So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions.

Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital.

There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.

We leverage every component of SCOM. The solution uses monitoring mechanisms to send alerts and notifications for down systems or problematic trouble issues. We use it for all of that. We have dashboards up, customized management packs, and monitors for both Windows and Linux. We use SNMP traps to pull in information forward network devices that are in the enterprise. We use it for everything.

The deployment is determined by the customer. We have a large number of clients. Some clients host it in the cloud, while others host it on-premise.

Some clients have Amazon, and some clients have Linux.

The initial setup is easy.

The software installation does not take much time, half an hour. The onboarding of it will depend upon the environment.

It's advisable to have a basic understanding of the Linux Operating System prior to using Nagios XI, such as common Linux commands, what a server is, and monitoring basics. Essential knowledge of Linux commands is necessary.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Nagios XI a nine out of ten.

The initial setup is very easy, with a few command lines. and for a simple network monitoring there is no need to install any specials packets on linux server.

My first installation was Zabbix 3.2 on a CentOS 7 Linux Server. And the very difficulty that i faced was the fear of the unknown !

I've deployed so many times that the initial setup is straightforward, but I would say that for someone who is totally inexperienced in Linux, it can be a little time consuming. If you understand a little about Linux, then it's no problem. A full system can easily be configured in two hours but it took two days the first time I did it. If you're not a technical person you can still install it but it will likely take some time.

As an example, configuring SNMP trapping into Zabbix needs configuration outside of Zabbix itself. This is not complex, but can slow down the process for inexperienced installers.

Zabbix is open-source so if one wishes to implement it in-house, they must have qualified professionals to set up and optimize databases, Linux/Unix OS, PHP, Apache, and depending on what is monitored, a full-stack network and systems administrator may be needed.

Zabbix provides support although we have not subscribed to the support. We implemented the instances on our own and we also operate and maintain them on our own.

Like other common Linux distributions, some of the most valuable features of this solution are the ease of use and deployment. It's simple and has a lot of packages and a lot of software. 

In terms of initial setup, it's petty straightforward. At the Linux stage, you can introduce the Linux commands. In the environment in Linux, you can install Zabbix pretty easily.

The deployment doesn't take too long. It might take only two weeks.

We do have a team that can manage the deployment and maintenance of Zabbix as needed. Usually, we have one or two managers that are able to handle anything that comes up. The rest of the team is a bit more technical. 

Its deployment is easy. Virtual appliances are very easy, and Zabbix agents are supported across different platforms, such as Linux and Windows. I would rate it five out of five in terms of the ease of the setup.

We also have been using WhatsUp Gold for ten years. Zappix is a Linux solution and WhatsUp Gold is a Windows solution. 

We have a basic license for WhatsUp Gold and have purchased upgrades. In our country, there is no local expert tied with the OEM. The support team that is provided is not acceptable to us. 

The solution, SolarWinds, and WhatsUp Gold are good for monitoring servers but lack the functionality to find problems or root causes for any system, application, or service. 

ThousandEyes and AppDynamics find actual problems with networks, applications, or services. We are looking more at these products because our goal is to find all loopholes. 

For example, the solution or WhatsUp Gold might identify a packet loss. But ThousandEyes or AppDynamics will drill to the highest problem such as the HTML or a Cisco network problem. This approach is much more interesting. 

Implementing Zabbix is difficult. I've deployed many solutions over the years, and Zabbix is the hardest to implement. You have to do some development to get it to work with IBM, Micro Focus, or HP products. 

You can find some plugins or an integration package in the Zabbix community, but you'll always need to custom-develop something. Enterprise products aren't open-source, so creating a new integration is challenging. You may need to pay for software production professional services, which are expensive.

Many people in my country fail to implement this product. They say, "This is open-source, so I can implement it myself." However, it isn't easy in the beginning. An IT technician who has no experience with network or server monitoring tools will find it difficult to plan this implementation. They call us for help.

You need one person to implement the product, but you need help from the customer side. We need someone familiar with the customer's network, database, etc. The person implementing Zabbix needs to know Linux and have some programming knowledge. 

The initial setup of Zabbix is complex as it is installed on Linux machines. Besides, every package has to be installed individually. Even if one package is missing, it will not be installed. So everything needs to be checked. It's too much of a headache. The solution got deployed on the cloud.

I have a network consisting of about 800 machines running either Windows, Linux, or macOS, with a security firewall provided by Check Point (1800 model). Within this network environment, I use a non-customized version of Nmap on my Linux PC as a network scanner, or "network mapper".

As a network mapper, Nmap enables me to scan the network and uncover information relating to each device on the network in order to identify vulnerabilities, which is one of the main responsibilities of my job.

My main use case is figuring out which kinds of devices are connected on the same network (e.g. servers, browser clients, switches), but on a lower level I also it use to check which ports are open or closed or not on any given machine. Additionally, I occasionally use it to identify which operating systems are running on specific machines.

I advise others to decide for what purpose they want to use the solution. If they want to test the availability of the network code or the basic information about the network and domain, then I recommend the solution. But if they are looking for expert-level monitoring, they should ideally go for Parrot OS or Linux OS, or the Wireshark tool. As far as UI and stability, Nmap is a good application. Otherwise, it has a limited amount of expertise.

I rate the solution as a seven.

PRTG Network Monitor is scalable. You can also deploy it on Linux and Windows. We have approximately 350 people using this solution in my company.

We are an IT company that deploys this solution on more than one site.

For the last year or two, I've been asking the vendor about the mobile app. This is something that probably everyone asks when they see the tool and they see how powerful it is. If there is any mobile app for this or if there is any way this tool can be more easily accessible other than having a big client installed, it would be great. I know you can build dashboards, et cetera, but there is no quick and easy way. I should be able to download an app, log in, and see my status. That will put this product above everything else out there. I believe it's on their roadmap.

Other than that, we are not looking for any features. Initially, when we started, they were just, for example, Windows compatible from a front-end console perspective, but that has evolved over time. Now, they can run on Linux, Mac, etc. So, that's great. There was a bit of pushback initially, but after that has been sorted, the next question everyone is asking is obviously being mobile. What can I do remotely? Do I have to physically log in? Do I have to open up my laptop? That's the next big thing everywhere. People sometimes just want to glance at something or have the mobile opportunity to do things.

I work with other products like Dynatrace and they are lacking in that they have a minimum interval and are still evolving to increase their real-time monitoring. However, they are working on specific features to improve that. Currently, they don't have the real-time monitoring that ITRS Geneos has.

When we were evaluating or comparing other products, we found that some products for installation and data collection require another Java virtual machine. The base was set up as a Java virtual machine on the client machine and then extracted the data collection. ITRS Geneos directly uses operating system calls to fetch data, so it doesn't need another layer or another software installed. With other solutions, it becomes difficult sometimes because a Java virtual machine itself requires some resources, CPU, and memory. This can cause delays or affect the actual application running.

There was a comparison going on between BMC tools and ITRS Geneos. The bank's strategy was not to rely on one tool but to use ITRS Geneos for critical applications that require timely messages, instead of relying on the in-house monitoring tools. Banks don't mind paying the license fees for the solution instead of using the infrastructure-provided monitoring tool or custom in-house builder monitoring tools.

Open-source tools have become more popular in the last 5 to 10 years. Linux, for example, comes with Prometheus, a monitoring tool. However, these open-source tools are not suitable for global monitoring and cannot be used across the bank. We cannot create a dashboard out of it where it links multiple applications hosted on different environments and different kinds of applications. We needed some sort of proprietary tool or a license-based tool that can be used as a global tool for the whole department, or for the whole BU, not just specific to the product or applications.

I was involved with the solution architecture and engineering team. We build the monitoring tools, collect the requirements from internal clients, set up the monitoring for their applications, design dashboards, etc.

Deploying Geneos is straightforward. The Geneos agent can be quickly installed on Linux and Windows. The Windows agent is relatively time-consuming compared to Linux because Windows has some limitations. The installation and configuration are straightforward, and their documentation is excellent. Anyone with moderate knowledge of infrastructure can follow the documentation.

After deployment, Geneos requires some maintenance. For example, the agent sometimes crashes, so we must manually restart it. 

Icinga is used for monitoring infrastructure devices like network devices, firewalls, and lots of servers. Linux, Windows, and many services are running on them using plugins, which are being distributed together with Icinga. We have developed some software in-house, so we use that as well.

The solution is deployed on-premises. I'm using version 2.9.

There are about 40 people using this solution.

The installations we have done were pretty complete, but we're always looking for other opportunities to install Icinga in our customers' networks. We're actively promoting Icinga to our customers.

The solution has great workflow and server modules. From there, you can monitor your active directory, exchange server, Windows roles, and even Linux-based solutions. They provide a lot of features; it's good and easy software. I like the network feature which allows the addition of router switches and the ability to update variables. I'm able to build some SNMP OIDs to check on the monitoring status of network devices. At the time of patch management, you can also update your software for third-party softwares. You can select the application as well as customize your own application and install them on the PulseWay dashboard. Compared to other solutions, Pulseway is straightforward and easy to set up.

I didn't work much on ScienceLogic, but I was completely involved in the integration and transition of the product, as well as meeting with management and discussing the product.

In addition, I have worked as a visual contributor to discover devices and communicate with the networking team about how to come up with solutions.

Aside from all of this, there are limitations. When I mentioned limitations, one of the things I mentioned was application monitoring. However, if I talk about infrastructure monitoring, as I previously stated, I would prefer to use ScienceLogic as an infrastructure monitoring tool. When it comes to infrastructure monitoring, we have options such as Windows, and Windows environments. Each and every customer will have their own Windows 80 servers, as well as their own active directory and other Windows-based servers. When it comes to Windows-based servers, ScienceLogic suggests using PowerShell to monitor them.

PowerShell configuration, resource groups, and so on are not simple. Because, when you first start using PowerShell to monitor, you must manually configure all of these things by logging into the server, because PowerShell is not always configured. PowerShell has not been updated. PowerShell has some issues that you must troubleshoot. Believe me, I literally worked to discover approximately 12,000 Windows devices within the previous company around the world. When I first tried to discover it using normal discovery, it only found about 5,000 devices. Where exactly are 5,000 and 12,000? I literally had to work on each and every one of those 7,000 devices to figure out why it wasn't being discovered.

When it comes to Windows monitoring, we must plan ahead of time before we begin discovering devices. We must have knowledge of where the devices are and what exactly the legacy servers are, can just get rid of those legacy servers, what are the active directory servers, and how many active directory servers are there. 

When we talk about Linux, Unix, AIX, and these devices, your storage devices, and network devices have little trouble. However, if you want to find these Windows-related devices, you must plan ahead of time. This was one of the issues I encountered.

ScienceLogic does not have application monitoring. We definitely need something integrated within ScienceLogic to monitor applications so that we don't have to rely on monitoring tools to monitor other applications. At least the ones that are market leaders, such as SAP, Oracle, and others.

It may try to start a monitoring application at some point. At the same time, it should have some automation options, such as the ability to automate events. Though it has, it does not have inside the box; however, we will need to do some scripting and other things to automate things. Perhaps it could include some within-the-box automation that can assist us in consolidating events or taking action on the consolidated events within ScienceLogic.

The main objective to use Nagios Core 4.x is to save significant costs on Infrastructure Monitoring without compromising the monitoring parameters.

So, deploying Nagios Core 4.x  was the only option for me considering the below-listed positive factors.

1) Working on Nagios Core for more than 10+ Years.

2) Good Hands On skills to cover the standard monitoring parameters such as CPU, Memory, Storage & Running Services.

3) By introducing NCPA Agent, further monitoring became very smooth & saves time as NRPE & NCPA Client Side Configuration takes more time. On the other hand, NCPA Installation is very straight & you just need to provide a unique token only.

4) NCPA Agent is available for Windows & Linux like OS environments with most of the current & previous stable kernels.

5) Presently, more than 500+ nodes & 2500+ services are under active monitoring.

The monitored services are as follows.

1) Windows & Linux Nodes

* CPU Utilization (%) & Allotted CPU Cores.

* Memory Utilization (%) & Allotted Memory (MB/GB/TB)

* Total Storage Utilization, Allotted Storage Space & Available Storage Space (MB/GB/TB)

* Running Services, CPU & Memory Utilization (%) by a particular service.

* Start the monitoring service if Nagios finds it SHUT.

2) Cisco Nodes (Switches, WLCs, APs, Routers)

* CPU & Memory Utilization.

* Bandwidth Utilization (Combined & on individual interface as well).

* Cisco WLC: No. of connected APs, CPU & Memory Utilization & Bandwidth Monitoring.

* PING RTA, Jitter & Packet Loss.

* Temperature, Free Interfaces, IOS Version, Switch Stack Status.

3) Services

* DNS/Domain Name Expiry

* SSL Expiry

* Many More...

If we need to process quicker, we use third party plugins to avoid downtime.

Nagios Core would benefit from aggregations if a particular server goes down. 

Comparing Nagios UI and Nagios Core, in Nagios Core we need to do some coding while Nagios XI has everything in UI. If you go with Nagios XI the developer task is minimized because they help provide the UI. With Nagios Core, we need to log into the Linux servers and we need to change that particular directory. We need to write a code for each and every server.

I downloaded the Linux image from the internet, set up my server, and launched the setup. It took 10 minutes to install. During the last installation, I activated automatic system updates.

Nagios Core is deployed in a Linux operating system and it is simple to do. For a medium-sized infrastructure, the deployment can take a day.

We use it for standard monitoring of 300 to 400 devices, the usual Windows and Linux servers and network equipment. We are monitoring the disk usage and the network ports.

For servers and applications, it was very, very efficient.

The flexibility and customizability of Centreon's reports, analytics, and dashboards are good. It is of very great value that we can create a graphic map. It gives a good understanding to managers and directors about the importance of monitoring within the company and, as a system engineer, to have a very efficient vision of what is happening when your app is not working. You can be informed before your customers. Afterward as well, you can better communicate with your customers and can let them know that you are resolving the problem. It's the best tool on the market for that at the moment.

It's not sufficient to have only this tool if you would like to anticipate a lot of problems. You can add other tools. However, it’s really useful in particular to keep this tool and to understand where the problem is, and who’s working on it. It's important that the company invests money in monitoring tools and the business.

Centreon's dashboards help you see all of your customers in one place. We use only one dashboard for some applications. For example, we made a dashboard for a critical app with all of the equipment of the app as the server. We put everything on the map. I work only with IT teams with interns. I don't work in an IT department or work with professional customers, so it’s hard to assess dashboards fully.

We use Centreon Plugin Packs Connectors, for the database with our SQL. It was very comfortable to use the plugin directly and it was very simple to implement.

Certain devices and equipment have plugin packs that helped our organization support and/or integrate. For example, a Windows Server component, and a Linux component. We have some tools in which we know what we need to supervise on a server for the database. We have some metrics that we are using, however, it’s easier with the pack.

We can implement a project very fast and we don't have many things to think about. There's no fear of forgetting something important. It was very comfortable and to use with all the free components it has.

It’s important that we have ready-to-use connectors and integrations for helping to provide a clear, comprehensive view of our organization. It's very easy, and it's not very complicated to implement. It's very well developed, and you can be confident using it.

We did use Anomaly Detection to help alert unusual dysfunctional behavior. It was a project, however, we don't use it every day. It was a project that we developed for the ability to anticipate some problems in the IT system. For example, a server that will be crushed or a problem with the CPU. There are some tools that can alert us about future issues. However, I haven’t fully implemented anything due to a lack of time.

Centreon is great for helping to monitor our IT infrastructure and cloud-to-edge and providing holistic visibility. It's very efficient. It's graphically very simple to find task user information. 

Another thing that we love about it, is when we work for example, with the Army, they prefer to work with French projects yet take, for example, a US solution. It's great in France to use a French project.

For more than ten years they’ve developed new things every year. They like to always be on the top of the market with their project, and the progress they make year after year is incredible. Three years ago, I discovered that if we have money to spend with them, they have some teams of developers and we can share with them our budget and they can then develop something directly for our company. Afterward, they’ll use part of the work to improve themselves. I found this a very smart way of working.

Centreon helped measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows. It was more informative according to my use case. We can make some weekly reports, daily reports, or monthly reports.

Centreon is great for helping to drive business performance and excellence and aligning IT operations with business objectives. It improved performance in terms of understanding the past. If it's very well configured, someone can fix a problem quickly. There is some progress that can be made in anticipating the future and trying to improve the performance of the future as a company to avoid problems and prevent incidents before they arise.

The product is helping to consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps, as well as managing metrics across domains. For example, if we have a team who doesn't know how to contribute, or how to implement these parts, it's possible to solicit consulting assistance. They can help us remotely, or they come to our company to help us to configure items. If someone works with a big company, for example, they can get help from someone to come in for a few days or a week and assist them.

The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities.

It also provides a nice dashboard, or what's called the Centreon MAP, and you can extract information very well from that for building reports for customers. It gives you a representation of service and business activities. You can access all the information in one place.

We also use Centreon Plugin Packs. They help us support Linux servers' operating systems. When it comes to monitoring things, you can set an agent on the client's operating system or you can have agentless access. For the agent-based monitoring, you need to install it directly on each OS that you want to monitor. For agentless monitoring, you can simply click through the interface to provide a Plugin Pack, and you can run it directly.

It can also help you look at KPIs because calculations can be done directly in Centreon.

What I value most about Pandora FMS is the simplicity of working with it.

The speed of locating problems and to be able to solve them quickly, so that it affects our client's network infrastructure as little as possible, is very valuable.

Thanks to Pandora FMS we have everything unified in the same point and it is highly efficient.

This software is used to monitor several elements in the network, for example, it can detect if a network interface has been down, if it has received a defacement attack in unaweb, it alerts if there has been a memory loss in any application server; among its characteristics it allows to interact with other applications or platforms in the web and it can also send SMS if a system fails or alert about changes of an application in the web.Pandora FMS can collect information from any operating system, using specific agents for each platform, which collect data and send them to the server. Specific agents are used for GNU/Linux, AIX, Solaris, and Windows 2000, XP, 7, 2003 and 2008. Among its characteristics you can monitor services over TCP/IP protocol, without installing agents, you can also monitor network systems such as load balancers, routers, switches, operating systems, applications or printers. Pandora FMS also supports WMI to communicate directly with Windows systems remotely and SNMP to collect data orecibir traps.it can supervise the resources of devices such as processor load, disk use and RAM memory, analyzes the processes that are running in the system, in general can receive information from anything that can be collected automatically.

Pandora FMS is relatively new, and the interface with the older version crashes at times. We have several different operating systems, such as Linux and Windows, and Pandora does not run as well in these.

In the next release, I would like to be able to customize the dashboard. Right now, the list of latest events is limited to 60. I would like to be able to customize this value.

The initial setup of this product is quite straightforward, if you have experience with Linux commands.

This solution has helped us improve our organization by allowing us to create a lot of metrics on several platforms, including Windows, Linux, and Unix. We then use these Pandora metrics to create an interface. We then pass the interface off to the central console.

We primarily use Datadog for:

• Native memory
• Logging
• APM
• Context switching
• RUM
• Synthetic
• Databases
• Java
• JVM settings
• File i/o
• Socket i/o
• Linux
• Kubernetes
• Kafka
• Pods
• Sizing

We are testing Datadog as a way to reduce our operational time to fix things (mean time to repair). This is step one. We hope to use Datadog as a way to be proactive instead of reactive (mean time to failure).

So far, Datadog has shown very good options to work on all of our operational and development issues. We are also trying to use Datadog to shift left, and fix things before they break (MTTF increase).

We collect all data logs from all operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, VMware, and bare metal data centers. We also automatize the installation of the agent on servers. 

Now we are starting a POC to analyze the APM module. In the feature, the next step is to do a POC of security modules. 

The final idea is to have a unique portal for observability. This will make it easy to troubleshoot and for layer levels 1 and 2. 

We think the pricing is actually really cool. Only certain network devices make the pricing really cost-effective for us. We can monitor 50 servers and essentially one server or 50 servers has no impact on costs. The one thing I think that's crucial is just to make sure that you understand how many billable network devices you have in your estate before you move forward.

Typically, in our environment, VM hosts, storage arrays, virtual machines, or physical like Windows or Linux machines, all have no impact on cost. The only things that really impact costs are our network switches and our firewalls.

I was involved in the initial setup of Auvik at my location. It was straightforward, and I was surprised by how much information Auvik can give you. The way they deploy is the smartest way to deploy anything. You go through that trial period with them where you'll give it all the time to gather the information about your gear. When you're actually talking to the guys, they give you a demonstration of Auvik in your environment related to your gear and the information Auvik will use, which is very important. 

Before we got down to the purchase, I wanted to see information related to the gear that I actually have, and that's important for anybody. I didn't want to see the hypotheticals of if we had a specific gear. Instead of deploying it in my environment with the belief that it is going to be great, and then realizing it is not compatible with this, I wanted to know that first, see it, and then decide whether or not that's going to be a deal-breaker. For example, I might get to know that Auvik is not going to show me information about the access points that I have because the manufacturer's access points don't have a feature that allows Auvik to see that information.

In terms of the duration, we gave it a weekend. There are different methods for using Auvik, and you can spin up a Linux box and install Auvik that way, or you can use their appliance. Based on your environment, they have their recommendations, and then you just let it sit for some time while you configure all your devices to communicate with Auvik. The setup configuration took me half a day. I had to make sure that I had the traffic all permitted through the firewall, the switches and routers were all set up to send information to Auvik, and SNMP communication was all good. After all that was set up, I just had to wait for Auvik to gather the information. I come in on Monday, and I saw all the information Auvik gathered about the network topology and other things over the weekend.

Comparing Auvik's setup time with other solutions, I haven't seen better. Auvik does the work for you. I spent half a day setting up the SNMP information and entering whatever credentials I needed to enter into Auvik for the WMI communication. After that point, you'd have to kind of trim it down. You have to say that I don't want to see the subnet because it'll scan everything. When you give it the information to look at your route, it'll be able to grab any route that your router can see. If you're not concerned with the public WiFi that you might provide and that your router might handle, you can just eliminate that from the map. You just say don't scan the network, and this way, you're only looking at the data that you want to see, which is really handy. So, in terms of the setup time, it is about how fast you can get into your devices and how quickly can you enter the credentials into the devices that you manage.

It's missing the license checker feature. We are using Salesforce and the license is a really crucial part of the development, and we have to monitor it. Now, I have to write a script and then run it on a random Linux box and get a notification if it's expiring. It's a really specific feature. I'm not sure Auvik will develop it.

We used Nagios for monitoring. Since it's an open-source thing, you can easily extend it with plugins. We had the license-checker in Nagios and I miss it in Auvik. There might be a solution to check this license. I just haven't had time to check it.

We didn't have a solution in place. Auvik was our initial solution, but now, we have migrated away from it to Domotz because of pricing. What really triggered it for us was that our firewall of choice is pfSense, which is open source. Auvik, by default, would categorize pfSense as a Linux server, which is essentially what it is. We would then manually categorize it as a firewall. Firewalls are on the list of billable devices for Auvik. However, we weren't being billed for them because Auvik was originally categorizing them as Linux servers. When we were onboarding the product, we mentioned this to our account manager, and we told him that none of our firewalls are being categorized as billable devices. The account manager at the time said that it was a bank error in our favor, and because they were not able to categorize it properly, they were not going to bill us for those devices.

We then costed out our offering with it and had that set with all of our clients. Recently, Auvik was able to fix that bank error, which essentially doubled all of our prices. This makes for a very hard conversation to go to clients and say that we need to double our prices to them because our vendor has doubled our prices. That was a challenge. 

I'm okay if you're going to double our prices, but the support for pfSense, for which they weren't billing us before, is fairly limited. With most of the firewalls, if you have site-to-site VPNs, they show up on the network map as a site-to-site VPN or remote access VPN. Auvik will monitor the usage on those to say, "You have 10 remote access connections, and everything is okay, or you're up to 50 people connecting remotely, and you're starting to get degraded service." All of these additional firewall monitoring features weren't available on pfSense, which was fine because they weren't billing us for it. Now that they wanted to start billing us for these devices, I had asked them if we were going to get support for all of these additional features. They said no because they are not looking to expand their pfSense development. That was frustrating. So, it basically came down to whether we double our costs and pass that onto all of our clients, or whether we look for an alternative, such as Domotz, that doesn't have as many features and is not as pretty in a sense, but it halves our cost. So, we ended up halving our costs instead of doubling them.

As part of onboarding, we got talking with some of the Domotz dev team, and all of the features that were missing have been added as feature requests. We're working with their engineering team to implement some of the features that are not quite there yet.

Auvik monitors things that other tools don't monitor. It can monitor VMware, and Linux platforms. In addition, the automatic backup of network switches and changes to them is essential. It has positively affected the visibility our IT team has into remote and distributed networks. We can get into Auvik and see throughout the network. We can do discovery and see things that we can't see with other tools. And when the network is too stressed, we get notified. Out of all the tools out there, it's probably number two or number three among those we use. It's very critical for us.

The alerts go to our high-end guys because it's not monitoring desktops. It's notifying us of issues with equipment that only the engineers know how to operate, manage, and deal with. It's very handy for us and very important for us to prioritize which alerts are coming through to which people, so that the right people get them.

In terms of keeping device inventories up to date, it finds equipment that some of our customers never even tell us about. We have one customer with oodles of stuff but they had no idea what they had. They are a district utility and they have stuff everywhere. We know more about their network than they do, through Auvik.

The amount of time it saves us on setup management is significant. We used to have another tool that was good, but it was a nightmare to configure. Now, for every new customer, it probably saves us a minimum of 10 to 20 hours of work or more, depending on the size of the customer. On average, it's saving us about 10 hours.

It has also reduced our mean time to resolution because it's better at alerting us in the middle of the night when there is anything that looks more critical. It's quicker than other platforms. We see things before they happen, such as a hard drive failing inside of a RAID set, or a problem inside a VMware system before there is a bigger problem. We can be more proactive than we could be with the other tools that we have. I've seen some minor issue alerts from other tools, but a lot of time they can't see anything in a RAID set, but Auvik does.

We are a small company of about 15 people. We do open-source kernel development for lab machines. We have about 100 of these machines and they are all connected using smart routers. However, it is hard to monitor the routers' states.

We do open-source driver development as a contractor for other companies that may have licensing issues. We write the open-source network drivers for Linux and other open-source operating systems. That is the reason we need good network monitoring software: so that we know where there are problems in our network drivers. If the network drivers produce very bad network traffic, we need to know the first time. We have a lot of test devices, laptops, running in our lab, and they are currently monitored by Auvik, and we are very satisfied.

I require the monitoring of Linux devices and it doesn't support them. Although we've done a trial, we're not going to carry on with it. We've already gone with another product.

Also, seeing the topology is quite useful, but it's not really suitable for a large enterprise.

It also wasn't able to inventory everything. We're using Lansweeper, which pulls the serial of every single IP device, but Auvik only seemed to be interested in SNMP. It didn't care about non-SNMP devices. The solution needs to move past just having SNMP. If it could have other ways, like an agent, that would make things easier. The lack of being able to communicate with non-SNMP devices was the issue.

We previously used a kind of piecemeal solution; we tried to do SNMP reporting through our RMM tool. We also used a free Linux distro called LibreNMS, Nagios, and SolarWinds.

Libre was too convoluted; it was challenging to set up and obnoxious to deal with. Nagios gave us a lot of false alerts and irrelevant data and required tedious maintenance. Lastly, the company didn't like SolarWinds, so Auvik was our best solution, even though it was more expensive. Auvik does a better job of alerting and presenting relevant data, and I don't know if the other solutions featured automatic backup configuration or remote tunnel access. Most of the competitors didn't have the network topology mapping, or they didn't do a good job of it, but Auvik does that very well, and it's dynamic. Auvik seems like the more complete, refined tool, despite being a bit more expensive or on par with the competition.

I wasn't around for the initial setup, but I've installed agents. When we install an agent, we turn off the Linux box and install it, then it's good to go most of the time. Another person on our team is the architect, and I am the person who deploys the agent on each server, switch, router, or firewall. There are various steps, but it doesn't take much time. After deployment, the solution is very low maintenance.

I like Auvik's SNMP capabilities. Seeing all the metrics and analytics in one dashboard is a game-changer. The topology is excellent. I give the network visualization 10 out of 10 for intuitiveness. The UI and user interface are top-tier. None of the other network monitoring solutions I've tried has more features than Auvik. Nothing compares. 

I deployed NetFlow monitoring for one of our clients, which was great. I wasn't a cybersecurity analyst then, but Auvik helped me get into that field. The data captured and displayed and that real-time monitoring and alerting are critical for any network environment.

Auvik's monitoring and management functions aren't tricky to use. It takes no time to configure the notifications, and the dashboard is nice. The topology is impressive. I remember setting up a TV for some of our client environments to monitor. 

You don't need to interact with it much because you get those alerts and reports sent to your email when there are issues. You can customize the triggers, so you're not bogged down with notification fatigue. It isn't a complicated solution, and Auvik's training is excellent. 

Everything is a single pane of glass, and Auvik is compatible with many different network hardware vendors. We had clients with SonicWall and Fortinet appliances. We primarily use Ubiquiti devices, but it doesn't matter. When a device isn't compatible, Auvik helps us integrate it quickly using various workarounds. We can easily do a bit of programming in Linux or set up specific SNMP triggers. Auvik is the solution regardless of the environment.

Auvik is also a Canadian company, and it means a lot to us to support another Canadian company. They've grown phenomenally over the years. They're not as big as Shopify, but all the Big Tech heavy hitters are all Americans, so it's nice to see Auvik reach for the stars.

I give the solution a ten out of ten.

We generally prefer to install the Auvik collector on-premises onto a server and run it in the Linux configuration. We do this more so than using the cloud, likely for performance reasons.

I recommend Auvik. It is a great tool for managed service providers because it works with any hardware vendor and allows them to scale their networking practice greatly.

My advice would be dependent on how many sites you are monitoring and what you are intending on monitoring. For network equipment, Auvik is very good. For hardware and software, such as Linux, Windows, ESXi, and other similar things, it is very poor in those regards. That would be the major thing. If you are intending on having one tool to rule them all, I would probably steer you toward that limitation because it is quite limited in the endpoint monitoring and server monitoring, but it very well exceeds in network monitoring.

In terms of providing a single integrated platform, the API access to it is good. It does provide that, but the actual OS and software side of things that are not network devices is a little bit lacking.

Overall, I would rate Auvik a 7 out of 10.

We use Infraon IMS to monitor devices and links. It will provide information including downtime, uptime, what devices are connected to the router, memory utilization including how much and at which location, etc. All of this information is available with the report, which has fine granularity.

It is running on a Linux system.

Every organization has public and private IP addresses, and you can't log into every machine over the internet. That's where Azure Bastion comes into the picture. You can configure Bastion on one machine, and from that machine, you can RDP or PuTTY to all the machines. RDP is for Windows, and PuTTY is for Linux.

FortiMonitor could improve by having compatibility with other operating systems, such as Linux.

FortiMonitor is an appliance with a distribution of Linux Ubuntu and it is working with the Fortinet cloud. We monitor logs from the Fortinet FortiGate and Fortianalyzer environments. We attempt to achieve efficient utilization of the CPU and memory through logs for troubleshooting.

My advice to those wanting to implement this solution is for them to create a test environment and try different operating systems, such as Windows and Linux. Test different applications in both environments to see what fits the use case best.

I rate New Relic Insights an eight out of ten.