Hands on: ManageEngine OpManager Professional 12.7 review
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This comment first appeared in issue 354 PC Pro.
ManageEngine is a key player in Zoho’s software and service empire, providing a wide range of IT management solutions. The Opmanager product family provides network, server and application performance monitoring, and manages EngeNENGINE version 12.7 provides many new features.
Focus on compliance and SafetySupport for SHA-2 authentication with the support of using Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) and SNMP 3. Root Cause Analysis (RCA) profiles compare data collected from multiple devices to help solve problems, Cisco ACI, IPMI, and VPN Monitor exists, Opmanager with Slack and Microsoft Team Used for alert notifications.
ManageEngine’s flexible licensing solutions have good value for small and medium-sized businesses because they are based on devices rather than elements or sensors. 10 devices in the OPMANAGER standard version are £195 per year and offer availability, interfaces and SNMP/WMI Network monitoring Service, Professional Edition adds virtualized host monitoring and other functions in the comments.
In addition to the permanent license, they are available as an additional version, including the Opmanager add-on module at a discounted price. For example, Professional Plus costs £983 per year for 50 devices, including Network Configuration Management (NCM) and NetFlow Analysis (NFA), as well as Firewall and application management.
No matter which version you choose, you won’t wait long to see it in action: it took us 20 minutes to install it on a Windows Server 2022 host and run the initial scan of the lab IP subnet. For device identification and classification, Opmanager is a veritable detective as it has over 11,000 devices and 56,000 vendor templates.
Find out what our lab equipment is to correctly identify all of our Windows servers and workstations, router,switch, NAS appliancesVMware and Hyper-V virtualize hosts and printers. Adaptive alert thresholds are assigned to Opmanager using machine learning algorithms to tune their devices for you, and they can be linked to a range of operations using the integral drag-and-drop workflow builder.
The Opmanager web console and its numerous dashboards are able to provide a lot of information about your network, and the convenient Heatmap widget displays a grid of colored blocks representing each device and its status. A detailed custom dashboard is created by selecting from over 200 available widgets, and the Network Operations Center view provides a big picture support for the department.
Virtual monitoring is extensive as Opmanager discovers our VMware ESXI and Hyper-V hosts and provides a view of system and VM utilization, guest OS, and data storage. Add the NetFlow module, where you can view all common traffic and convert raw packets into NetFlow data using the free NetFlow Generator utility.
Opmanager’s RCA configuration file is similar to the Solarwinds NPM PerfStack feature and is equally easy to create. The list of available metrics is very basic, but you can select devices and monitored items, e.g. CPU and memory usage, add them to your RCA dashboard and then view everything on one screen to help identify complex issues.
The Application Performance Management (APM) plugin is worth it because it monitors and reports on a large number of applications. We use it to check our AWS account and provide detailed information on service availability, EC2 instances and S3 bucket status, as well as monthly billing charges and forecasts.
It may take some time to master its myriad components, but Manageengine’s Opmanager is a powerful monitoring solution with a lot to say about your network. The web console is well designed and easy to customize to fit in, while SMB will approve Opmanager’s affordable licensing plan.
