New Network Monitoring Software Reviews 2017

What have real users in the enterprise tech community been saying about network monitoring software in 2017?

In the review excerpts below, we take a look at new network monitoring software reviews on IT Central Station. Users discuss their favorite solutions, sharing which features they’ve found most valuable, and where they hope to see improvements in the future.

Nagios XI

Henry Huang, Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees, refers to Nagios XI as “the only monitoring tool you will need.” 

Huang emphasizes the value in OMD “(best combination of open source plug-ins put together for Nagios), Zabbix, and Zenoss.

The main components of OMD are Check_MK, PNP4Nagios, Nagvis, and of course Nagios. Among these projects, Check_MK is the core of OMD that makes Nagios easy to configure, easy to scale, and mashed together all the other popular Nagios plugins into one unified user interface.”

“Nagios needs to improve their incident manager”, writes Alessandro Pozzoni, Senior Manager of Engineering at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees. 

He elaborates that “Currently, it isn't good for ITIL in my opinion. The Reactor is good to go, but XI needs to improve its reporting functionality.”

CA Unified Infrastructure Management

Luis Miguel Goez Mora, Senior Manager Information Technology Infrastructure at an insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees, lists several valuable features for CA UIM:

• Multitenancy

• Easily skinnable

• Development Kits (SDKs) and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

• Reporting Tools

• Probe packages and probe deployment 

Goez Mora also shares that “Through action automation (using NAS and robot actions) we got reduced operational effort, improved operative tasks, and optimization of resources.”

Reba Gaines, Founder and CEO at a tech services company with 1-10 employees, writes about the “enhancements” she would like to see made to CA UIM:

“I would like to see enhancements to core probes for bulk uploads. Some probes have the capability to monitor multiple targets. You either must enter them one by one or use scripting to bulk load the targets. I would like to see that functionality built into the probes.”

SevOne

Amarnath Palaniswamy, Senior Solution Architect at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees, lists SevOne’s valuable features and shares how his company has benefitted from the tool: 

• Quick response on reports

• User interface

• Scalability of the monitoring

• Reliability

“Given the ease of access to the information in a few clicks, the user base of the product has increased tremendously. As the word of mouth spread, the increased reachability of this for the performance reporting space within our organization increased.” 

Akash Tyagi, Solution Architect at a tech company with 1,001-5,000 employees, suggests how SevOne could improve: 

“This is my favorite part of a review, so I am providing many ways to improve the product:" 

• Application session tracking.

• Improve virtual appliance scalability.

• Dashboard and report delivery.

• Integration with service management (ServiceNow, Remedy) should be an out-of-the-box API.

SCOM 

Stevan Davis, SCOM Senior Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees, writes what he values most in SCOM:

“Its flexibility, the ability to create Management Packs to monitor different programs or devices. No matter what it is you want to monitor or how you want to monitor, it can be done. You may have to create the code using VBScript or PowerShell, and XML, but it can be done. There are always lots of examples online that you can work from that will save you lots of time.” 

A QA Engineer at a Consumer Goods company with 1,001-5,000 employees suggests how SCOM could be further improved:

“It would be nice to see the old MP Designer come back as you could quickly design and build an MP without a deep understanding of the XML code behind it.

Having to use Visual Studio requires a much deeper understanding of MP coding and limits the audience base capable of building custom monitoring Management Packs.”

SolarWinds NPM

“I love the GUI”, writes Christopher Good, Lead Network Engineer/Business Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees.

Good describes that “Almost everything is accessible through the web interface.  It is very user-friendly.  It is easy to drag and drop resources wherever you want them.

NPM also includes additional features that come in handy, such as a web SSH console, SYSLOG and trap collectors, and Wireless Heat Maps.

A new feature has now been included called NetPath.  This allows you to see the status of a path all the way to an endpoint, even through the internet. This is awesome!”

Craig Norborg, Senior Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees, suggest adding more granular permissions to the software:

“More granular permissions! I'd like to see a role-based system where you can granularly apply permissions for administrative tasks and be able to assign these roles to people. Just because you need to edit a node doesn't mean you should have full admin permissions!”

Read more user reviews for the top network monitoring tools of 2017 here.