Why not to use Operations Manager to monitor your network.

With constant changes in your private and public cloud comes the need to constantly make small modifications to your network monitoring policies. If you’ve made an unfortunate mistake and you’re using OpsMgr to monitor your network, you’ve probably noticed that it is just too complicated. Besides that, you probably reached the conclusion that not all devices can be monitored and that you have absolutely no real clue of what you are monitoring and what thresholds you are using.

“What on earth happened? Was it that your boss is a bit stingy and didn’t feel like he had the budget to get a real network monitoring tool?”

If you’re just starting with Operations Manager, you probably need some time to get things set up for your server and application monitoring, that’s understandable and will probably be enough. But please, when it comes to monitoring your network, get serious!  OpsMgr is just not up to par. You want to know why? Take a look at the following reasons:

So let’s see how much time you’re actually wasting? First, you probably wait an eternity hoping that your device will be discovered by OpsMgr to only find out that it cannot be. Or if you’re lucky, it is discovered but not correctly or completely.

Second, how are you going to manage the monitoring policy? Will you just risk weeks or months of work by depending on the totally mysterious intervals and thresholds the management pack comes with? Good luck with that! If you’re looking to throw away some more precious minutes, you could of course enter the twilight zone of over rides and change it all yourself? However, don’t forget to keep track, you might end up with worse thresholds than you started with.

Oh, and what do we do when we have a Cisco Nexus for example, and you are adding new Virtual Ethernet Interfaces? You’re certainly pushing your luck in hoping that the discovery might find them? Maybe that does occur, but what threshold will you use? Ups! But of course, you can always override and keep track of that in an excel sheet, like it was done back in the day.

OK, maybe we are a bit sarcastic, but we’ve seen several customers that arrive at our doorstep, tired of trying to monitor their network with OpsMgr, only to find out that it is just so much easier to do it through Xian Network Manager.

• Network device discovery in seconds
• A robust generic device discovery, works with anything that has SNMP
• An easy overview of your current used thresholds and options for automatic and dynamic thresholding
• Continuous dynamic device updates

Pricing starts at $35 USD per device. Not something you need to think about very long. And most known network devices have special MPs, and otherwise the Generic MP can always handle it.

More info on: http://www.jalasoft.com/xian/networkmanager