OP5 Monitor Reviews

Our previous use case for OP5 Monitor was server monitoring.

The monitoring in OP5 Monitor is very easy because we can directly use custom plugins. We can write custom scripts and use those scripts directly. It's very low cost, open, and the dashboards are easy to see. We can extract the reports easily, and this is very easy to compare.

Real-time monitoring in OP5 Monitor provides data every one minute or every five minutes, enabling us to get live data from the last one minute or last five minutes.

OP5 Monitor gave us proper server availability, so we can always check whether a server goes down or the server CPU and memory decreases. Before reaching a particular bottleneck situation, we identified and fixed the issue, which helped us from a cost-saving business perspective. It helped us avoid application downtime.

OP5 Monitor could include application monitoring in addition to infrastructure monitoring. If application business transactions were monitored, it would be helpful. For application-related issues, instead of going to any other monitoring tool, users could use the single OP5 Monitor tool, which would be beneficial.

I worked on OP5 Monitor for almost four years.

The price for OP5 Monitor is fine, but we don't know the exact price because it was managed by us; the customer themselves bought it and gave it to us to monitor.

OP5 Monitor has competitors such as ScienceLogic, Zabbix, and SolarWinds. I cannot say directly what is the best solution, as there are pros and cons compared to each tool. ScienceLogic is capable of performing all OP5 Monitor's functions, including alerting, integration, scalability, and reliability.

Currently, we are not using OP5 Monitor because our license expired. The last time we worked with OP5 Monitor was in May this year, approximately two to three months ago.

Alerts in OP5 Monitor are effective, and alerting is straightforward from the tool. We can adjust the alerting intervals and integrate with any alerting tool, such as ServiceNow, which will create tickets automatically. From OP5 Monitor, we can receive email alerts or SMS alerts to our mobile numbers.

It is easy to integrate OP5 Monitor using Slack-based integration or directly using the REST APIs. Automation in OP5 Monitor is available for alerting, which is useful for customers and users.

I can recommend OP5 Monitor as it is a good product. On a scale of 1-10, I rate OP5 Monitor a 9.

We utilize OP5 Monitor in both on-premise and cloud environments. We have a master OP5 Monitor for our primary clients, and other deployments located globally that are integrated with the master. Our monitoring includes databases in both public and open-stack clouds, covering both on-premise and cloud deployments. The workload, including the VM workload, is similar across both environments, and we do not encounter any monitoring issues in either. Therefore, OP5 Monitor is effectively used in both on-premise and cloud environments.

We utilize OP5 Monitor to monitor various aspects of our servers, including CPU usage, memory usage, disk space, and specific URLs. In the cloud, we monitor up to 8,000 to 10,000 servers worldwide. While the tool is capable of monitoring network performance, we specifically use it to capture server-related data.

We have a set of standard monitoring parameters that we follow, which include tracking server performance metrics, such as memory usage, disk space, processor usage, etc. In addition to these standards, we also monitor databases by tracking important database terms such as database logins, read rate ratios, and write rate ratios. We are also capable of providing custom monitoring solutions as per the specific needs of our internal customers.

While standard monitoring parameters are deployed across all servers, application-specific monitoring requirements such as monitoring of URLs or databases are handled on a case-by-case basis as per the requirements of the individual customer. This approach is driven by the fact that not all customers require the same monitoring solutions.

The monitoring capabilities have helped organizations.

OP5 Monitor is a great choice due to its being built on an open-source monitoring tool and provides ample opportunity for customization based on specific support requirements. It is also user-friendly and easy to manage with a wide range of plugins available for use. In comparison to other enterprise tools, such as Micro Focus, OP5 Monitor stands out for its features and cost-effectiveness, making it the best tool in the market. Customization is one of the key strengths of the tool and provides a lot of capabilities. Additionally, it is easy to find support and plugins for the tool through online resources.

The dashboard offers customization options and automation features, such as ticket automation. It is effective in eliminating certain issues. 

When handling the configuration this tool is good and easy to use. It supports both LDAP and local user accounts, as well as the ability to clip together dashboards.

The documentation is helpful. They are well-maintained in terms of integration, and how to install, and download. It's not so complicated.

The solution is useful for tweaking. However, there have been some negative experiences, such as limited report capabilities. The only report available is in PDF format, making it difficult for teams managing multiple servers to extract data in Excel format. The speaker recommends that the team improve the report capabilities to better serve users.

If there are corrupt files the data can be extracted from them. Anyone who wants to see the performance of memory usage, such as whether it's at 80 to 90 percent, can use this tool. However, other tools can provide this information in two minutes, this tool is more time-consuming and the report it provides is not very effective for practical use.

When it comes to reports, the tool falls short. During a recent call, it was noted that while the company has distributed servers across the globe, only the master server can accommodate the reports and events, causing delays. If other servers experience issues, the team cannot view the reporting or tag things, such as for troubleshooting purposes. If this aspect was improved it would be an excellent tool.

I have been using OP5 Monitor for approximately six years.

This is a stable solution. I have no concerns about its functionality being stable, even after implementing it in demanding environments where we monitor over 10,000 servers. Occasionally, there is some slowness due to heavy load, but overall, the solution performs very well. I have no complaints, and there have been no instances of breakdown.

This is a scalable solution. Currently, we are using it to monitor not only one or two servers, but a whopping 10,000 servers on a single monitoring instance. This demonstrates its usefulness and its ability to provide redundancy by keeping a server available at all times. Overall, I can say that this is a highly scalable solution.

It is better than other commercial tools in the market.

We are using the 10,000 licenses and we can monitor 10,000 systems.

I have raised tickets with support from OP5 Monitor on their portal. I have customers that have questions regarding the usage of new features and I have had to contact support for answers.

I am neutral when it comes to technical support. The support I purchased was minimal, sometimes the support engineers are hesitant to provide information and suggest engaging with solution developers for additional costs. I have had both good and bad experiences.

I rate the support from OP5 Monitor an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have used other solutions in the past.

The setup of the solution is easy. However, if you want to integrate it with on-premises or cloud systems or implement it globally, some additional knowledge is required. When the solution is purchased, it was new to the market, but we were able to test and buy it and received about six or seven days of training sessions. The architecture of the solution is very good, and it is not complicated to install and integrate, especially for those with system administration experience.

The deployment time of the tool depends on the server you are installing it on. If it's only one server, the process is simple, and you can download the necessary files from various locations, including Discord. Installing the tool takes less than 20 minutes, and integration can be difficult, taking around an hour. This is apart from the standalone installation. However, if you want to integrate the tool with many machines, the process can take longer, but it still should not take more than an hour. To begin with, setting up the tool is simple, but to create templates and work groups, you need to have your own templates. After that, it's straightforward to add and configure them. Starting and finishing the process takes only a minute or two, and then the data can be easily retrieved.

We can do the implementation of the solution.

We have received a return on investment using the solution. I have been in the monitoring industry for 15 years and it is worth the money we pay.

The cost of the license and support are separate. If you want platinum call support, it will cost more than a regular call. I did not opt for it, as it is an additional cost.

How cost is approximately $2,000,000 for three years.

As the person responsible for monitoring strategy, I gathered recommendations from multiple stakeholders regarding what should be monitored, both in terms of functionality and non-functionality. This included monitoring servers, network devices, components, databases, and other areas. Using this input, I assessed various monitoring tools to see if they could integrate with our systems and provide the reporting and alert capabilities we needed.

The key points that drove my decision were the ability to monitor and recover network and server issues, as well as provide database and other monitoring capabilities, as well as reporting and alerting. Price and capability were also important factors in my decision to choose this solution. Before purchasing, we conducted a proof of concept in our development environment to ensure that the solution met our needs, and we only implemented it in production once it was proven to be effective.

I would recommend this solution to others. It is a highly capable solution.

I rate OP5 Monitor a ten out of ten.

The solution has received a lot of positive feedback, and it is an excellent tool for monitoring. Despite the broad range of monitoring capabilities, it's relatively simple to manage, and adding checks for new technologies is a breeze. They provide pre-built checks for cloud servers, on-prem servers, and various other checks. Therefore, it's effortless to deploy and use. 

We used it for network monitoring, including utilization and bandwidth.

One of the valuable features was that we could integrate it with our CMDB.

It's always good when it's open to more platforms, with even more integration, especially ticketing solutions like ServiceNow. I have built integrations with some other tools, so this is a point for future development, unless they have already addressed it.

I have used OP5 Monitor for more than five years.

It's definitely a stable solution. It's reliable.

With limited hardware or a virtual machine, you can address a huge network, hundreds of thousands of elements that need to be monitored. Other commercial software is not on that level. Those solutions need more machines, hardware or virtual machines, to address the same estate that I was able to do with one machine.

Their tech support was great. They're supportive and they also have very good FAQs. If you cannot find something in the FAQs, you can reach out to support and they will be very helpful.

We switched from our previous solution because of the scalability of OP5, but that was done before my time with the company so I don't know what they used before.

The setup was straightforward for our purposes, but the more you want to monitor, the more you have to fine-tune things. This is true for all products. You get some basic functionality and basic monitoring with minimal effort, but if you put in more effort, you get more granular details out of it.

It deployed pretty fast. In one day you can be up and running with basic monitoring, but there were new features added to the system. If you need more, you will want to fine-tune the cluster and the way it monitors things.

In terms of the deployment process, you needed to add a virtual machine or a physical machine if needed. You then install the application, provide credentials, and that's it. You then just need to populate and you can do auto-discovery to populate it, although I'm not sure how the auto-discovery works. Our approach was to use the CMDB. We added the devices and elements that we wanted to monitor based on our CMDB.

I had two people onboarding it, but they did it as a side job, not full-time. It depends on how you set it up, but if you do it yourself, two people are sufficient to address it. They have to have some technical knowledge.

It can be done in-house or with an integrator. OP5 has pretty good training support, so if you have smart people in-house, you can do it on your own. If you don't have the people or the time, you can use an external partner.

The ROI is great. It's worth it.

Licensing is done yearly, or you can pay for a longer period. It was not expensive. And because it's less demanding in terms of hardware, you don't have to pay for another SQL or other database license, and you can have a huge installation on one machine, compared with other solutions where you have to install five machines to do the same job. OP5 is great value for the money.

OP5 lacks some visualization, a feature that makes some other products nice. Op5 is built for purpose, which is fine, but if you compare it with some new products, the visualization is not so appealing, especially for management. But it provides the information required.

Those other products require more machines to run. If you don't need fancy visualizations, OP5 is fine. It gives you what you need with minimal resource requirements, and they are implementing additional features as well, but it is taking some time.

If you want a flexible network monitoring system that is scalable, with minimal resource requirements, this is the way to go.

We use OP5 Monitor to monitor servers, databases, storage, filers, storage devices, network devices, and log file monitoring.

Its open-source environment is accessible to everyone. We use plugins and scripts to monitor and can use customized scripts. We can also observe whatever we want, and there are no limitations. We can monitor whatever we want.

There are some lag time and connectivity issues. It is not an OP5 Monitor issue but due to some network issues. We do not get performance reports properly, which needs improvement.

We have been using this solution for almost three years. We are using version 8.3.2, and it is a client on-premises environment migrating to GCP and Google Cloud.

It is a stable solution.

It is scalable, and there are a lot of applications using OP5 Monitor. For each application, there are 40 to 50 servers and 40 applications in total. So there are around 1600 servers. So about eight servers are monitoring, and we have about 40 application users using OP5 to monitor their servers, their clusters, their network devices and storage waste.

We usually contact ITRS support, and OP5 Monitor is owned and managed by ITRS. We have a customer ITRS support portal, and we can search for ITRS support on Google. We can create a new ticket and ask them about queries if we need any new monitoring enabled or if we need to upgrade the OP5 Monitor. They respond within a few minutes. I rate the support an eight out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was medium. It was not easy, nor was it difficult. You can take any server, install it, and download the OP5 from Google. It takes around 20 to 30 minutes for the main installation.

It is not a free solution, but our client agreed with ITRS that they would use OP5 Monitor, so they have kept using it.

We chose this solution because we did not pay for it. Our client insisted we use this solution only because it is their business, and they paid for it.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, the graphic user interface is much better than Nagios. So if someone knows the basics of Nagios, they can use OP5 Monitor efficiently if there are any difficulties.

Our customers are using the OP5 solution for monitoring. Our customers are using log management, but it's not the only part of the software that they are using. They are using all the features, and log management is one of the features of the software.  

We are working with its latest version.

The best feature is that it is very relatable, stable, and scalable. The logger is a part of the software, but it's not the most important point of it.

They need to improve the dashboard interface.

I have been using this solution for more than eight years.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

It is very good. I would rate them a five out of five.

It is easy. We have one engineer for its deployment and maintenance.

My advice will be to buy it if it is the correct software for you.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

We use this product for our network monitoring solution.

The API makes it pretty easy to integrate with any system.

The user interface is not what we are used to these days, and should be improved. For example, the dashboards are easily customizable to a certain degree, but not as well as a product like Tableau. From the visual aspect, it could look a bit fancier.

Functionality-wise, this product is missing the NetFlow monitor.

Our organization has been using OP5 for more than ten years.

This is definitely a stable product.

OP5 is scalable.

We have been in contact with technical support and found them to be helpful.

We have used various monitoring products but at the moment, OP5 is our main one.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward and there are some templates that you need to apply. It's not for somebody who is inexperienced, but if you have some IT knowledge then you can get up to speed quickly.

Basically, we just need two parameters to set it up, and then it's up to you to decide what you want to monitor.

I like the flexibility, as it is based on Nagios. It is more tailored towards network monitoring and I can recommend it. There are some visual aspects and the NetFlow that are missing, but otherwise, I'm completely fine with it. Especially with the API, where I can use the data with many other systems, it's great.

OP5 is meeting my purpose, but the UI is not suitable for management, who are looking for something fancy. Also considering the NetFlow functionality is missing, it loses a couple of marks.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Most of our clients are IT operation departments in larger organizations. They use OP5 Monitor to get an understanding of what's going on in their IT infrastructure: everything from network and server infrastructure to applications and specific metrics inside applications. It's mostly operational stuff.

For a standard IT department the types of applications they monitor would include, infrastructure-wise, everything from the network, service virtualization environment, VMware, cloud, and everything that runs on top of that, like databases, web servers, financial systems, payroll systems, and internally developed systems.

We have hospitals who use it for systems where they keep track of ambulances. We have a cruise line as a customer that uses it on systems that keep track of the IT services onboard cruise ships. It could be used on cooling containers, temperature and environmental monitoring, redundant power, uninterruptible power supplies with diesel generators. Everything from smaller workshops to nuclear power plants are running the system. It's used by a very wide scope of clients.

The reason why a system like this exists and is needed in an IT operations department is to automate the process of getting to know if stuff is working or not. If you don't have this, you will have to physically inspect your servers; log onto everything and check what's going on, and you will have to do that frequently. If you do that manually, it's not going to work. And it's not going to be done with good enough quality. This monitoring system is a way to implement automated tests of all your responsibilities as an IT operations manager.

Instead of checking the logs each Monday, or checking that applications are running, and checking your ticketing system for angry users, you put this system in place and it monitors and continuously tests everything that is of importance to you and your users. It could be everything from monitoring disk space to CPU usage to memory. It could include determining if the response time in your e-commerce platform is quick enough, or whether you have too many bounces from some of the pages on your website. You want to monitor anything that could cost you money or time or resources. You can do that with this system. It's very flexible.

In our company we have over the last two years helped some 60 different clients using this tool. For example, we are working with the largest employer in Sweden. The company takes care of all the hospital, school, and municipal infrastructure in the Gothenburg region. They monitor their whole network infrastructure using OP5 Monitor. They have about 4,500 switches and routers. If something goes down there, it's critical stuff: hospital equipment, etc. I don't know how many outages they have detected and fixed, but I imagine they have been able to stop a few outages before they became to large of an issue.

What Monitor does is that it lets administrators of these different applications get insights into how their environments are performing. Is it working? Is it not working? Do we have some issues that we need to fix now? It tells them what's going on.

The web-based UI is functional. It's in need of an update. There is a large, ongoing project to release a redesigned web interface, to which we are providing feedback. That's going to be really exciting. OP5 has always been web-first. There are no clients to install. It's always just a web interface.

There are a couple of things in need of improvement that are major. Some of them are on track. IT environments today are in constant flux. This is driven by the newer cloud technologies such as Kubernetes and Docker, etc. The whole Nagios-based monitoring system that OP5 is created on top of, is based on a host-service model. There is a need for a strategy on what to do with more dynamic environments. I know that is a fluffy description, but that's one key thing. There is some cool stuff going on in that direction. We, as a partner, are helping a couple of clients integrate with cloud environments, which is really cool.

Right now, we're focusing a lot on automating the configuration of monitoring systems. That's something that needs improved APIs. 

Finally, it needs a unified, central way to manage and configure agents. That would be a key feature.

I have been using OP5 since the start of the company in 2003. I was one of the first employees.

ITRS technical support is quite good. From the start, there has always been a focus on having really skilled people in support. That's something ITRS should be proud of and continue to invest in.

If we go back 15 years, in that time span our clients have not used a different monitoring solution. Today, everyone has some kind of monitoring system. And if they don't, they've been living under a rock, or it's a new company.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. It does take some prior knowledge. You need to be an IT admin person to get it. But if you look at a normal installation on an IT infrastructure with up to, say, 1,000 servers, that is usually managed in under a week. That says something about the ease of implementation.

In terms of an implementation strategy, we have a template that we follow to save time and deliver an efficient setup. We're consultants, so we always try to anticipate questions and make it as easy as possible for the clients. So it makes sense for us to reuse the knowledge we have gained from other implementations.

It's quite well documented with the documentation available online, which is nice. The initial implementation is the smaller part. When you want to add functionality, such as implementing a new application or some new piece of hardware or software, there is a lot of material available online from ITRS on how to do that. That's good.

We don't sell the licenses, generally. We sell our time to help improve the way our clients are using the product. But if someone were to  ask me about price, I would say that OP5 has a very low price as a solution, compared to many other solutions out there.

Make sure that you have a good relationship with ITRS or a partner that can support you in the process.

Most of the clients that I work with have been our clients for many years. The reason they are using ITRS is that it's something that works for them. They invested a lot of time and effort into learning the tool, adopting it to their needs, and making sure that it's working well for them. I also think they value the local contact, that they have someone to talk to; a vendor that actually supports them in their endeavors.

Stuff happens. It doesn't matter if you run a small IT department or a large one, or if you just buy IT services from an external company, stuff never works 100 percent. When it stops working, it's important that you know so that you can take action, tell your customers, start taking preventive actions, and try to fix the problem. That's what this tool provides you: knowledge about whether things are working or not. If you don't have something like this, what's going to happen is that people are going to get upset and, sooner or later, someone will be so upset that they pick up the phone and call you. And you will have another 60 people who are upset, but who haven't called you because they're busy with other things. This is something you need to have, to stay on top.