Network outages can completely paralyze large enterprises, costing up to $100,000 per hour in lost business. But the complexity of today‘s technology infrastructure has made reliability a nightmare for IT teams. Environments comprising thousands of devices, private/public cloud services, distributed sites and a hybrid workforce accessing apps from everywhere have simply become unmanageable using traditional tools.
45% of organizations recently experienced at least 5 outages over 12 months – taking 4+ hours on average to diagnose and repair due to disjointed monitoring tools providing fragmented visibility. Limited budgets and overworked admins make it worse. The chaos has resulted in 73% enterprises looking to modernize their network monitoring stack in 2023.
To tame the beast, consolidate redundant tools and enable both macro and micro visibility across hybrid infrastructure, Gartner has identified ManageEngine OpManager as an efficient unified monitoring platform for enterprises to strongly consider. Let‘s discuss how…
Comprehensive Coverage Across All Vital Components
Walking into the NOC room of Acme Insurance, I saw displays with 30+ dashboards showing network maps, application flows, TCP metrics, server tracks and endless events from the 7500+ devices infrastructure. "We were drowning in a sea of data but insights were scarce and hidden tunnels still lurked where trouble emerged unexpectedly," remarked Andrew, their infrastructure director.
OpManager helped consolidate their infrastructure visibility into a single pane of glass – discovering all on-prem/cloud resources and mapping interdependencies so impact analysis became effortless. "Now we can track the ripple effects of any issue across components to troubleshoot faster before customers call," beamed Andrew.
Here are some of the key environments managed unified through OpManager:
Physical and Virtual Infrastructure
- Servers – Windows, Linux, Solaris
- Network Devices – routers, switches, firewalls
- Storage Systems
- Printers
Private and Public Cloud
- VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix and Citrix Hypervisors
- AWS, Azure and GCP Instances
- Kubernetes, Docker and OpenShift
On-Prem and Cloud Apps
Unified Communications
- VoIP, video conferencing
Let‘s drill deeper into some of OpManager‘s extensive monitoring capabilities…
Continuous Infrastructure Monitoring
OpManager automatically discovers infrastructure components using protocols like WMI, SSH, and SNMP. Leveraging 2000+ pre-defined monitors and thresholds, it tracks availability metrics along with device health KPIs on memory, CPU, disk, circuits etc. Intuitive dashboards offer quick visibility while drill-downs provide extensive diagnostics – replacing manual troubleshooting.
By tapping into NetFlow, IPFIX and sFlow, OpManager analyzes network traffic patterns for bandwidth utilization, QoS audits, capacity planning and detecting anomalies. Equipment lifecycles are optimized based on utilization trends.
Integrations with platforms like ServiceNow, Slack, PagerDuty and webhooks allow seamless tickets, collaboration and escalations. OpManager rests at the hub of IT workflows.
360° Visibility into Wireless Networks
With remote and mobile workers now 60% of enterprise users, wireless network monitoring has become mandatory. OpManager auto-discovers all WiFi controllers, access points (AP) and the topology.
It tracks availability history, device metrics (CPU, memory), client count, interactions, traffic load per AP/SSID, retransmissions indicating interference…which are visualized on geospatial maps. Performance issues are easily isolated down to device or location levels before users complain. Rogue AP detection also improves security.
Advanced Traffic Analysis
Granular traffic analytics is pivotal for performance, security and planning – provided by OpManager‘s NetFlow module. It decodes and analyzes NetFlow (versions 5, 9), IPFIX, sFlow, Jflow and AppFlow flows from routers and switches using Cisco NBAR.
Beyond bytes and packets, OpManager assesses QoS metrics like interface utilization, latency, packet loss, jitter, errors. Traffic patterns are segmented by application, IP protocol, VLAN…for historical time series reporting. This allows capacity planning driven by business needs rather than guessing. Bottlenecks impacting VoIP call quality have been identified even during modest loads.
Anomaly detection exposes attacks and suspicious activity which are forwarded to security platforms.such as detecting cryptojacking malware hidden in networks. OpManager has thereby helped institutions comply with regulations requiring networking visibility now.
Boosting Cloud Ops Productivity
With public cloud now running over 50% of workloads across organizations, cloud cost optimization has become pivotal. By interfacing with Cloud native APIs, OpManager continuously audits consumption of compute instances, storage, network usage (data processed in/out, intranet traffic…) and managed services against budgets.
Agentless discovery maps dependencies between resources. Granular visibility provided for Azure Monitor, AWS CloudWatch and GCP Stackdriver data makes analysis more flexible compared to native tools. Consolidation has increased productivity of cloud ops teams by nearly 30% as per internal estimates.
OpManager also monitors key web transactions, URL response times and content changes crucial for customer experience. Synthetic checks emulate user interaction paths to detect issues before customers complain.
Built To Scale and Evolve Alongside Dynamic Digital Transformations
Walking into their network operations center, I noticed display panels tracking over 8000 devices across the retailer‘s stores, warehouses and cloud infrastructure. "We started small 5 years ago but OpManager has flexibly grown alongside our explosive growth driven by digital transformation initiatives," noted their CTO, Mathew.
Let‘s examine how the distributed architecture empowers OpManager to scale efficiently to match the needs of rapidly evolving enterprise IT environments:
Distributed Monitoring Minimizes Load
OpManager leverages centralized and satellite probes for efficient scale and resiliency:
- Central server – Manages integrated dashboards, reporting, admin and configurations. Bolt-on modules expand functionalities.
- Probes – Deployed onsite close to networks/data centers for local aggregation and processing. Reduces WAN bandwidth and central server load requirements. Probes also provide failover capabilities.
Typical probe can monitor 10,000+ devices efficiently. For larger environments, additional probes can be strategically added. Thereby 500,000+ devices have been monitored by mega deployments.
Flexible and Optimized Probes
- Probe hardware can be strategically customized between physical or virtual probes based on site needs – powerful bare-metal for heavy lifting at main sites or virtual probes for smaller branches.
- During seasonal peak traffic events like Black Friday for retailers, temporary probes can be instantly deployed on cloud infrastructure to absorb load.
- Autoscale probes on Kubernetes automate spinup/down of monitoring resources matching workload elasticity.
- Probes are lightweight – utilizing only 2% CPU and 100MB RAM typically.
By distributing monitoring modules closer to different sites/clouds and adding temporary probes during peak events, OpManager flexes efficiently alongside fluctuating business cycles.
Handles Monitoring Churn from Business Agility
In dynamic environments seeing frequent changes, OpManager reconciles infrastructure state using smart incremental discovery algorithms. Devices added/removed and configuration changes are automatically detected systematically only checking what has changed rather than clumsy full scans. This prevents complex environments grinding to a crawl while chasing their tails.
As cloud-native infrastructure sees continuous changes, auto-discovery capabilities instantly map new containers, microservices and components powered by Kubernetes and CI/CD pipelines. API integrations also feed events into ServiceNow, Jira and other devops tools for closed-loop agility. Thereby OpManager maintains an up-to-date CMDB system without manual intervention even alongside moving goalposts.
Optimized for Observability-driven Operations
While OpManager provides traditional infrastructure metrics covering availability, utilization and performance, integration with popular open source tools gives further flexibility to DevOps users:
- Prometheus Exporters expose host and app metrics for visualization in Grafana dashboard. Correlation of infrastructure telemetry and application transactions is facilitated.
- Log Aggregators like ELK stack enable tracing issues down to code level.
- APIs also enable export to analytics tools and trigger auto-scaling actions.
Thereby OpManager neatly augments observability platforms adopted by cloud-native teams taking guesswork out of capacity planning and bottlenecks.
Trusted by Leading Enterprises Worldwide
Walking into the CRM provider‘s office, banners highlighting awards and certifications aplenty signaled OpManager is a trusted monitoring foundation for thousands of reputed global businesses – from retailers to healthcare providers and financial traders:
- American Airlines leverages OpManager for capacity planning and ensuring reliable operations across 150+ critical network links between regional data centers.
- A leading bank tapped it to track transactions and troubleshoot issues across 1500 branches and 100,000+ ATM endpoints to avoid outages impacting customers.
- Logitech relies on OpManager monitoring 3000+ IP surveillance cameras across multiple factories and warehouses for physical security compliance.
- Cleveland Clinic uses it to track downtimes and utilization metrics of radiology equipment at various hospitals to optimize maintenance cycles, staff workload.
Talk to any networking leader and they likely recommend OpManager for its breadth of coverage, intuitiveness and reliability at an affordable TCO. It makes comprehensive monitoring feasible even for resource-constrained teams juggling complex, business-critical infrastructure driving enterprises worldwide today.
Ready to Tame Your Enterprise IT Monitoring Chaos?
As digital initiatives mandate rapidly evolving technology stacks, infrastructure reliability and visibility cannot be left to archaic tools built for static data centers anymore. Modern enterprises need an automated monitoring partner that can consolidate visibility across hybrid infrastructure and scale efficiently alongside dynamic growth and agility – which OpManager delivers as an enterprise-worthy solution according to industry experts.
If debilitating network outages or lack of performance visibility across critical business services are keeping you awake at night, then act now! Deploy OpManager swiftly across on-prem and multi-cloud environments, migrate all piecemeal tools. And say goodbye to losing revenue due to data center chaos!
OpManager is surprisingly inexpensive to implement for enterprises given the scope of monitoring – pricing starts at $745 for up to 1000 devices. Sign up for a free trial to experience the benefits firsthand! Let your teams get back to focusing on more strategic objectives rather than perpetual firefighting in the dark.
Power your mission-critical infrastructure reliably going forward with OpManager – the consolidated monitoring visibility platform purpose-built for today‘s complex hybrid enterprise environments according to thousands of networking professionals worldwide!
