ManageEngine OpManager Makes Monitoring Simple and Effective

Using a network monitoring solution like ManageEngine OpManager is essential for modern internet users who are constantly on the web to run their businesses and other activities.

The reason is web security issues like data leaks, hacks, ransomware, viruses, etc., are plaguing the world. In addition, users face downtimes, lags, network outages, overloads, and performance issues.

All these are hazardous for your organization and may cause data, financial, and reputational losses.

So, it’s crucial to continuously perform server and network monitoring with the help of a dedicated software solution like OpManager.  

A server and network-performing software can help you monitor every activity in your networks, servers, and different types of systems you use. It can detect the root cause of an issue and alert you immediately so you can take prompt action to resolve it.

Let’s talk about OpManager and find out how it can help you.

What Is ManageEngine OpManager?

ManageEngine OpManager is a robust network monitoring tool that businesses and professionals can use to monitor their routers, firewalls, traffics, switches, IPs, configs, applications, VMs, servers, wireless LAN controllers, load balancers, storage devices, and printers for performance and faults.

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This comprehensive, end-to-end monitoring software lets you gain deeper visibility into these devices so you can detect issues and fix them and also improve their performance. It’s an affordable and easy-to-use network monitoring solution that businesses of different shapes and sizes can use to stay vigilant and maintain serviceability.

ManageEngine OpManager has been providing server and network monitoring for more than 15 years now and is a trusted solution in the industry.

Key Features of ManageEngine OpManager

Some of the key features of OpManager are:

#1. Network Monitoring

Networks are like the backbones of a business, whether it’s an enterprise or small. A network outage has the potential to hamper productivity and cause damage.

Using a network monitoring solution like OpManager, you can anticipate network outages quickly and address the problems proactively. OpManager will monitor all your network services for performance so you can spot performance issues faster and restore performance.

By acquiring in-depth visibility into your IP-based device’s health, performance, and availability in real time. You can also monitor traffic flow, routers, switches, and bandwidth utilization. This will help you improve performance and maintain a congestion-free organizational network to keep your operations running.

• OpManager can continuously monitor network uptimes and downtimes and ping the monitored devices after the set intervals. If it detects any packet loss or downtimes, it will notify you quickly.
• It can monitor devices using SSH, VMware native API, Telnet, WMI, and SNMP for metrics like speed, resource utilization, processor time, idle time, etc. It will help you troubleshoot memory and CPU bottlenecks.
• It can monitor the traffic patterns of a device for insights like interface traffic and last-polled traffic value and filter network traffic by period. The NetFlow module by OpManager provides deeper network visibility with support for sFlow. NetFlow, IPFIX, jFlow, etc.
• OpManager can monitor packet loss because of discards and errors and reduce their likelihood.
• It leverages IP-SLA by Cisco to monitor the WAN, and the WAN Round Trip Time Monitor by OpManager tells info on WAN link latency, round trip time, bandwidth utilization, and other aspects of performance to detect and fix WAN performance.

#2. Physical and Virtual Server Monitoring

Let OpManager monitor your physical and virtual servers to ensure they run at maximum performance around the clock. It can monitor VMware, Hyper-V, Xen, Nutanix HCI, and Citrix servers.

OpManager can continuously monitor a server’s components like memory consumption, CPU usage, disk usage, I/O, network, processes, URLs, scripts, event logs, etc., via WMI and SNMP protocols.

• It can monitor Windows Services like FTP, Alerter, Net Logon, Print Spooler, IAS, DHCP Server, etc. If any of them fails, you can configure OpManager to restart the services and the server automatically.
• OpManager can discover each process running on the servers with its details like Process Name, Process ID, Process Argument, and Process Path.
• You can detect login failures due to account lockouts, bad passwords, log tampering, failed login attempts, etc.
• The tool lets you monitor URLs and look for text on the webpage. It will help you spot the missing text and be alerted if your site is compromised.

#3. Wireless Network Monitoring

Gain comprehensive wireless network statistics for access points, switches, routers, Wi-Fi systems, and more. OpManager will also help you monitor wireless network traffic and Wi-Fi strength and offers detailed insights into the health and availability of your wireless network.

• OpManager can automate regular maintenance and monitoring tasks, reducing manual effort and time.
• Its powerful tools for network visualization let you understand your wireless network’s topology and efficiently manage them.
• You can track critical metrics regarding network usage, including bytes transmitted, CPU, memory, disk utilization, number of users, access points, etc.

#4. WAN Monitoring

OpManager utilizes Cisco’s IPSLA technology to allow you to monitor and visualize WAN links’ availability, traffic details, and Round Trip Time (RTT). It can also help you troubleshoot WAN links’ performance and outage issues by looking at detailed reports and dashboards.

As a result, you can stay ahead of your competitors, ensuring your mission-critical apps are always available and meet SLAs.

• OpManager utilizes SNMP to fetch links’ performance statistics by sending a query to Cisco’s routers.
• Its configuration wizard can also configure IPSLA parameters to monitor WAN health.

#5. Cisco ACI Monitoring

Get a detailed view of the whole Cisco ACI infrastructure along with your controller to monitor aspects like tenants, endpoint groups, and fabric switches using OpManager. It will provide a unified platform for administrators to track the efficiency and health of the ACI environment along with its related components.

OpManager utilizes the API access credentials of Cisco to interact with your organization’s SDN environment to monitor the ACI device and components. From the summary page of ACI, you will get the required data on the detected ACI model and other information, like:

• Controller’s availability timeline
• Recent faults in ACI
• APIC summary table for health and availability score

Furthermore, OpManager can automatically plot your ACI environment’s topology map so you can view the APIC controller, the leaves, and the spines in your network and the interconnection between them.

• With the Fabric tab, you will get a layout of all the software components and networks in the ACI environment in the form of a 3-tier architecture. When you initiate the discovery, components like leaves, spines, super spines, health score, node ID, and pod ID get automatically added to OpManager.
• With OpManager, you can drill down to each tenant and its summary page with data on connected application profiles, VRFs, bridge domains, endpoint groups, and tenant health scores.
• Using a dedicated SDN dashboard with personalized widgets like SDN inventory, alarms, etc., offers needed information on the ACI environment quickly.

#6. Storage Monitoring

You can monitor storage devices such as Tape libraries, storage arrays, and Fiber channel switches using OpManager’s capabilities like capacity utilization monitors and storage growth trend graphs.

The integrated storage monitoring feature by OpManager will offer you the freedom to manage your entire network storage devices in just one pane. It also offers sophisticated performance monitoring and reporting along with features like disk write/read stats.

• You can configure thresholds and assign a severity for alarms and events
• By leveraging SNMP, SMI-S, CLI, or vendor-specific APIs, you can detect and monitor RAIDs in the network.
• OpManager offers asset management and provides details on logical and physical assets. It also lets you view storage RAIDs availability, health, and utilization and receive alerts on software and hardware problems, sensor faults, and drive failures.

#7. Distributed Network Monitoring

OpManager has a strong Probe-Central architecture, making it possible to easily scale it based on your enterprise’s expansion and growth without affecting reliability. 

The probe is configured at remote network monitoring websites with the central server designed to offer the needed network visibility throughout locations. It reports performance stats and network health over several remote probes. This is how OpManager makes distributed monitoring simple.

• It has a feature – Smart Upgrade to simplify and optimize your enterprise edition’s upgrade process so that you can leverage the latest features and capabilities.
• You can view a device’s snapshots page belonging to a given problem from OpManager’s central server web client. You can also view the probes’ CPU, memory used, disk space, and availability.
• A probe at each site does scaling tasks like mapping, fault monitoring, discovery, and interaction with the central server.
• You can eliminate language barriers with the help of stats across Central and Probe in the language of your choice.

#8. Network Visualization

Visualize your network infrastructure with OpManager easily and reduce complexities due to your business’s growing requirements. It empowers admins to quickly create virtual replicas of data centers and network topologies with a drag-and-drop diagram builder.

With a network visualization tool like OpManager, you can see business-critical data and ensure 24/7 service quality. You can visualize networks in multiple formats like:

• Layer 2 maps to view layer 2 devices in your network along with each interface, node, port-to-port connection, and interlinked layer.
• VM topography diagrams to see the relationships between VMs, data stores, and hosts.
• Business views showcase devices in the form of graphs based on the delivered services. It facilitates quick network troubleshooting and ensures mission-critical programs are always available.
• Google Maps and Zoho Maps are used to view the network by organizing devices on these maps based on which geographic location they are.
• Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) views let you understand hyper-convergence. You will discover Nutanix clusters for VMs and hosts and their relationships and add Nutanix’s Prism Central to find clusters that an HCI device has mapped. This will provide you with a detailed map of each VM and the number of nodes under the HCI.
• SDN infrastructure views allow you to detect all the spines, leaves, and APIC controllers in your organizational network and the interconnections between them.
• SD-WAN topology view provides a map-like presentation of network devices of the detected controller by Cisco Meraki, having a built-in SD-WAN system.  
• 3D rack & floor views can be created with OpManager to help admins track server status and availability.

#9. Network Fault Monitoring and Management

It’s challenging to perform network fault monitoring and management, especially if your team is small or you need to manage a site remotely and send a technician to detect the issue, which you could have done remotely. This takes a longer time to identify the cause and resolve the issue.

OpManager can constantly monitor issues in your network devices and simplifies the alert management process by implementing sophisticated alert monitoring. It performs monitoring efficiently so you can easily find the root cause of the issues and quickly fix them so that end users don’t have to suffer.

• With intuitive event processing on receiving alerts, OpManager can correlate network events, detect and remove unwanted events, and showcase only relevant alarms
• It features user-friendly color-coded alarms
• It allows admins to view an alarm’s event history and delete or clear alarms manually
• You can enable your device to send SNMP traps if a problem occurs and provide useful information to network operators

#10. Intuitive Dashboards and reports

OpManager offers intuitive dashboards where you can visualize all the connected devices in your network, performance metrics, resource utilization, and other statistics with greater clarity. You will find various options for visualization, like maps, graphs, etc., and can customize your dashboard to make it more suitable for your use case.

In addition, these dashboards come with widgets, color-coding, drag-and-drop options, and other useful features to enhance user experience. Apart from that, you will get periodic reports on your network’s performance, server metrics, device health, response time, inventory reports, and other data to make a deeper analysis of issues and find ways to resolve them. OpManager’s simple user interface has 100+ built-in reporting profiles and 125+ out-of-the-box reports.

#11. Configuring Thresholds

With OpManager, you will be able to configure thresholds for services and resources running on your network devices and servers when they reach critical conditions.

It supports multiple-level thresholds for breaking down and classifying faults encountered and raising alerts when the devices reach thresholds. You can respond proactively with a corrective action based on the severity level.

#12. Notifications and Alarms

If OpManager detects any risks or network or server outages, it notifies you through email or SMS. It also enables administrators to configure the software and automatically run homegrown scripts or external programs when alarms get triggered.

OpManager performs smart event processing, correlates network events, presents meaningful alarms, and filters undesirable events. In addition, it uses color-coded alarms in a user-friendly format.

#13. Data Center Management

The integrated data center management and monitoring allow you to monitor servers, bandwidth, and applications from a single console. In addition, you can monitor traffic flow with the NetFlow plug-in and data center environment monitoring.

OpManager lets you visualize various elements present in your data center infrastructure, which helps you manage it effectively and determine performance at the data center and rack floor levels.

With OpManager, you can create a replica of the data center and rack floor in 3-dimension. It also lets you embed it on the NOC screens for continuous health monitoring. Creating a 3D replica is easy with the drag-and-drop option. OpManager also provides device status in real-time.

#14. Customer Support

You can reach out to OpManager’s customer team through email and call. OpManager is effortless to install. Just download and install the software, add your systems, and set up the thresholds and dashboards for monitoring. You can also download their mobile applications available for Android, iPad, and iPhone.

ManageEngine OpManager Alternatives

Despite offering a long list of useful capabilities and tools, it might not be suitable for everyone. So, if you are looking for OpManager alternatives, here are some options for you:

#1. Auvik

If you are looking for an efficient, cloud-based network monitoring solution, Auvik is a good option. Auvik allows you to detect issues immediately with device logs and notifies you proactively with alerts and pre-configured monitoring. You can view all the systems in your network, where they are located, and changes in them.

#2. Paessler PRTG

Monitor your complete IT infrastructure with Paessler’s PRTG monitors. It provides cloud-based and on-premises tools for medium-sized, large, and enterprise businesses.

PRTG offers plenty of features like maps and dashboards, alerts and notifications, user interfaces, SLA reporting, customizable reporting, automatic network discovery, and more.

#3. SolarWinds

Solarwinds offers a multi-vendor monitoring solution that can expand and scale your network’s needs. It offers multiple valuable features like critical path visualization, intelligent mappings, performance analysis, advanced altering, and more.

Its pricing starts at $1,785.

Final Words

ManageEngine OpManager is undoubtedly one of the best network and server monitoring platforms. It offers advanced monitoring capabilities to all your networks, servers, devices, and other systems.

Thus, if you want to stay protected and keep your business operations running all the time, you can consider network and server monitoring by OpManager. Avail of its free trial today.

Next, you can check out Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) software to monitor IT assets.