Every business today needs a comprehensive network monitoring tool that stays on top of all devices and activities that happen in your organization's network. As networks become bigger and more complex, you need a tool that grows with your organization and comes with all the features to manage your network.
One tool that can fit the above needs is ManageEngine's OpManager. In this article, we'll talk about what OpManager is and its features, followed by a detailed review.
What's ManageEngine OpManager?
ManageEngine OpManager is an affordable and reliable monitoring solution that monitors a wide range of devices like switches, routers, servers, VMs, printers, storage devices, firewalls, and more. Essentially, it can monitor any device that has a unique IP address and is connected to your network. By continuously monitoring these devices, OpManager can give you an accurate idea of the health and performance of these devices. With this information, you can drill down to the root cause of problems and fix them at the earliest.
OpManager Features
OpManager comes with a rich set of features that cover almost every aspect of network monitoring. Here's a look at some of its salient features.
Network Performance
OpManager monitors your network and its performance closely to reduce the chances of costly outages. With its capabilities, OpManager optimizes your network for improved performance while ensuring the good health of all the devices that connect to it.
To achieve the above lofty milestones, OpManager closely looks into certain metrics in your network. They are:
- Availability: Every second of network downtime can cost you money, so you ideally want a network that never has an outage or downtime. This is why OpManager pings every part of the network and the devices that connect to it at specified intervals, and if it spots any delays in these pings, it notifies you right away. In turn, you can look into the reason for the latency and address them. Such proactive measures greatly reduce the chances of a network outage.
- Memory and CPU Utilization: When devices use high levels of CPU or memory, it can reduce the available resources for applications, thereby bringing down the end-user experience of these devices. To address this problem, you must know which apps are consuming high levels of resources, so you can take the necessary measures to improve user experience. Also, such high usage levels can indicate an impending attack, so that's something to consider as well. OpManager monitors device usage through SNMP, WMI, SSH, and Telnet. Specifically, it looks for indicators like speed, processor time, etc.
- Bandwidth Consumption: Slow network connections that hamper productivity can be due to problems in the network or the device. OpManager uses SNMP monitoring to understand device traffic and accordingly, provides contextual information on the root cause.
When you stay on top of these important network and device performance parameters, you can proactively fix issues and can ensure that your network always has optimal performance.
Visibility in Traffic Flow
The flow of traffic in your network is a good indicator of your network's health. In general, speeds below threshold levels indicate bandwidth clogging, device malfunction, etc. while speeds above threshold levels could be due to an impending cyberattack like Denial of Service (DoS). Since traffic flow is such a good indicator of your network health, OpManager tracks it using many flow technologies like IPFIX, sFlow, NetFlow, etc.
Automates Configuration Management
The last thing you want in your organization is for an unauthorized user to modify the configuration settings. Though you can't completely stop this event from happening using OpManager, you can reduce its chances. OpManager provides the option to back up your configurations, so they can be restored quickly when needed. Furthermore, you can reduce manual access to important configurations by creating automated scripts for tasks that need them. More importantly, you can detect any changes made to configuration variables in real-time to prevent catastrophic impacts on your network.
Troubleshoots WAN Issues
OpManager leverages Cisco IPSLA to troubleshoot WAN issues. Specifically, OpManager comes with a feature called WAN Round-Trip Time (RTT) to monitor latency issues, bandwidth utilization, and overall WAN performance. Using this information, you can better understand the problems in your WAN and troubleshoot them accordingly.
Monitor VoIP Performance
In today's global world, communication has become a central aspect of operations. Most organizations prefer to use VoIP for business communications as it is affordable and reliable. However, any issues in your network will have a direct bearing on the performance of your VoIP systems. To bring down this impact, OpManager uses Cisco IPSLA to identify where packet loss is occurring, its frequency, delay and jitter values, and more. Armed with this information, you can easily troubleshoot your VoIP issues.
Monitors the Health of Devices
The performance of your network depends on a large context of the health and performance of the devices that connect to it. OpManager keeps a tab on all the devices that connect to your network including servers, workstations, switches, routers, etc. It assesses the health and performance of these devices through many parameters and notifies you when the values are way off the established baseline values.
In all, these are some of the important features of OpManager. As you can see, it's highly comprehensive and monitors all aspects of your network, including the devices. With this background, let's head to a detailed review of OpManager and how it can impact your organization.
OpManager – A Detailed Review
With many network monitoring tools out there, it's hard to identify the one that best fits your needs. The review below can provide a broad idea of how OpManager can better optimize and improve your network's functioning. Accordingly, you can decide if this is the right tool for you.
Real-Time Insights
Network monitoring is the core functionality of OpManager, and it continuously scans your network and devices to ensure that everything is working optimally. A highlight of OpManager is that it monitors in real-time, so you can get information about any issues right away. It uses Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) to monitor the health of every device, and since this protocol is present in most IP-based devices, OpManager can monitor almost all kinds of devices that connect to your network.
These real-time insights can particularly help to detect imminent cyberattacks or if one of your network's critical components is malfunctioning. The biggest advantage is that you can remediate the issue quickly, so the impact is minimal.
Reports and Charts
For most people, it's hard to digest the technical information about the device and network functioning. Also, it doesn't help when you get information about devices in isolation. This is why OpManager consolidates all the information gathered from different devices and network areas and presents them in the form of charts and graphs. These ready-to-digest formats help you to understand the state of your network with a mere glance.
The reports are both concise and detailed, in the sense that it offers a bird's eye view of the status of your network and devices. When you click on each aspect in the report, you get further information about specific parameters, and this will help you better understand the root cause of an issue.
Such reports and charts work well for people of all technical levels and can come in handy to talk to your management. It can also help with internal auditing, budgeting, and capacity planning. Moreover, some of these reports can be used to meet compliance standards, with little modifications.
Proactive Approach
One of the biggest reasons for organizations to choose OpManager is its proactive approach to troubleshooting. It continuously scans your network for anomalies, so you can get to the root cause, and fix it at the earliest. Such a proactive approach can save a ton of time, money, and effort for your organization. More importantly, it catches a problem before it turns into a disaster, thereby reducing the reputational loss in the eyes of external customers and other stakeholders. Furthermore, a proactive approach to troubleshooting brings down the number of emergencies that you have to handle, and the escalations and stress levels reduce as well. Plus, the number of help desk requests can also decrease.
Monitors Wireless Networks
OpManager monitors not just the devices in your network, but also the Wi-Fi strength at different locations. This feature can come in handy if most of your employees work from the same office space. Essentially, this tool shows the strength of wireless access points across the entire space, so you know which areas require a Wi-Fi booster. Also, this information can come in handy while planning the layout of your office space. Typically, the highest signal strength must be reserved for the most mission-critical applications.
An added advantage of monitoring wireless networks is that OpManager identifies the possible security gaps that could threaten your network. Knowing this information can help you to better prepare and address these security gaps.
Discovers and Monitors Hardware
An often overlooked aspect of network monitoring is the underlying hardware devices. They are seen as a potential cause only when a major problem occurs, by which time, the damage is mostly done. To avoid such situations, OpManager continuously scans the network to discover any new device that connects to it. Further, it adds the discovered devices to its monitoring list and keeps a tab on the hardware as well. It monitors aspects such as temperature, voltage, disk and memory usage, and more, so any small issue is immediately notified to you.
Generates Network Maps
Often, admins find it hard to track the health and performance of networks because the networks can grow faster than their monitoring capacity. Needless to say, it can lead to blind spots and gaps that, in turn, can serve as the entry point for cyberattacks. OpManager helps to prevent such disasters for you. As a part of its continuous scanning process, it creates a list of devices. Whenever a new device is added, it updates the network map. This way, a mere look at the network map will tell you the new devices and their respective location, and in the process, eliminates possible blind spots.
Integrates with Other Modules and Apps
OpManager integrates well with other ManageEngine modules like OpUtils, Netflow Analyzer, and more. Also, it works well with third-party applications, thereby greatly extending its usage and functionality. Such seamless integrations also ensure that you can better leverage OpManager's capabilities.
Supported Devices
OpManager is undoubtedly a versatile network monitoring tool that can add value to your organization. However, it merits knowing that OpManager works only on Windows Server 2008, 2012 and R2, 2016, and 2019. When it comes to Linux distributions, it works on Ubuntu, Suse, Red Hat Linux (up to version 8), Fedora, and Mandrake Linux only.
Pricing
Another important aspect is the cost. Generally speaking, OpManager comes in three editions: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise. The Standard edition starts at $245 for 10 devices, while the Professional edition costs $345 for the same number of devices. The Enterprise edition is priced at $11,545 for 250 devices.
The Enterprise edition offers many additional features when compared to the other two editions, with the notable ones being support for multi-site and distributed networks and data retention for 180 days when compared to the 60 days of the Professional edition. The price of OpManager is highly comparable to other similar products, so this tool can be a good value for your money.
Final Verdict
Overall, ManageEngine OpManager is an excellent network monitoring tool that comes with all the features you need to gain complete control and understanding of your network. More importantly, it helps to quickly identify blind spots, so you can fix them at the earliest before it turns into a disaster. Such a proactive approach coupled with its wide-arching ability to monitor every aspect of your network and devices make it a good choice for organizations of all sizes.
Moreover, its advanced reporting features help all users to stay on top of the health and performance of devices and the network as a whole. It can help with internal auditing and compliance as well.
However, this tool is not for everyone, as it works only on certain versions of Linux and all Windows systems. If you have other operating systems in your organization, OpManager will not run well on them.
We hope this information helps you to better decide if OpManager is the right platform for your organization.
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