A Network Administrators’ guide to OpManager Plus!

Maintaining a business network is very daunting, regardless of its size, and to ensure optimum functioning there’s a need for various tools to oversee the network, servers, IP addresses, switch ports, configurations, firewall rules, and policies, etc.

OpManager Plus was crafted to eliminate miscellaneous tools and takeover a network’s seamless functioning all by itself.

More about OpManager Plus:

ManageEngine OpManager Plus is a unified IT management tool that helps IT admins monitor the health, availability, and performance of a network infrastructure in real time. The solution assists in attaining a network devoid of errors and enhancing overall network efficiency. This comprehensive tool ensures you’ve undivided visibility of your entire IT infrastructure!

Full-stack visibility into your IT Operations

With OpManager Plus, enterprises are offered visibility into four layers of their IT operations. This multi-faceted visibility enables IT admins to identify potential faults and troubleshoot them.

What are the four layers?

• Network layer
• Server and storage layer
• Application layer
• Security layer

Network layer:

The network layer works with network components and communication, and serves as an underlying framework for exchanging data and facilitating communication within the IT infrastructure. Monitoring and managing the network layer is highly recommended in order to witness a stable and secure IT infrastructure.

With OpManager Plus, you can,

• Monitor 1000+ devices including routers, switches, firewalls, WLANs, and a lot more.
• Manage and optimize network bandwidth to ensure smooth and efficient data transfer.
• Protect your network from security breaches, threats, and unwanted access.
• Regularly observe the performance of the network, analyze data traffic, and detect any possible obstacles in order to take proactive measures.
• Monitor and manage IP address and switch ports.
  
  

Server and storage layer:

The server layer includes both physical and virtual servers that are responsible for hosting applications, services, and processes. While the storage layer involves physical and virtual components responsible for storing and managing data.

Monitoring the server and storage layer is indispensable to ensure server uptime and fulfill the storage needs of an IT infrastructure.

With OpManager Plus, you can,

• Track 100+ critical physical and virtual server performance metrics.
• Support server infrastructure models like Dell, HP, Cisco, VMware, Nutanix, and Hyper-v, etc.
• Monitor RAID and tape library systems.
• Monitor server configurations to help meet the requirements of specific applications and services.
• Carry out efficient data storage and capacity planning.
• Proactively identify and address issues in the fabric switches.

Application layer:

The application layer ensures an application can effectively communicate with other applications on various systems and network.

Monitoring the application layer is essential for ensuring the delivery of dependable web services to end users and supporting the overall objectives of the organization.

With OpManager Plus, you can,

• Monitor the performance of both on-premise and cloud-based application infrastructure.
• Oversee and manage web services and applications hosted on the cloud.

Security layer:

The security layer focuses on protecting an organization’s IT infrastructure from security breaches, unauthorized access, and other security related threats.

Managing a security layer is paramount to protect sensitive data and seamlessly carry out daily operations without wrecking the end-user experience and harming an organization’s reputation.

With OpManager Plus, you can,

• Examine and audit firewall rules and policies.
• Implement firewall rules
• Explore and utilize role-based access
• Deploy configuration updates across network devices
• Make sure to meet critical compliance standards
  

A close look into unified IT Operations Management by OpManager Plus

The IT operations management process includes monitoring several essential components:

• In-depth enterprise network performance monitoring
• Firewall log analysis
• Automatic device configuration management
• Real-time network traffic monitoring
• IP Address and switch-port management
• Novel application monitoring

To monitor and manage all of these processes, there are separate tools available in the market. However, OpManager Plus is designed to help IT admins carry out a unified approach towards their IT operations.

Here’s an overview of all the ITOps processes involved:

In-depth enterprise network performance monitoring:

OpManager Plus is a real-time network performance monitor that helps businesses monitor the health, availability, and performance of their network proactively.

The solution also offers:

• Impeccable IT operations monitoring as the solution offers support for over 2,000 metrics across 10,000 devices.
• Visualize WAN and VoIP paths, identify poor performance, and resolve potential outages.
• Leverage historical trend graphs for improved capacity planning.
• Monitor both physical and virtual server infrastructure.
• Optimize the health and performance of your server and other network devices with OpManager Plus’ server monitoring capabilities.
• Utilize built-in network troubleshooting tools to combat critical network faults.
• Analyze and improve MTTR (mean time to resolve) with dedicated insightful reports.

These are some of the major functions that help IT admins achieve an error-free network. When talking about network monitoring capabilities of OpManager Plus, we should also disclose how OpManager Plus can help with storage monitoring for an expandable business infrastructure.

Storage monitoring:

Monitor and manage an enterprise’s storage and ensuring optimum performance is a huge challenge without a proper tool in place.

With OpManager Plus’ storage monitoring functions,  you can,

• Dedicate SAN performance monitors for storage devices and switches to ensure SAN runs at peak availability and reliability.
• Discover, monitor, and manage RAIDs in your IT infrastructure
• Enhance tape library management system
• Dedicated set of storage monitors to gain observability into your enterprise’s storage devices from a single pane of glass.
• Automatically discover and manage fabric switches in your IT infrastructure.

Firewall Log Analysis:

OpManager Plus is compatible with a wide range of network firewalls, both open-source and commercial, such as Check Point, Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks.

Some of OpManager Plus’ log management capabilities include:

• Analyzing firewall logs to obtain information about security threats and traffic patterns.
• Utilizing firewall rule anomaly detection and rule impact analysis to enhance the implementation of rules effectively.
• Around-the-clock monitoring of changes to firewall rules and immediate notifications about any misconfigurations, ensuring that security remains intact.
• Boost operational efficiency using automated security audit reports.
• Dedicated compliance dashboard that provides insights into your enterprise’s network compliance status.

The firewall module of OpManager Plus offers managed firewall services that are beneficial for MSSPs. This enables businesses to effectively oversee multiple firewalls at customer locations using a centralized OpManager Plus installation.

Automated device configuration management:

OpManager Plus offers a comprehensive solution to efficiently manage the configuration and compliance of network devices such as switches, routers, and firewalls. It provides automation and complete visibility throughout the entire device configuration management life cycle.

Some of OpManager Plus’ configuration management capabilities include:

• Implement configuration management for a broad array of IT infrastructure components from more than 200 different vendors.
• Real-time change and configuration management with network configuration analysis, tracking user activity, and enabling remote firmware upgrades.
• Ensure effective and flawless change implementation by utilizing automated backup, role-based access control, different views, and change tracking.
• Make sure that the IT infrastructure adheres to important compliance standards such as PCI, SOX, HIPAA, and others.

By utilizing the Network Configuration Manager module, you can efficiently identify firmware vulnerabilities and promptly address them to minimize risks and strengthen the security of your network devices.

Real-time network traffic monitoring:

Extreme bandwidth utilization is often a major problem for an enterprise of every size, because it can lead to poor network performance and hurt network uptime.

Your business admins also have to monitor your real-time network traffic. With OpManager Plus, you can gain detailed inputs into your network traffic and identify where the bandwidth’s been extorted. 

Here are some of OpManager Plus’ bandwidth management capabilities:

• Allows IT administrators to monitor applications and protocols effectively by providing a user-friendly dashboard that enables users to access detailed information about interface-specific traffic, applications, sources, destinations, conversations, and more.
• Advanced forensic reports to speed up the troubleshooting processes.
• Obtain real-time insight into bandwidth performance using advanced monitoring features that support all major flow types such as Netflow, sFlow, jFlow, IPFIX, NetStream, and AppFlow.
• Traffic reports to help you drill down to the root cause of the applications and slow network links and promptly address them.

OpManager Plus’ NetFlow Analyzer module enhances bandwidth management in an enterprise network by offering real-time insights, capacity planning, predictive analysis, trend forecasting, security enhancement, and so on.

IP address and switch port management:

Monitoring and managing IP addresses and switch ports comes with a set of issues like IP duplication, IP address exhaustion, misconfigurations, unauthorized access, etc.

OpManager Plus helps IT admins address these challenges and carry out seamless IP address and switch port management and maintain a robust and secure infrastructure.

With OpManager Plus, you can,

• Dynamic IP address management
• Monitor IP, MAC status, and port speed of switch ports within the infrastructure.
• Enhance the security of your IT Infrastructure.
• Streamline effective management of your IT infrastructure by utilizing the built-in diagnostic tools.

With a wide range of more than 30 tools, OpManager Plus enables you to perform various network monitoring tasks. These include detecting unauthorized devices, evaluating bandwidth usage, monitoring the availability of critical devices, and ensuring the protection of Cisco configuration files with backups.

Novel Application monitoring and management:

Managing applications in an IT environment comes with a multitude of challenges such as performance bottlenecks, security issues, compliance issues, change management, scalability, etc.

OpManager Plus’ integration with Applications Manager helps businesses achieve slick application management via pre-configured monitoring support for over 100 applications and server types.

With the robust solution, you can,

• Seamless application discovery and dependency mapping.
• Attain comprehensive visibility into the performance of storage devices and applications throughout the IT infrastructure.
• Monitor 130+ on-premises and cloud applications with the Applications Manager plugin. Measure multi-page workflows, perform multi-geographic monitoring, and analyze slowdowns for 24×7 website availability.

4. Licensing model with System requirements.

i) Licensing model (Editions)

Professional Edition:

Starting Price – $1,233 for 50 devices

Enterprise Edition:

Starting Price – $19,995 for 1,000 devices

Check out our transparent pricing model:

https://store.manageengine.com/opmanager/opmanager-plus.html

ii) System requirements

To know more about the requirements, this link will help!

iii) Supported Platforms

• Web
• Android
• iOS

iv) Mode of Support

• Email/help desk
• FAQs forum
• Knowledge base
• Phone support
• Chat

v) Types of Organizations supported

• Large enterprises
• Mid-sized businesses
• Small businesses

vi) Deployment options:

• Cloud, Saas, Web-based
• On-Premise Windows
• On-Premise Linux

Looking to simplify your IT infrastructure monitoring? Try out OpManager Plus with our 30-day free trial and experience its pre-built features. You will also be given a demo wherein the functionalities, navigation and prices are discussed and can be tailor-made based on the requirements.