Our company has been hit with a staggering 700% increase in our SolarWinds renewal costs. There's a strong chance we'll be moving on from them soon. I'm curious about what other monitoring software is out there. Currently, I'm considering options like PRTG, Icinga, Nagios, Zabbix, or LANSweeper as potential replacements. We primarily use SNMP and ICMP for monitoring to minimize the need for installing agents.
5 Answers
Zabbix is a strong candidate, but the setup is quite labor-intensive. The quality of what you get is directly related to the effort you put in. A note from experience: Zabbix often pairs well with Grafana, but if you need help with templates, be prepared to deal with language barriers, like translating from Spanish to English.
We use Nagios along with CheckMK. It takes a bit of effort to set up properly, but once you do, it operates well. Just be prepared—the templates can feel a bit outdated.
Right? Definitely a solid option.
Honestly, if you want flexibility and a ton of templates, there's no real substitute for SolarWinds, though it's a shame they're hiking up prices like this. I think LANSweeper really lacks when compared to others out there. Also, 700% increase seems absurd; are you sure it’s accurate?
Given that we have a perpetual license, we’re not rushing to make a switch, but if support is needed, we might regret it.
If you're looking for SNMP monitoring, Librenms and Observium are both great choices. They provide a lot of the functionality you might need without overcomplicating things.
If you're monitoring around 650 devices, I'd recommend checking out What's Up Gold. I’ve had great experiences with it at that scale.
We might be able to cut down our devices too, so that's promising to know.
It seems a lot of monitoring tools require hefty initial setup like that, I've felt the same way with Icinga.