When it comes to IT monitoring software you nearly need a Bachelor’s degree from the software provider just to manage the damn thing, and we won’t even get into the complications involved in setting it all up. Its no secret I often fantasize about the perfect piece of monitoring software for specific tasks and all in one style solutions. At one point in the last year it was a task of mine to research all monitoring solutions I could find and come up with something affordable, fairly straight forward and easy to manage and it needed to scale well. By the end of this task I was left with only a few solutions that made the cut and I will briefly cover those as well as some that didn’t and why they didn’t. Although I only list a handful here I can assure you I tested over 20 different monitoring solutions of all shapes and sizes.
Our primary goal was a monitoring solution that could monitor servers, workstations, network devices, virtualized servers such as VMWare and possibly the actual hardware to replace Dell OpenManage. I wanted a few things in the software itself but they were not all must have features, such as WMI, SNMP, Windows & Linux Support, At a Glance style dashboards, customizable reports that can run on a schedule.
Main Contenders
Microsoft – Systems Center Operations Manager
The first piece of software I want to mention is Microsoft’s own Systems Center Operations Manager, or simply SCOM (pronounced es’ com). This seemed like the perfect solution because of the huge support database for features, operating systems, plugins and partners. Another nice perk was how well it integrates with Active Directory and Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). We were not looking for a piece of software to manage updates because we were already using and were happy with WSUS, so the fact that it all tied right in together was very nice indeed. I found plugins for nearly everything including our Dell servers which read like a complete replacement for the OpenManage suite.
My first bit of displeasure came from the grueling installation which seemed to be one minor issue or annoyance after another. After this I noticed how insanely detailed the setup was, this isn’t just the setup for the software itself but the setup of every machine you want to monitor. I had issues pushing agents and getting machine to report back correctly. I had issues setting up what I actually wanted to monitor and what I didn’t. The biggest annoyances came from the consistent alerts and yellow flags thrown on my workstations and servers which were almost always nothing that I wanted to alert on anyway. Yes I know I have some event log errors for specific things that currently no fix exists but I don’t want my machine health to be shown as degraded based on this either.
The frustration was never ending with this software and managing it was a full time job. There were no quick overview style dashboards to be found which was the one feature I really wanted in a monitoring solution. Overall after a few weeks I abandoned this garbage and never looked back, the only advice I can give here is if your serious about running SCOM you should buy a few of those huge Microsoft books we are all so familiar with and possibly enroll in a few courses so you can throw it on your next resume. Personally I’d rather invest the time into learning more C# or PowerShell over a monitoring solution.
Pro’s
- Very Powerful when combined with plugins
- Management of software installations, updates and rollouts on top of monitoring
- Complete solution which could replace several pieces of software
Con’s
- Very complicated to setup
- Very complicated to use
- Time consuming to manage
- No simple one time reports
- Designed for full central management weather you want it or not
- Consistent alerts on seemingly unimportant events
- Adding new machines and features is very time consuming
- Agent installation failures with vague descriptions of why
- Most monitoring requires configuration changes on the servers, not required by other software
- No native Linux support, must pay 3rd party fees
IPSwitch – What’s Up Gold
After installing What’s Up Gold I immediately found it wasn’t for us at all and could possibly be adapted but why reinvent the wheel? I found this software to be better suited for an organization with lots of locations spread out geographically. I found the setup to be nearly as frustrating as SCOM with the exception that most of the machines I attempted to monitor with WMI just outright failed to report any data back. The software even struggled on the simplest of things like detected the proper machine name, I don’t care how the software gets the name but when it reports back just an IP address on a network where both DNS and NETBIOS work properly that’s just unacceptable.
Pro’s
- Ability to monitor the entire network including network devices
Con’s
- Complicated setup and failures with WMI monitoring
- Designed for multi-location monitoring
- Poor job of detecting system names, roles, CPU types and more
- Linux Support cost extra
- Reports are generic and bland
- Most reports cause errors when running on a single machine
Manage Engine – OpManager
This was just like IPSwitch What’s Up Gold all over again, just read my review for that and apply here.
Pro’s
- Free
- Could be useful for other light duty management tasks
- Printer monitoring of ink levels and current print job is a nice touch
Con’s
- Very expensive and I mean VERY
- Quoted Price of 4k for 50 devices, 2k for VMWare, 2k for Netflow and then almost 1k for each type of plugin, AD, Exchange, SQL and so on
- Over crowded and complex interface
- Issues setting up on Windows 7 and Server 2008
- Designed more towards Muti Site like What’s Up Gold
- Very few built in server roles
- Server can’t belong to more than 1 role at a time, i.e. Exchange & Active Directory
Uptime Software – Up.Time
This was my favorite application by far, it seemed to have just about everything I was looking for and was extremely easy to setup and manage. So much stuff worked right out of the box and by the time I got around to installing this piece of software I already had experienced several others so I was really able to see where the software excelled where others fell on their face. Although we didn’t end up with this solution in the end it was my final choice and I’d be lying if I said it was a tough decision.
Pro’s
- Plenty of Management options including Agent, Agentless, WMI, SNMP, Node, Novell, LPAR, VirtualNode & ESX
- Extremely easy to setup and manage including adding new machines
- Very diverse reports with an abundance of reporting options
- Can dynamically add users & machines to a report without recreating the whole report
- Monitoring for Windows, Linux, Network Devices and VMWare
- Nice easy to follow interface with that “at a glance” appeal
- Easy to setup one time reports for deep analysis or trending
- Only application that Network interface bandwidth consumption worked out of the box
- Several installation options including Windows, Linux, Sun, Virtual Appliance and others
- Historical data retention along with (Min / Max / Avg) style performance reporting metrics
- ESX license covers all virtual machines on that server
Con’s
- Pricey, especially for Linux
Quest – Spotlight on Applications
I wasn’t able to fully give these applications a try because the first issue I ran into a a free only version of their Windows monitoring application. This was only a problem because there were obvious issues with the application and no support so I didn’t even bother trying any of their other applications like Spotlight on SQL and so on. I think the way Quest operates is that they buy software from smaller companies and then resell it under their brand. I know its something like this because when I was trying to get quotes I was working with another company who was separate from Quest and they were telling me to go to their site and check out what else they had to offer. This has me worried because it was obvious Quest wasn’t making this software and when I asked about just purchasing one application to do everything I was told it was not possible and never would be. The reason was because some of the Spotlight Apps come from one company while others from another, could you image the nightmare trying to support that?
Pro’s
- NONE
Con’s
- Free only Windows Application kills the rest of the apps if you want everything from one vendor
- Deal with several companies by the time you get the whole Spotlight on Suite
- No chance of integrating Spotlight Applications into one since the developers are different companies
Free & Open Source
Spiceworks
Who hasn’t heard of Spiceworks right? The infamous defacto standard in free IT applications.
Pro’s
- Free
- Could be useful for other light duty management tasks
- Printer monitoring of ink levels and current print job is a nice touch
Con’s
- Designed more as a IT help desk solution rather than a full monitoring solution
- No scheduled reports
- Poor job of detecting system names, roles, CPU types and more
- Monitoring requires additional software, configuration and lots of custom work
- No resource usage reporting
- Most features don’t work out of the box
Hyperic – HQ Open Source Edition
Hyperic is a little lesser known in the SMB IT world but its a platform that is known to scale well and has impressive list of partners and support. The slogan on the front page of their site reads “Monitoring the World’s Largest Web Applications”. This tells me they must be big, stable and well known in the corporate world but also throws up a red flag for pricing if we wanted to move to the paid solution.
Pro’s
- Free
- Division of VMWare (Could also be a Con for some folks)
- Works with Windows, Linux, ESX & More
- Ability to convert to paid solution if you outgrow the open source edition
Con’s
- No Reports in the free version
- Agent based only, NO WMI or SNMP
- Had issues using both auto and manual discovery when setting server roles
- Some metrics reported incorrectly
- No built in disk monitoring tools
Nagios Open Source
Nagios is a product I have heard time and time again in the open source world. Its extremely well known and known to be one of the only platforms that will scale beyond the needs of any SMB.
Pro’s
- Free
- Well known in the Open Source district
- Tons of support out there
Con’s
- Only installs on Linux
- Absolute PITA to install for a Linux Novice
- Every plugin and addon has to be built in Linux, then configured manually for your specific setup
- I struggled to get this working and continually found myself looking for help more then monitoring my systems
- Everything including the dashboards are ugly, stripped down and nearly useless until you manually build and configure plugins
- Site is poorly designed and difficult at times to navigate and find items
Quest – Spotlight on Windows
Personally I think just about every other monitoring application should takes notes from how well the main dashboard in Quest SoW in designed. Although its starting to look a bit dated, I absolutely love the main dashboard and the ability to have it automatically cycle through machines. Another nice touch is a separate tab for all of the most important monitors including CPU, Memory, Disk, Event viewer and others. There is even a nice “drill down” feature where you can get really in depth with your analysis. Some major issues I found were no e-mail on alarms, constant disconnects of machines and a huge memory leak in the application when left running for more than a full day. Its such a shame to see such a nice product go to waste with no desire from the company to pick up support and carry on development. I plan to review this application and another free goodie from Quest which basically shuts up every complaint I have here in a later review.
Pro’s
- Free
- Perfect interface although a tad dated
- Several options for setting alarm notifications on screen
- Options to set trending for specific metrics
- Customizable metrics for each status monitored
Con’s
- Disconnects machines without attempting reconnect if there are any network interruptions
- Has a giant memory leak after running for more than a few hours
- Free ONLY, no support, no more features
- No options to adjust data retention
- No e-mail on alarms
OpenSmart
Pro’s
- Free
Con’s
- Only Monitors Ping & Uptime
Others barely worth mentioning
PowerAdmin – Server Monitor
Pro’s
- NONE
Con’s
- Designed for monitoring of network devices more than servers and workstations
- Tons of features useless to most SMB’s built in and activated by default
- Very busy interface that makes administration very time consuming
- No Linux support
Eastbow – Server Performance Monitor
Pro’s
- NONE
Con’s
- No option to run reports on a schedule
- One monitors 1 hard drive in each machine
- No Service monitoring option
- No Linux Support
Towodo – System Monitor
Pro’s
- NONE
Con’s
- No option to run reports on a schedule
- Requires SQL Database
- Reporting is designed for deep analysis rather than trending
- No Linux Support
Adrem – Server Monitor
Pro’s
- NONE
Con’s
- Needs Novell Client installed on each machine to be monitored
- Primarily for Disk monitoring
Diffusione – Informatica Health Monitor
Pro’s
- NONE
Con’s
- NONE
Our Choice
So what did we choose? Well we actually already had been using Kaseya for some of our customers and I already knew Kaseya management quite well and its my personal favorite if you can afford and justify it. It does everything that all of the pieces of software I listed here do and so much more including pushing scripts with its own custom scripting language built in. Kaseya also has the best patch management that I have seen to date so for us this was a no brainer but we know now that absolutely without a doubt this is the best option for us and there is nothing else out there that we overlooked.
Closing Thoughts
Their are so many things that just seem obvious in the way of machine monitoring yet some how so many seem to miss these things and focus on other features while passing over the most important fundamentals. I’ve seen so many solutions that seem to get off on a bad start and instead of keeping the focus on the most important tasks like simplicity, ease of management, and that “at a glance” view I keep referring to, they focus on building in as many features as possible even though most you will never even use and this just further exacerbates the situation. Up.Time was quite refreshing and came into my lineup just when I was about to lose all hope for a viable monitoring solution that fit our criteria. If Kaseya isn’t an option for you then I highly recommend you give it a test drive. I know their are some Microsoft die hards that will run nothing but Microsoft in their production environment and if you have the time and desire to learn SCOM then I believe this could also be a viable solution but you will pay dearly in the amount of time you need to sink to not only learn the software but the time to continually manage it as well.