
• Reporting

Incentivized

Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.

Incentivized

There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.

Incentivized

A similar but more basic alternative is available on Android, called Fing. It's very useful for diagnosing issues on networks when you only have your mobile device to hand.

A graphical user interface alternative to Nmap, is Zenmap. It's the official GUI for Nmap and does use Nmap under the hood. It makes things a bit more 'point and click'.

Incentivized

OP5 Monitor is based on nagios and it's good for monitoring system and application level components. Still it's difficult to setup and customize alerts, but it's a very useful tool for medium and large enterprise organizations.

Incentivized

• NMap being free of charge has a positive impact on our budget. It is an enterprise-class tool that anyone can download and use.
• NMap, both command line and GUI, is a very advanced tool that is easy to use, so there's very little learning curve involved, which has a positive impact on productivity and security.
• A valuable feature that is a huge time saver is that you can compare scans. This saves hours of searching manually for differences in scan results. Faster results means faster mitigation of problems, which can be a real money saver.

Incentivized

• Better monitoring
• Instant alerts

Incentivized