Network Monitoring Solution Reviews

Solarwinds, Fluke Networks, Zabbix and Nagios are just a few of the network monitoring solutions that IT Central Station can tell you about.

There are literally dozens of enterprise network monitoring solutions in the market, and choosing the right solution for your needs can be confusing. Which tool is right for you and your needs?  You can choose from toolsets from large commercial players such as Solarwinds, Fluke Networks and OPNET or look to open source solutions such as Zabbix and Nagios. How do you decide?

IT Central Station is like Yelp or TripAdvisor for IT software, but unlike other review sites, all of our reviewers are strictly validated to ensure that each review is authentic and based on a real user's experience. We are an open, vendor-neutral site, and we do not endorse one vendor or another. If you use network monitoring solutions in your job, you can write your own review and promote your expertise to a community of IT decision makers.

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM): Aaron Leskiw, a network engineer at a large consulting firm, wrote a fascinating in-depth review of Solarwinds NPM. He writes that NPM has an excellent UI and "does an all-round great job at automatically discovering network devices." He likes its support for syslog, virtualization, and VSANs. On the other hand, he says that that stock reports feel limited. He is also disappointed about the lack of Hyper-V support, although you can poll it with SNMP.

Nagios vs Zabbix: These are two popular open source solutions for network monitoring, and a number of our network engineers take an opinion on which one is the superior solution. The majority of our reviewers prefer Zabbix, and the debates get quite passionate about which solution is best. One of our reviewers writes that "if you're fed up with Nagios or doing a brand new deployment, taking a serious look at Zabbix will be worth your while." He says that Zabbix offers a quick and simple install, support for multiple platforms, a variety of templates covering most popular software, integrated graphs, and escalation management.

IBM Tivoli Netcool: One of our users gave Netcool a four-star review. She would have given it five stars, except for the fact that it is a highly complex product and required significant training in order to get up to speed. Once she was trained on the solution, she found it very useful for her needs.

ManageEngine OpManager: A real user of OpManager writes that he chose OpManager because it is feature-rich; has strong automation features, especially for troubleshooting and network mapping; and supports Hyper-V and URL monitoring. On the other hand, its large feature set can also increase complexity, and he has encountered some difficulty loading custom MIBs for obscure devices.