Observium Reviews & Insights

Score10 out of 10

13 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Observium are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Real-time analytics and config management: Many users have expressed their delight in the real-time analytics and config management feature of Observium. They appreciate being able to view minute attributes of a device with life monitoring, which makes it easy for them to analyze and manage their network efficiently.

Easy first-time configuration: Several reviewers have mentioned that the easy first-time configuration of the server is a standout feature of Observium. They find it user-friendly and appreciate how quickly they can set up the system without any hassle.

Extensive device support: Users have highlighted that Observium provides extensive device support, allowing them to have control over the status of their networks. The clear and intuitive interface makes it easy for them to navigate and access relevant information.

Observium Reviews

4 Reviews

Great tool for monitoring Network devices.

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 17, 2024

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are monitoring the usage and utilization of network device resources using this tool. It shows the exact info with details of what we want. It includes: - resources like CPU and port usage. - bandwidth utilization report. As we compare with other tools which already in market. but didn't find this tool's features.

Pros

Automatic device discovery.
Scalability
Real-time monitoring.

Cons

Customisation on dashboard.
User mapping requires more clearly.
Support for custom graph and polling of devices.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is a very good overall monitoring solution for any kind of SNMP network device. Fast and simple to set up. It is an easy, robust, and quick monitoring system. The easy-to-use user interface provides advanced capabilities for the statistical display of data, as well as diagrams. This is a great way to add auto-discovery and geographical representation of the network.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Observium Review

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

April 30, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Observium is being used to provide monitoring to a number of sites across Europe. This includes on site network infrastructure, servers, virtual machine estates and wireless AP's. It is currently in use by only one department, the IT team. The problems it addresses is providing monitoring and alerting for the company.

Pros

SNMP monitoring
Easy to set up initially
Alerting

Cons

Documentation
Community support
Easy to set up but hard to customise fully

Likelihood to Recommend

Currently I would not recommend Observium to anyone else. Not when there are extremely similar and if not better products out there.
I would more likely recommend LibreNMS, which is a fork of Observium and is going in (in my opinion) a better direction than Observium. The dev team for LIbreNMS is more approachable for help and advice also.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

Observium - Great NMS capability at a low (or free) price point

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Observium within the IT department primarily to record and present performance data on a wide variety of devices across our network. It fills a gap between no statistics and expensive (and sometimes cumbersome) COTS products that do roughly the same task.

Pros

Observium produces simple, attractive and clean performance graphs. Expensive commercial products either do this about as well as Observium, or much, much worse.
Observium does a good job of discovering your network via SNMP/CDP/LLDP. Provided your network is set up properly and the software has the correct settings, it can do this very quickly and very well.
Observium provides immediately actionable data, on a LARGE swath of products in the field. In 4+ years using the product, I've found maybe 2-3 products that didn't work "out of the box" for data collection. This is way better than any commercial product I've used.

Cons

The documentation needs help. This product, like many other IT products, likes to skip the "101" stuff, assuming that you just inherently know how to do something, and the documentation is just for reference.
I have not been able to rely on the alerting engine as our primary way of knowing if devices are up or down. I'm sure that's just as much my fault as the software, but this is one area where commercial products tend to shine in comparison.
The autodiscovery of VMware virtual machines does not work properly if the ESX-level name of the VM doesn't match the VM's hostname. FileServer234 will be discovered, but "Server234 - File and Print" will not.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are on a budget, this is one heck of a tool for the price (including the ~$200/year for the Pro subscription).
If you are OK with maintaining and updating open source tools, this is a great tool.
If you are afraid of the Linux command line or live in a Windows-centric world, this might not be the tool for you.
If you can't stand things occasionally not working, this is probably not a good fit.

Derek Dolan

Senior System Administrator in Information Technology at CURT Manufacturing, LLC (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

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Observium for Enterprise Network Monitoring

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 12, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Observium as a network management software. It's nice because it's a lightweight tool that is a Linux distro, and allows for some great visualizations. The flexibility to load up our equipment and network paths, then view a high level overview of the traffic and netflow statistics, is critical in our choice to use this software. You can see things like user logins, processes on each router, and obtain optimization information for daily network management.

Pros

You can see the bits per second that are happening on the ports, which is fantastic.
Between logical interfaces, you can see how much bandwidth is being used per second/minute/hour.
You can infer power consumption and conflicting routes. Great tool to aggregate and visualize your distributed network.

Cons

The UI is pretty robust and succinct. It might be beneficial to have favorites for complex network schemas.
Historical searching based on X time frame.
More customized dashboards.

Likelihood to Recommend

Observium is great for medium to large network sizes. If you have a mix of public and private servers, this is a great tool. If you want to be able to visualize your routes, hops between, and bandwidth consumption, this is the right hammer for the job. If you have a smaller network, this tool might not have as large of value.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

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Observium - Great NMS capability at a low (or free) price point

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

Observium produces simple, attractive and clean performance graphs. Expensive commercial products either do this about as well as Observium, or much, much worse.
Observium does a good job of discovering your network via SNMP/CDP/LLDP. Provided your network is set up properly and the software has the correct settings, it can do this very quickly and very well.
Observium provides immediately actionable data, on a LARGE swath of products in the field. In 4+ years using the product, I've found maybe 2-3 products that didn't work "out of the box" for data collection. This is way better than any commercial product I've used.

Cons

The documentation needs help. This product, like many other IT products, likes to skip the "101" stuff, assuming that you just inherently know how to do something, and the documentation is just for reference.
I have not been able to rely on the alerting engine as our primary way of knowing if devices are up or down. I'm sure that's just as much my fault as the software, but this is one area where commercial products tend to shine in comparison.
The autodiscovery of VMware virtual machines does not work properly if the ESX-level name of the VM doesn't match the VM's hostname. FileServer234 will be discovered, but "Server234 - File and Print" will not.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you are on a budget, this is one heck of a tool for the price (including the ~$200/year for the Pro subscription).
If you are OK with maintaining and updating open source tools, this is a great tool.
If you are afraid of the Linux command line or live in a Windows-centric world, this might not be the tool for you.
If you can't stand things occasionally not working, this is probably not a good fit.

Derek Dolan

Senior System Administrator in Information Technology at CURT Manufacturing, LLC (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile