Comparison with other network management systems

From OpenNMS

OpenNMS VS HP Nagios

The following URL compares OpenNMS with Nagios

http://www.rootdev.com/tech/opennms-vs-nagios

--Arul Krishnamoorthy., 18 March 2009

OpenNMS VS HP OpenView

I have recently been working to replace HP OpenView Network Node Manager (NNM) and Operations (OVO) with OpenNMS as our primary monitoring application for our Network Operations Center. I evaluated several different network monitoring systems both commercial and open source and in the end eventually settled with OpenNMS due to its capabilities and flexibility, this is not to mention that the price was right.

To summarize my experiences with HP OpenView NNM and OVO...

The NNM map requires a lot of administrative overhead, both the NNM map and message browser are very antiquated, the OVO agents are a pain to work with as they often break during an OS upgrade/update, the OVO agent install process isn't very smooth, HP's support is great with 1st call resolution but if you get escalated you probably won't ever get resolution.

During my two years of research on monitoring systems I evaluated many commercial applications such as; Solar Winds Orion, NimSoft Nimbus, SiteScope, and several of the BMC products. Also we evaluated several open source products such as Nagios and Big Sister. We eventually settled on OpenNMS due to its capabilities, simplicity and flexibility.

While out of the box OpenNMS was unable to provide us with the functionality of NNM and OVO, we found that with a few extra open source packages and some in house development work we were able to eventually address 99% of the functionality of NNM and OVO and for a fraction of the price and time that we had spent on NNM and OVO. Integrating all of these things together would not have been possible if it weren't for the flexibility of OpenNMS.

I don't "yet" have support through The OpenNMS Group but the support that I have received from the mailing list alone as been far superior to that which we received from HP.

I have learned a lot about monitoring systems from my two years of researching network monitoring systems and the following are some of the ones that stand out...

Network maps are more work than they are worth, watching a screen of scrolling messages is a bad way to monitor anything, monitoring processes and procedures are just as if not more important that the application that you choose, ease of configuration is just as important as ease of use with a monitoring system because you spend just as much time working with the configurations as you do using it.

I hope that somebody out there finds this information at least a little bit useful. For anybody out there looking for a good monitoring platform my recommendation to you is do lots of research and strongly consider OpenNMS!

--Byron A. 16:02, 20 February 2006