In this ManageEngine OpManager review, we will have a closer look at the features/functionalities, customer support, and certifications of this leading software.

Today businesses of all scales rely heavily on networks for all their tasks. Hence, monitoring the networks continuously has become a necessity for any business. Networks are getting larger and more complex day by day, having several links established worldwide. This creates network management a challenging task for network admins.

To cater to this challenge, organizations use robust Network monitoring software like ManageEngine OpManager.

What is ManageEngine OPManager?

This helps them to continuously monitor their network and provides control over it, making it easy to stay ahead of all the problems before they affect any operation.

ManageEngine OpManager is a top-notch software used by over 1,000,000 IT Admins across 120 countries. The software provides the right tools that are perfect for businesses of all sizes to manage their network efficiently.

To find more interesting features and details about the software, we are here with a detailed review of this powerful monitoring tool. So, let’s get into it!

ManageEngine Network Performance Management Solution Review (2023)

1. Features and Functionality

Whether you are a network administrator, system administrator, or IT professional, monitoring problems way before they hinder performance and production is a tedious task. So, finding an ideal software that helps you monitor your network, servers, routers, switches and virtual machine, all-in-one, is crucial.

You need to look for software that has all the features and functionalities that suits your needs. This made us think about trying out ManageEngine OPManager and addressing all the functionalities to give you a depth understanding of the software.

1.1. Network Management

One of the top features of ManageEngine OpManager has to be the management of networks. From managing performance, fault identification, and network provisioning, to maintaining QoS, it is a comprehensive network management solution that has all the right tools to manage and monitor networks.

1.1.1. Network Performance Monitoring

Whether it is a small business or an enterprise-level business, networks are the backbone of every organization. So, loss of productivity due to a network outage can lead to huge damage. To avoid such situations, ManageEngine OPManager lets you monitor the performance of your network which keeps your business up and running.

It works by proactively anticipating potential outages, and network problems, helping you maintain a congestion-free network.

1.1.2. Router/Switch Monitoring

The most expensive part of the network is WAN links and the routers that serve them. So, managing bandwidth allocation can be difficult. But by using ManageEngine OpManager, you can easily measure your WAN links bandwidth and traffic, helping you optimize bandwidth allocation across links.

Additionally, this robust network performance management solution helps you quickly spot problematic routers and the ones with unusual behavior.

Talking about switch monitoring, it is as important as router monitoring. To maintain your network in a healthy state, switch monitoring is essential. With OpManager, you can effortlessly monitor your switch and switch port availability by creating maps to graphically visualize your entire LAN.

Another useful utility that is embedded in OpManager is a Switch port mapper that helps you find out the list of problematic ports.

1.1.3. WAN RTT Monitoring

One of the features that intrigued us was WAN management. WAN is considered to be one of the most expensive parts of the corporate network. So, getting informed timely of any outage, intermittent connectivity, or unscrupulous usage is necessary.

We found this feature helpful as it allows you to visualize your WAN links and solve performance and outage issues with Cisco IPLSA technology.

This functionality also lets you monitor WAN link latency, bandwidth utilization, and other performance factors instantly, helping you diagnose and resolve slow WAN connectivity issues.

1.2. Server Management

Our team was quite happy to find out the incredible tools and functionalities that are provided by this Network performance management solution to manage servers. With OpManager, you can monitor physical and virtual servers, automate repeated management tasks, plan capacity, and troubleshoot faults effortlessly.

1.2.1. Server Monitoring

This effective feature helped us gain a quick birds-eye view of the happenings of all system resources of a server. It helps you periodically monitor servers and all their critical applications along with their services and processes.

No doubt, OpManager is one of the top-notch server performance monitoring tools. A feature that we enjoyed using was ‘Server uptime monitoring’. This amazing feature lets you keep tabs on the availability of both physical and virtual servers 24/7. This means you can monitor complex performances at any time and can detect issues at an early stage.

1.2.2. System Health Monitoring

System health monitoring is a significant feature that comes with this Network performance solution. It allows you to stay ahead of all the upcoming obstacles/problems by continuously monitoring system resources on Windows and Unix-based servers.

The common suspects behind server performance degradation are CPU, disk, and memory. The OpManager helps you monitor more than 25 different memory, disk, and CPU metrics across servers.

Users can keep track of multiple processors with comprehensive utilization reports. Also, with the intuitive dials in the snapshot page, you can instantly spot high resource utilization, which we find helpful as it keeps the user well aware of all the happenings.

1.2.3. VMware Monitoring

This feature made us so happy to use it, as it provides several out-of-the-box features that most of the software doesn’t provide. Although VMware comes with a handful amount of benefits and helps businesses at all levels to set up virtual machines and servers, when it comes to managing them, can be a lot more challenging.

To keep VMware infrastructure in check, OpManager provides an efficient VMware monitoring tool. The biggest perk of this monitoring tool is that it allows you to monitor VMware servers right away without any configuration.

It is a simple single-step process, in which you just have to enter the VMware vCenter and its HTTPS credentials, and then the OpManager discovers all the ESXi host and the VMs associated with the vCenter.

OPManager has more than 30 availability and performance monitors that are pre-configured with thresholds. OpManager monitors more than 400 important VM events like VM powered on, VM powered off, Host disconnected event, data refresh event, new datastore added event, etc. Notification profiles can be assigned to send constant alerts whenever resource consumption crosses critical thresholds.

1.3. Fault and Performance Management

To maintain a seamless network, identifying network faults much before an unforeseen outage or performance degradation occurs, is crucial. With the OpManager network fault management tool, you can detect, recover, and limit failures in your network effortlessly.

1.3.1. Email and SMS alerts

It is not humanely possible to get along with all the happenings all the time.  So, using a tool that gives you all the useful insights into your network issues is a treat. OpManager provides a multi-channel network alerting system. It allows users to foresee any upcoming failure and helps in taking proactive measures.

This tool allows admins to prioritize alerts. It also reduces the admin’s workload by fixing issues before the violation of (SLAs). Moreover, IT technicians can choose the medium of sending notifications.

What we liked most about this feature was that apart from conventional notification channels, it also supports one-click integration with famous communication tools.

1.3.2. SNMP Trap Processing

While conducting the ManageEngine OPManager review, we were glad to find out about this exceptional trap-processing functionality. If you are an IT specialist, then you must know that the SNMP trap is the most used monitoring technique in the industry.

With OpManager’s efficient rule-based processing engine, it can handle around 3000 SNMP traps per second. This feature makes it a breeze to create an SNMP trap. It allows you to import SNMP Traps directly from the SNMP MIB file. It also gives you the option to create the processor from unsolicited traps under Alarm View.

Apart from other amazing features, it also lets you forward the traps received in OpManager to other Network Management systems. You can also get knowledgeful reports on all processed SNMP traps. One cool thing that we enjoyed doing was the customization of reports. You can schedule the time of the report to be received either periodically or on specified days a week.

1.3.3. IT Workflow Automation

Workflow automation needs to be included in this ManageEngine OPManager review. This outstanding feature makes it a breeze for IT admins to design and automate workflows to troubleshoot network issues.

We were amazed to find out that OpManager supports more than 70 workflow checks and actions. You just have to create workflows using these checks and actions to the workflow builder, without any hassle of complex scripts and codes.

Moreover, while testing this well-integrated workflow automation too, our team was relieved to find out about its drag-and-drop feature. You can easily create new workflow rules for every administrator, with the drag-n-drop builder. Apart from creating new ones, it also allows you to modify the existing ones.

1.4. Storage Management

A dedicated storage management software is required to manage existing storage requirement and forecasts future needs. This excellent feature keeps everything stored in one place, optimizing storage usage. OpManager packs a punch with tons of features including ‘Capacity utilization monitors’, ‘Disk Read/Write’ stats, ‘Storage growth trend graphs, and more.

1.4.1. Storage RAID Management

Our ManageEngine OPManager review would be incomplete if we didn’t talk about this amazing feature. OpManager supports an advanced storage monitoring tool that uses CLI / SNMP / SMI – S and vendor-specific APIs. It helps efficiently discover RAIDs in your organization or data center network environment.

OpManager makes monitoring your RAID devices a breeze. You can add new monitors, and edit, and delete existing monitors that are associated with the specified device. It also lets you have a graphical view of the data that is gathered during monitoring.

Moreover, with this robust tool, you can check the availability, health, and utilization of storage RAIDs.

1.4.2. Storage Capacity Forecasting

Most companies tend to spend dollars on their storage capacity. However, a good forecasting tool not only helps them stay within their budget but also solves all the storage issues beforehand. It is designed specifically to forecast how much storage a company would require, helping the organization buy enough disk space to fulfill the needs of applications and users.

The tool works by noting all the storage capacity details over time. It then predicts the future capacity consumption by data growth trend report. No doubt, predicting storage capacity requirement is crucial but at the same time it is very important to plan your storage spending,

So, this tool makes your estimation easy by giving you exact dates when your device will reach 80/90/100 % of its allocated storage, with the help of historical trends.

1.4.3. Fabric Switch Management

Our team was quite impressed to see this helpful feature. This is a great tool as it provides several exceptional features that no other software provides.

This tool has fine-grained monitoring capabilities due to its integration with vendor-specific MIBs and APIs. It automatically discovers fabric switches in your environment. As soon as the fabric switches are identified, an extra detailed scan is performed. It helps provide a complete insight into asset, capacity, configuration, and performance.

The best thing we found about this tool is that it constantly monitors the status of switches and ports. And whenever there is a state change it raises/reports an alarm to administrators through email or SMS messages. Also, if the alarms go unattended, it escalates to higher authorities based on pre-defined rules.

2. Customer Support

3. Security

Before experiencing the security component of this product, the ATS team went through different reviews, and each of them states that it offers exceptional security in every feature, functionality, and process.

From organizational security, physical security, data security, and operational security to a lot more, this Network performance management solution take all the necessary measures to fulfill its security checklist. Following are some of the top security features that we liked the most:

3.1. Single Sign-On (SSO)

This amazing functionality needs to be on the top. With an integrated built-in Identity and Access Management (IAM) service, it lets you access multiple services using the same credentials. It helps eases the hectic login process repeatedly and provides effective access control.

Moreover, it also supports SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), making it simpler for customers to integrate their company’s provider every time they log in.

3.2. Multi-Factor Authentication

This helpful feature provides an added layer of security. It works by demanding extra verification from the user after the password. It supports different verification modes like QR code, biometric face ID, fingerprint scanning, push notification, and time-based OTP. This greatly helps to mitigate the risk of unauthorized access or uncertain use.

3.3. Backups

While reviewing this OPManager solution, we were concerned about the Backup functionality. But we were relieved to find out that it’s backups customer’s data every day and weekly. Not only the data is backed up but also encrypted using the AES-256-bit algorithm.

To add an extra layer of security to the backed-up data, the software uses a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) in the backup servers. This helps to keep track and schedule all backups regularly. Users are recommended to do local backups regularly to avoid any inconvenience.

3.4. Malware and Spam Protection

Formatting a file is just as simple as making a click from your mouse. We were impressed to find out about this robust feature. With the built-in automated scanning system, thoroughly scans all user files.

Also, ManageEngine supports a custom anti-malware engine that works by receiving instant updates from external threat intelligence sources. It then scans files against malicious patterns, helping protect customer data from ransomware.

Moreover, for verifying authentic messages, Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) is used. This way high-level security is guaranteed to the users.

3.4. FAQs

  • On-premise installation available
  • ManageEngine products are GDPR compliant
  • SSL certificate is installed inside the app
  • SAML is available for secure login
  • 2-factor authentication is available
  • Users can take local backups
  • Dedicated servers are not available – ManageEngine recommends users install their solution on a dedicated server
  • Data export & data deletion options are available

4. Customer Testimonials

Since ManageEngine’s OPManager is a comprehensive solution, we have shared some case studies we felt are worth a look at.

These include remarks and feedback from the customer and how they found their investment in the ManageEngine solution met their organizational objectives:

5. Training and Education

The popularity of the software is not just because of its innovative features, and customer support. This robust software also provides excellent training sessions to its users. These training sessions are designed to arm ManageEngine users with everything they need.

Moreover, these sessions help the users to pick the right app that caters to their company’s specific needs. This as a result makes users realize the benefits of deploying the software and maximizing IT productivity.

Here are some of the types of training that Manage Engine is supporting:

5.1. Online Training

While keeping in mind the new normal, ManageEngine supports virtual training. This online option lets you take the training sessions from the convenience of your home or office. All it requires is a stable internet connection, and you can reduce your travel expense while seeking knowledge from experts.

You can register by clicking here.

5.2. Onsite Training

If you are looking for a budget-friendly option, this training session is for you. For instance, if you want to train all your employees, team, or your whole firm at once, this option is ideal.

You just need to pay one flat training fee, and the company will send professional trainers to the location of your choice. And you will be provided with 2-5 days of on-site, hands-on instruction. To register for onsite training click here.

5.3. Classroom Training

If you are also the one, who prefers to learn in the classroom environment. Then, you need to go for this option. Our team was quite surprised to learn that these classroom sessions are available at prime locations all around the globe. ManageEngine offers classroom training in the USA; Texas, Austin, Pleasanton, California. And in India, these are available in Chennai, and Tamil Nadu.

You can register now for the scheduled sessions.

5.4. Customized Training

Don’t worry, if all the above-mentioned training packages don’t meet your needs. The ManageEngine team offers customized training for its users. You can register now for the customized packages.

6. Certifications and Compliance

ManageEngine OpManager has earned ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification. The certification applies to Applicants, Technology, systems, People, and Processes. ISO is an international standard. It is published by the International Standardization Organization (ISO). The organization describes the management of information security in a company.

Moreover, ManageEngine payments comply with the PCI DSS(The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard).

This high-end organization has struggled hard to be able to fulfill the necessary security certificates. This will not only ensure the users are using a dedicated secure platform but also will help them stand out among others.

ManageEngine is GDPR compliant which demands the company to secure data throughout its life cycle. For more information on ManageEngine’s security policy and GDPR compliance, click here.

Conclusion

We thoroughly enjoyed the process of reviewing ManageEngine OpManager. This robust software meets the features and scalability requirements of customers and businesses of all sizes.

No doubt, it is one of the top-notch network performance management solutions available in the market.

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