OpenNMS Meridian is a scalable open source network management platform with network traffic analysis, network discovery, alerting, and monitoring. It's presented as a solution to monitor enterprise network performance and ensure the availability and performance of critical network services.
$42,000
per year Up to 2 Meridian and cores Up to 25 Minions
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
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Pricing
OpenNMS Meridian
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Editions & Modules
Essential
$42,000
per year Up to 2 Meridian and cores Up to 25 Minions
Premier
$56,700
per year Up to 4 Meridian cores and Up to 100 Minions
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.
There was a need to find an old configuration of a network switch that was accidentally wiped clean. Fortunately, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) kept and archived a backup copy of the switch device in question! We were easily able to upload the configuration file to the switch and restore the device back on the network in a matter of minutes!
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.
For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.
Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
Although Grafana is in no way an alternative to OpenNMS's full functionality, it can be integrated with other solutions (including OpenNMS itself) to offer the graphing and data visualisation aspects of OpenNMS. In this regard, Grafana is more flexible, and some would say prettier, than OpenNMS's graphing. For the best of both worlds, I'd recommend using them both!
At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment
Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.
