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Observium

Observium is an auto-discovering network monitoring platform designed for low-maintenance operation. It offers comprehensive visibility into a wide range of network devices, operating systems, and applications through intuitive graphical interfaces and extensive platform support.

License: Freemium
Available for:
Linux Online BSD

About Observium

Observium is a powerful yet user-friendly network monitoring solution that simplifies the complex task of keeping track of network health and performance. At its core, Observium leverages automated discovery to quickly map out your network infrastructure, reducing the manual effort required to set up monitoring for new devices. This auto-discovery process is one of its most compelling features, supporting a vast array of vendors and device types right out of the box, including Cisco, Juniper, Extreme, HP ProCurve, Brocade, and many more.

One of Observium's key strengths lies in its excellent graphing capabilities. It provides detailed, historical performance data for various metrics like bandwidth utilization, CPU usage, memory consumption, and disk space across your monitored devices. These graphs are easily accessible and customizable, offering deep insights into network trends and potential bottlenecks. The platform supports a wide range of protocols and technologies for data collection, including SNMP, ICMP, and integrates with various vendor-specific APIs.

Beyond basic network monitoring, Observium extends its reach to server and application monitoring. It can collect vital statistics from servers running different operating systems and provides visibility into application performance through integrations and checks. This allows administrators to gain a holistic view of their IT infrastructure, from core network switches to critical application servers.

Observium also includes essential features like:

  • Comprehensive Inventory Management: Automatically collects and maintains detailed information about your network devices, including hardware specifications, serial numbers, and installed software.
  • Alerting and Notifications: Configurable alerting rules allow you to define thresholds and trigger notifications via email or other methods when network devices or performance metrics deviate from expected norms. While basic, it provides necessary alerts for critical issues.
  • Custom Dashboards: While not as flexible as some competitors, Observium allows some level of customization to tailor the information displayed on your dashboard to your specific needs.
  • Extensive Platform Support: Continuously updated to include support for new devices and technologies from a wide range of vendors.
  • Lower Maintenance: Compared to some enterprise-grade NMS solutions, Observium is generally considered lower maintenance once initially configured, making it suitable for organizations with limited IT staff.

Pros & Cons

Pros

  • Excellent automatic network discovery
  • Wide range of device and vendor support
  • Clear and detailed performance graphing
  • Relatively low maintenance after setup

Cons

  • Alerting features can be basic for complex needs
  • Dashboard customization is somewhat limited
  • User interface design is functional but less modern

What Makes Observium Stand Out

Low Maintenance Auto-Discovery

Minimizes the manual effort required for initial setup and ongoing management through its powerful automatic device discovery.

Extensive Vendor Support

Supports a wide range of network hardware vendors and device types out of the box.

Clear Graphical Representation

Provides intuitive and detailed graphs for performance analysis and trend identification.

What can Observium do?

Review

Observium presents itself as a robust and user-friendly network monitoring system, particularly appealing to organizations that prioritize ease of deployment and a comprehensive view of their network infrastructure with minimal administrative overhead. The platform's core strength lies in its exceptional auto-discovery capability. Upon initial configuration, Observium efficiently scans the designated network segments, identifying devices, their types, and key characteristics without extensive manual intervention. This feature significantly reduces the time and effort typically associated with setting up a monitoring system for diverse environments.

The breadth of device support is another major highlight. Observium boasts compatibility with hardware from a vast number of vendors, including industry leaders like Cisco, Juniper, HP, and many others. This broad support ensures that most organizations can leverage Observium to monitor their existing network hardware without encountering compatibility issues. The platform's ability to understand vendor-specific MIBs and metrics allows it to provide detailed and relevant monitoring data for each device type.

Visualizing network data is where Observium truly shines. Its graphing engine is powerful, generating clear and informative charts for a wide array of performance indicators such as bandwidth utilization, CPU load, memory consumption, and error rates. These graphs are crucial for identifying trends, diagnosing performance issues, and planning network capacity. The historical data retained by Observium allows for in-depth analysis over time, enabling administrators to understand long-term network behavior. Unfortunately, the customizability of these graphs and dashboards can be somewhat limited compared to some more enterprise-focused platforms, which might be a drawback for users needing highly tailored views.

Beyond traditional network devices, Observium also offers capabilities for monitoring servers and applications. While not as deep as dedicated APM tools, it provides essential metrics for system resources and can integrate with certain application types. This offers a more unified view of the IT landscape, helping to correlate network issues with potential server or application problems.

Inventory management within Observium is largely automatic, populating details about discovered devices such as serial numbers, hardware models, and operating system versions. This automated inventory is a valuable asset for asset tracking and compliance purposes, although manual data entry or enrichment options are less prominent.

One area where Observium is functional but perhaps less sophisticated is its alerting system. While it provides necessary alert configurations based on predefined thresholds, the options for complex alert logic, notification methods, and integration with external incident management systems are relatively basic. Users requiring highly granular and customizable alerting might find this aspect somewhat limiting.

The overall user interface of Observium is functional and generally intuitive, making it accessible for administrators of varying skill levels. The navigation is straightforward, and key information is usually easy to find. However, the design, while clean, can feel somewhat dated compared to modern web applications.

From a deployment perspective, Observium is designed to be installed on-premises, offering full control over the data and infrastructure. This is ideal for organizations with strict security or compliance requirements. The installation process, while requiring some technical knowledge, is well-documented.

In summary, Observium is a highly capable network monitoring system, particularly strong in its auto-discovery, extensive device support, and graphical data representation. It excels as a low-maintenance solution for obtaining a clear overview of network health and performance. While its alerting and dashboard customization features might be less advanced than some competitors, its core strengths make it an excellent choice for many organizations, especially those looking for a straightforward yet powerful NMS without the complexity of larger enterprise suites.

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