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Home > Reviews > Beyond OpManager: A Guide to the Best ManageEngine Alternatives
September 13, 2024
FAQs about ManageEngineThe best ManageEngine alternatives on the market
In the field of infrastructure and server monitoring, ManageEngine OpManager has long been regarded as a robust and feature-rich software solution. Trusted by IT professionals worldwide, OpManager excels with its comprehensive set of tools for performance monitoring, fault management, and server monitoring.
However, despite its extensive capabilities, there could be several reasons why businesses and IT departments may seek alternatives to this popular platform. Whether driven by specific organizational needs, budget constraints, or the desire for unique features not found in OpManager, exploring alternative solutions may unveil options better aligned with your operational goals.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of investing in a reliable monitoring tool, outline key factors to consider when searching for a ManageEngine alternative and present some of the best alternatives to ManageEngine OpManager, as chosen by our team of experts, highlighting their unique offerings and how they cater to varying requirements within the sphere of IT management.
Whether you’re on the lookout for a more cost-effective solution, specific integration capabilities, or enhanced usability, join us as we explore the diverse landscape of ManageEngine alternatives available at your disposal.
ManageEngine OpManager is a comprehensive network monitoring solution that offers full visibility and control over network assets such as routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and storage devices.
It is designed to manage networks effectively by providing real-time monitoring, in-depth visibility into device health, performance, fault management, and integrated troubleshooting capabilities.
OpManager features comprehensive coverage, allowing you to monitor a wide range of network devices and servers, including wireless networks, WAN, and storage devices, supports distributed network monitoring and offers “end-to-end” coverage, allowing you to gain insights into the entire network infrastructure from a single dashboard.
An enterprise edition called OpManager Plus extends these capabilities further to cover hybrid network health, availability, performance metrics, hardware monitoring, WAN and VoIP monitoring, and includes tools for server, application, and storage device monitoring.
There are many reasons to invest in monitoring tools like ManageEngine and its alternatives. Here are five of them, in no particular order.
When choosing a ManageEngine OpManager alternative, it’s important to consider several factors to ensure that the alternative meets your network monitoring and management needs effectively. Here are the key aspects to look for.
Evaluate the pricing structure of the alternative in comparison to OpManager. Look for solutions that offer a good balance between cost and functionality, including the availability of free or unlimited support, which can significantly reduce the total cost of ownership.
The alternative should offer a comprehensive set of monitoring features. Essential capabilities to look for include, but are not limited to virtual environment monitoring (e.g., VMware, Xen Server, Hyper-V), log file monitoring, Microsoft Windows service monitoring, file/folder monitoring, script monitoring, URL monitoring, system resources and health monitoring and custom device monitoring, to name a few.
The usability of the software is crucial for efficient network operations management. Look for a solution that simplifies performance monitoring and network management tasks, allowing network administrators to effectively oversee the network.
Consider the level of support and maintenance offered by the alternative. 24/7 support with unlimited calls at no additional cost is a significant advantage for managing enterprise networks effectively.
Research user reviews and feedback to gauge customer satisfaction. High renewal rates, positive testimonials, and the overall sentiment towards the product can provide valuable insights into its reliability and effectiveness.
By carefully assessing these factors, you can select a ManageEngine OpManager alternative that offers the right mix of features, usability, and cost-effectiveness to meet your network monitoring and management requirements.
Paessler PRTG is a powerful and versatile network monitoring software based on elements called “sensors”. One sensor usually monitors one measured value in your network, e.g. the traffic of a switch port, the CPU load of a server, the free space of a disk drive, and so on. PRTG includes more than 250 built-in sensors for various tasks, device types, and use cases.
When compared against OpManager, PRTG is frequently rated higher for its functionality in enterprise monitoring, diverse system compatibility, real-time monitoring, and multi-system management capabilities.
It is also praised for its flexibility: features such as fully customizable dashboards and the capability to develop and deploy custom sensors make it easy to implement a bespoke monitoring solutions tailored to your specific needs.
PRTG also has a simpler pricing structure than ManageEngine: all editions have exactly the same feature set, the only difference is how many “aspects” of your devices you wish to monitor. With ManageEngine, you need to choose modules, which is both a cumbersome and onerous task: by the time you add the modules for all the features you need, the price might have gone through the roof. A 30-day free trial of PRTG is available, no credit card needed.
WhatsUp Gold is an IT infrastructure monitoring software designed to offer comprehensive visibility and management of various IT components. It is known for its user-friendly interface and powerful monitoring capabilities.
It enables comprehensive monitoring of networks, traffic, physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), and applications, and can automatically discover and map the entire network, showing network resources, connectivity, and dependencies. This simplifies the process of keeping the network map up-to-date.
Users can create customizable maps and dashboards, which provide a visual representation of the network and its health, and set up customizable alerts that notify end-users about issues in real-time, allowing for swift action to prevent or mitigate downtime.
WhatsUp Gold is offered in two editions, Premium (with Perpetual or Subscription Licensing) and TotalPlus (with Perpetual Licensing only). Both allow you to monitor an unlimited number of devices, with the difference that some features that are add-ons in the Premium edition, such as Virtualization Monitoring, Log Management and Network Traffic Analysis, are included in the TotalPlus. There is also a free edition that allows you to monitor up to 10 devices and includes all the features of the Premium package, except the use of add-ons.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a sophisticated network monitoring solution that offers extensive visibility and control over both wired and wireless network infrastructures. Visualization capabilities are a core aspect of NPM, enabling users to see the interconnections between devices, applications, and the broader network infrastructure.
The PerfStack metric correlation dashboard enables operators to visually correlate data from network interface utilization, application performance counters, or VM host memory utilization to compare these data types side by side on a common timeline to identify the root cause of issues. Additionally, NPM’s NetPath feature offers critical path visualization to help pinpoint issues across network nodes and devices, enhancing the ability to quickly resolve network problems.
NPM is designed to streamline network monitoring workflows and reduce alert fatigue through its intelligent alert system, which allows for customizable notifications based on specific performance baselines. This ensures that users are alerted to critical issues without being overwhelmed by unnecessary notifications.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is available in perpetual or subscription licenses. However, as with ManageEngine OpManager, the highly modular nature of this solution means that you will probably need to mix and match multiple modules to get all the monitoring features you need, which can quickly drive up the price.
LogicMonitor provides a comprehensive, unified management platform for network monitoring that increases visibility, accelerates troubleshooting, and optimizes network performance across all IT and network devices.
It can automatically discover network devices from over 2,000 top brands, and provides real-time data on network performance, enhanced with network logs and metrics for faster troubleshooting and dynamic, auto-generated topology maps to visualize relationships between critical infrastructure resources.
LogicMonitor supports monitoring via SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol), API (Application Programming Interface), jFlow, NetFlow, sFlow, WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation), NBAR2 (Network Based Application Recognition), and IPFIX (Internet Protocol Flow Information Export), and the list of monitored devices includes firewalls, routers, switches, wireless devices, and load balancers. Deployment is fast: it utilizes a lightweight, agentless collector and supports monitoring for on-premises, multi data centers, and cloud environments.
Like ManageEngine, LogicMonitor is SaaS (Software as a Service) with a modular pricing structure. This means that if you step out of the boundaries of the Infrastructure Monitoring package, you will have to pay extra for features such as IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) monitoring, container monitoring or log intelligence. A 14-day free trial is available.
Dynatrace is a platform that offers a comprehensive suite of analytics and automation capabilities for achieving unified observability and security across various IT environments. Causal AI technology is used to automate DevSecOps (Development, Security and Operations) practices on a large scale, enabling it teams to efficiently innovate within modern cloud ecosystems.
By leveraging AI based tools, Dynatrace can help boost the productivity of your team. Its Davis AI system offers AI recommendations and intelligent automation, with automatic root-cause analysis, natural language queries and AI-coded workflows that can help “reduce major outages and degradations by up to 60%, and mean time to recovery (MTTR) by 90%”.
Another AI-based tool, Grail, can help you understand the business impact of events in your systems. It automatically retains the context of your ingested data, providing powerful analytics, contextualization of logs to traces and AI-driven root cause analysis.
Like many other tools mentioned here, pricing for Dynatrace depends on which monitoring capabilities you need. Infrastructure monitoring is charged “per hour per any size host”, but other features, such as Kubernetes monitoring, Log Management or Application Security, are charged separately and in different ways, which can quickly get confusing. A 15-day free trial is available.
Checkmk provides comprehensive, scalable, and automated IT infrastructure and application monitoring solutions suitable for organizations of various sizes, encompassing everything from cloud to on-premises systems.
It can monitor the entire IT infrastructure, including public cloud providers, data centers, servers, networks, containers, and more, providing complete visibility for ITOps and DevOps teams. Its high performance core is designed with scalability in mind, reaching up to millions of monitored services, and a REST API and automation features like auto-registration of hosts help reduce manual effort.
This tool offers dynamic dashboards with interactive visualization options, log and event monitoring, availability and SLA reporting and an advanced notification system with many integrations. It is also extensible, with over 2,000 plugins and integrations available. And since it is based on Open Source code, it can be even be modified to better suit your specific monitoring needs.
Checkmk is available in five Editions: Raw, Enterprise, Cloud and MSP. The Raw edition is free to use, and can do server, network, application and log & event monitoring, with no limit on the number of monitored devices. More advanced features, like Container, Kubernetes, OpenShift and Cloud Monitoring are only available on the Enterprise, Cloud and MSP editions. Pricing is calculated based on the edition and number of services to monitor, which is different from the number of hosts.
Auvik is a cloud-based tool aimed at simplifying network management. It is known for its quick deployment and user-friendly interface, making it an accessible solution for managed service providers (MSPs) and in-house IT teams alike.
This tool comes with 50 pre-configured alerts, making troubleshooting easier and enabling users to address issues proactively. This ease of use is bolstered by features such as vendor-agnostic device discovery, automatic configuration backups, and robust workflows with API integrations for seamless third-party application connectivity.
Real-time network mapping, inventory, documentation, and intelligent traffic analytics, alongside robust remote management capabilities such as remote tunneling, remote browser, and an in-app terminal allow for quick access to device details and effective management of distributed sites through a standardized dashboard.
Auvik is available in two plans: Essentials and Performance. Both feature unlimited users, network sites, endpoints and support, but differ in more advanced features like configuration management, remote access and network flow monitoring, which are available only on the Performance plan. Pricing, however, is complex, calculated per number of switches, routers, firewalls, and controllers in your network. A 14-day free trial is available.
Datadog‘s infrastructure monitoring provides comprehensive visibility and security across various environments with minimal deployment effort, offering extensive integrations, real-time insights, and advanced features for optimal infrastructure management.
With integrations for over 500 popular technologies, including Kubernetes and serverless platforms, Datadog is capable of tracking tens of thousands of infrastructure metrics with historical record-keeping, and provides continuous configuration checks and compliance support for 15+ frameworks. Tag-based analytics facilitates easy filtering and slicing of complex infrastructures, and machine learning alerts reduce alert fatigue by automatically identifying significant issues.
It also integrates advanced machine learning for anomaly detection, forecasting, and root cause analysis, helping engineering teams manage expanding environments efficiently without extra resources. Its unified monitoring provides a single interface for tracking infrastructure metrics, traces, logs, and more, offering a comprehensive view of system performance and user experiences.
Datadog has one of the most complex pricing structures among all the tools mentioned in this article. To calculate costs, first you need to choose among many options which kind of monitoring you need to do (ex: infrastructure or network monitoring). Then, you have to find the plan that better suits your needs. Some plans are priced per host, but others use different metrics, like the amount of data ingested. A 14-day free trial is available.
Nagios XI is an enterprise-level infrastructure monitoring solution that is flexible and scalable. Designed for IT professionals managing mission-critical infrastructure components, it provides a centralized view of monitoring data for improved visibility and user access.
Based on the powerful (and Open Source) Nagios Core 4 monitoring engine, incorporates quality-of-life improvements such as a customizable GUI based on the Neptune UI theme for intuitive navigation, automated alerts via multiple channels (email, SMS, Slack, Teams) for swift issue resolution and configuration wizards, and APIs for user-specific layouts and functionality extensions.
It offers infrastructure management tools including bulk host import, auto-discovery, and auto-decommissioning, configuration snapshots for easy rollback and capacity planning and advanced trending graphs for proactive infrastructure management. Last, but not least, it supports multi-tenant capabilities and advanced user management for secure and efficient administration.
Nagios XI is available in two editions, “Standard” and “Enterprise”, with prices based on the number of nodes to be monitored, starting at 100 nodes. Customer support is charged separately. There is also a fully functional 30-day free trial, and a feature-limited Open Source version (Nagios Core 4).
Keep in mind that Nagios XI only runs natively under Linux, more specifically distributions like CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu, or Debian. However, it can be run on Microsoft Windows servers using virtualization solutions like VMWare, Virtual Box, or Hyper-V.
Zabbix is a comprehensive, open-source monitoring solution that covers the entire IT infrastructure stack, offering extensive features for metric collection, problem detection, alerting, and data visualization.
It supports metric collection from various sources including network devices, cloud services, VMs, OS-level monitoring, log files, databases, applications, services, IoT sensors, web pages, HTTP/HTTPS endpoints, and more. Problem detection capabilities include real-time detection, smart thresholds, trend prediction, machine learning, root cause analysis, anomaly detection, and flexible alerting options.
The platform features extensive data visualization options with customizable dashboard widgets, graphs, geo-maps, infrastructure maps, and scheduled reports. It also provides, multi-tenancy, inventory information, script execution, and respects user permissions for data display and operation.
There are also business service monitoring features, including root cause analysis, problem correlation logic, service tree definitions, and SLA information. If issues arise, Zabbix offers powerful alerting mechanisms via multiple messaging channels, including email, SMS, and integrations with alerting systems like VictorOPS, Opsgenie, Pagerduty, and more.
Zabbix is Open Source, completely free to use, and available on the most popular Linux-based platforms. Paid technical support is available in five support tiers (Silver, Gold, Platinum, Enterprise, and Global I), each one with different levels of availability, response times, and amount of incidents and support contacts.
Among all these, our favorite ManageEngine Alternative is Paessler PRTG. One of the main complaints we hear against ManageEngine is the pricing structure, and in this regard PRTG couldn’t be simpler: unlike ManageEngine, you don’t need to plan ahead for which modules and features you might need, or choose one over another to keep costs down. With PRTG you get every single feature on every tier, your only concern is how many devices you want to monitor.
It also “ticks all the boxes” in our list of desired characteristics: by enabling you to monitor all of your infrastructure with a single tool. The built-in sensors cover many different use cases so it can monitor your network infrastructure, services, servers, IoT devices, cloud infrastructure, devices and much more. And it is extensible, which means you can deploy third-party sensors, or even develop your own, to cover specific needs.
That means you can do away with having to rely on a variety of individualized solutions, which can carry potential risks such as conflict with your current workflow and even network security issues. For pricing, flexibility and integration, you can’t beat Paessler PRTG.
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