IT Question.. looking for the best monitoring tool for multiple platforms...

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Been asked by the IT director to spec a new monitoring tool.. we currently use Nagios that requires extensive looking after and recource to code new requirements..

New tool must be able to:
Monitor availability
Monitor events
Track outages
Report on capcity
Report to our 1st line in a way that is on the lines of red / amber / green

Things it should be able to monitor this subset across:
Network appliances (switches/routers/firewalls etc.)
Windows
Unix (various flavours)
Applications (be they websites or other)
Databases

I know this seems like monitoring nirvana but if something comes close then please help me out and let me share your knowledge...
 
Soldato
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IPMonitor from SolarWinds must come close to that lot.

NOC view takes care of green, amber red - we have a wall mounted TFT display for at-a-glance status. Loads of built in monitors for IP (eg Ping, SMTP) and application / system monitoring.
 
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IPMonitor from SolarWinds must come close to that lot.

NOC view takes care of green, amber red - we have a wall mounted TFT display for at-a-glance status. Loads of built in monitors for IP (eg Ping, SMTP) and application / system monitoring.

solarwinds is on the list.. thanks for the 2nd.. it does all the network stuff very well aparently.. whats it like for windows? we use scom/mom for capturing events etc. is it a replacement or just more of a dash for outages etc.
 
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Another vote for solarwinds here, we have orion it on a big screen in our office (1st line) and it polls every 10 seconds so we can see if any sites/servers are having problems or have in the past.

We used to have nagios, i feel your pain if it is configured the way ours was :p
 
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Another vote for solarwinds here, we have orion it on a big screen in our office (1st line) and it polls every 10 seconds so we can see if any sites/servers are having problems or have in the past.

We used to have nagios, i feel your pain if it is configured the way ours was :p

excellent! nagios is ok if set up properly.. but the time/resource required to do this is quikly outstripping it's benefit of being open source.
 
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Solarwinds IPMonitor is designed for SME's, what size network do you have? How many sites? How many nodes do you want to manage?

I've got IPMonitor installed and it monitors approx 120 nodes utilising atm 1700 or so monitors. I've got it monitoring systems from the USA to Australia and almosy every continet in between on our network, when I told Solarwinds this they couldn't believe it and tried to push Orion! Not bad for about 3k.

However, it's not a replacement for SCOM and doesn't play in the same league. The prices reflect this.

Solarwinds Orion is the larger brother and is designed for enterprise monitoring. Depending on how many sites you have, nodes, apps and if you;re a cisco house then the netflow module looks 'OK' + requirements then either could potentially be a good choice (I'm a fan of Solarwinds). Again, to deploy Orion vs IPMonitor the costs are far far apart and reflect the respective features each has. I still think IPMonitor looks better and monitors windows services far better for the price.

If you do have cisco routers and the right grade of swicth then Orion with the Netflow module is OK, we use a hybrid of IPMonitor and Plixers Scrutinizer for Netflow monitoring.
 
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maybe 600 end devices (mixture of windows / linux / solaris)
net app filers
hp sans
networking is a vast mixture of kit

sites = about 15 (micture of datacentres and client sites)

Solarwinds IPMonitor is designed for SME's, what size network do you have? How many sites? How many nodes do you want to manage?

I've got IPMonitor installed and it monitors approx 120 nodes utilising atm 1700 or so monitors. I've got it monitoring systems from the USA to Australia and almosy every continet in between on our network, when I told Solarwinds this they couldn't believe it and tried to push Orion! Not bad for about 3k.

However, it's not a replacement for SCOM and doesn't play in the same league. The prices reflect this.

Solarwinds Orion is the larger brother and is designed for enterprise monitoring. Depending on how many sites you have, nodes, apps and if you;re a cisco house then the netflow module looks 'OK' + requirements then either could potentially be a good choice (I'm a fan of Solarwinds). Again, to deploy Orion vs IPMonitor the costs are far far apart and reflect the respective features each has. I still think IPMonitor looks better and monitors windows services far better for the price.

If you do have cisco routers and the right grade of swicth then Orion with the Netflow module is OK, we use a hybrid of IPMonitor and Plixers Scrutinizer for Netflow monitoring.
 
Soldato
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solarwinds is on the list.. thanks for the 2nd.. it does all the network stuff very well aparently.. whats it like for windows? we use scom/mom for capturing events etc. is it a replacement or just more of a dash for outages etc.

We use Solarwinds here. It is a very good program but brings a quite powerful server to a crawl. (Running on Server 2008 server, dual core Xenon, 4GB RAM.)
 
Man of Honour
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Using Nimbus currently for perhaps 1500 hosts right across the board and it does some really advanced stuff for us which a lot of of the shelf products can't match without huge customisation.

That said it basically requires an extra team member to maintain and update it, it's a complex beast so it's probably a higher end product really.
 
Associate
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I investigated Nimbus and had a webex demo with an account manager and an engineer. It looked very, very powerful. Like you say though, it looked extremely complex to setup and I wouldn't have fancies administering it. Was expensive aswell compared to the others I benchmarked, but had shed loads of functionality.

The account manager made me chuckle when he said 'We'll have it fully installed and customised in three days!" :)
 
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