IT Central Station’s crowdsourced user review platform helps technology decision makers around the world to better connect with peers and other independent experts who provide advice without vendor bias.
Our users have ranked their solutions according to their valuable features, and have also discussed where they see room for improvement. You can read user reviews for the top 10 IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools here, to help you decide which solution is best for you.
Users compare and give feedback on the IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions that they’ve used — based on product reviews, ratings, and comparisons.
#1 Nagios XI
Nagios XI is ranked by our users as the number one solution of Q1 2017, but what do users really think of the solution?
Paolo Daniele writes “I think that the most important feature of Nagios is that you can write your own plugin, so you are able to create your monitoring system based on what you need. For example, I’m using a backup system that writes in a file when it’s done. If this file is empty it means that the backup fails: well I’ve written a Nagios plugin to check this so that I can be sure if a backup is ok or not.”
Brendan O’Farrell adds that “While the UI is functional, I have always thought there was room for improvement here. It is at times assumptive for the not so technical, rather than informative.”
#2 CA Unified Infrastructure Management
CA Unified Infrastructure Management is ranked by our users as the number two solution of Q1 2017.
As said in the video review above, Zafir Yousaf shares that “the most valuable features for us are the way it brings silo products together that we’ve invested in over the years, and it allows us to consolidate our views for our customers.”
Reba Gaines writes that she “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.”
#3 SevOne
IT Central Station users rank SevOne as the number three IT Infrastructure Monitoring solution of Q1 2017.
This Tools and Automation Manager writes that “The most valuable feature for us is its flexibility to handle different systems and different functions. We use it for networking, service systems, PDU’s, and anything that’s available for SO&P.”
Eric Sharpsten suggests that “the Sharpsten suggests that “the downstream suppression could be improved. Suppression must all be done manually, but this improvement is on SevOne’s roadmap, I believe.”
#4 SolarWinds NPM
SolarWinds NPM is ranked by our users as the number four solution of Q1 2017.
Christopher Good writes “I love the GUI. 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.”
Craig Norborg then suggests improvements such as “Norborg then suggests improvements such as “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!”
#5 CA Spectrum
IT Central Station users rank CA Spectrum as the number five IT Infrastructure Monitoring solution of Q1 2017.
Frank Tonjes discusses the REST API as a valuable feature, describing how “The REST API allowed us to automate a lot of the manual work required to add devices into Spectrum.
This included installing the product via ‘silent installer’ based on one config file (installer would look at hostname and find out what role the server was and installed only those components.”
Saad Syed shares that “There are certain attributes that we would like to be able to send northbound to different applications or different API calls that we can use. That is one area for improvement.”
#6 Opsview Enterprise
Opsview Enterprise is ranked by our users as the number six solution of Q1 2017.
Stephen Lam shares that “the most valuable feature we’ve found is really just how easy it is to add servers and devices to the monitor.
We also like the UI and applications. What we’ve also found that we like the iOS app which lets us acknowledge issues or see warnings from our mobile phones away from the office.”
Valentin Hobel has found that “the API provided by Opsview is, compared to other monitoring solutions, not state of the art. It would be great to see that more efforts would be put into this part of the product.
Furthermore, I would love to see support for more database systems which are needed for storing configuration stuff and data.”
#7 Spiceworks
IT Central Station users rank Spiceworks as the number seven IT Infrastructure Monitoring solution of Q1 2017.
Aimee White describes Spiceworks as “a system monitoring tool that has a wealth of community created add-ons that can especially help organizations with limited funds to ensure their mission critical systems are running well.”
Aaron Krytus argues that “Reporting for any application is a must. Where the reporting is very useful in SpiceWorks, I would like a more powerful reporting tool to better filter what I want and do not want.
There are some built-in filters, but a simple if-then ability would be incredibly helpful to narrow down my reports. “
#8 ITRS Geneos
ITRS Geneos is ranked by our users as the number eight solution of Q1 2017.
Thomas DM Thomas explains that ITRS Geneos “has powerful visualization features to develop dashboards to display in big screens and share it via Webslinger (a web server that allows dashboards to be accessed via web browsers).
It can log metrics (values) into a reporting database and generate historical charts for trend analysis. The Toolkit plugin can run scripts for custom monitoring requirements that cannot be implemented using standard plugins.”
This Project Manager suggests that “The main feature that needs work is the Dashboard designer. Although it has lots of features included we would like these visualization capabilities to be improved. Currently, we have to export metrics data in real-time into some other visualization tools in order to get a better picture and have a bit more functional dashboard.”
#9 ScienceLogic
IT Central Station users rank ScienceLogic as the number nine IT Infrastructure Monitoring solution of Q1 2017.
Jason Backley shares that “the Power Packs that are available are amazing. It took me ~10 minutes to fully configure multiple Pure disk arrays.
The Cisco UCS power pack was even faster. Literally pointed it at the IP of the UCS and it did all the work.”
Kalani Silva finds that “Reporting is still a gigantic pain point, we invest a lot of cycles in manufacturing reports off-board – #notfun.
While EM7 covers a lot of ground quickly and is capable of consuming enormous amounts of event and performance data, EM7 ironically has a hard time reporting on it – basic reporting is there, but if you let’s say want to run a report for the last 90 days how many Cisco 2900 routers had a critical power supply incident that for one isn’t easy and two needs a developer to write a custom report.”
#10 BMC TrueSight Operations Management
BMC TrueSight Operations Management is ranked by our users as the number 10 solution of Q1 2017.
Stefan Timmermann describes that “The Event Management is outstanding; still is the most interesting part of the product.”
At the same time, writes Timmermann, “The sizing (which is difficult), the maintenance of it and the upgrade paths. This is a difficult area which is not easy to cover, as every client has a different approach of implementing the product.”
Read more IT Infrastructure Monitoring Software reviews at IT Central Station.
