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Observium

Score10 out of 10

13 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Observium?

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Reviews

What users are saying about Observium.
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Great tool for monitoring Network devices.

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (11-50 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are monitoring the usage and utilization of network device resources using this tool. It shows the exact info with details of what we want. It includes: - resources like CPU and port usage. - bandwidth utilization report. As we compare with other tools which already in market. but didn't find this tool's features.

Pros

  • Automatic device discovery.
  • Scalability
  • Real-time monitoring.

Cons

  • Customisation on dashboard.
  • User mapping requires more clearly.
  • Support for custom graph and polling of devices.

Return on Investment

  • It is good for DC admin.
  • Only positive impact.
  • Highly recommended.

Alternatives Considered

Zabbix, ManageEngine AD360 and Auvik

Observium - Great NMS capability at a low (or free) price point

Incentivized
Derek DolanView profile
Senior System Administrator in Information Technology at CURT Manufacturing, LLC (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • Observium produces simple, attractive and clean performance graphs. Expensive commercial products either do this about as well as Observium, or much, much worse.
  • Observium does a good job of discovering your network via SNMP/CDP/LLDP. Provided your network is set up properly and the software has the correct settings, it can do this very quickly and very well.
  • Observium provides immediately actionable data, on a LARGE swath of products in the field. In 4+ years using the product, I've found maybe 2-3 products that didn't work "out of the box" for data collection. This is way better than any commercial product I've used.

Cons

  • The documentation needs help. This product, like many other IT products, likes to skip the "101" stuff, assuming that you just inherently know how to do something, and the documentation is just for reference.
  • I have not been able to rely on the alerting engine as our primary way of knowing if devices are up or down. I'm sure that's just as much my fault as the software, but this is one area where commercial products tend to shine in comparison.
  • The autodiscovery of VMware virtual machines does not work properly if the ESX-level name of the VM doesn't match the VM's hostname. FileServer234 will be discovered, but "Server234 - File and Print" will not.

Return on Investment

  • We still have devices on our network that Observium had no trouble dealing with, but our expensive commercial NMS can't figure out what to do with the data or how to present it. It's worth the $200/year subscription just for that.
  • It provides a sanity check against our commercial NMS. There have been numerous times where we've seriously questioned what Solarwinds was reporting, and were able to either show it was right or wrong by comparing to Observium.
  • I tend to think "Observium can probably do that" a lot more than I do about any of our other tools.

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, OP5 Monitor, WhatsUp Gold, Intermapper, HP BTO (formerly OpenView) Discontinued, Zabbix and Nagios Core

Observium Review

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Pros

  • SNMP monitoring
  • Easy to set up initially
  • Alerting

Cons

  • Documentation
  • Community support
  • Easy to set up but hard to customise fully

Most Important Features

  • Alerting
  • SNMP monitoring
  • Interface statistics

Return on Investment

  • Allows us to react immediately when issues occur
  • Paying for enterprise support is relatively cheap and we have found benefit from it
  • Lots of time spent customising the product has been challenging

Alternatives Considered

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Other Software Used

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Observium for Enterprise Network Monitoring

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Engineering (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • You can see the bits per second that are happening on the ports, which is fantastic.
  • Between logical interfaces, you can see how much bandwidth is being used per second/minute/hour.
  • You can infer power consumption and conflicting routes. Great tool to aggregate and visualize your distributed network.

Cons

  • The UI is pretty robust and succinct. It might be beneficial to have favorites for complex network schemas.
  • Historical searching based on X time frame.
  • More customized dashboards.

Return on Investment

  • Observium is enterprise-level network monitoring without the cost involved.

Other Software Used

Zabbix, Domo