ManageEngine OpManager

ManageEngine OpManager is network monitoring software providing visibility into the performance of routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, wireless LAN controllers, servers, virtual machines, printers and storage devices. The device coverage is the point: monitoring tools frequently handle network gear well and servers poorly, or the reverse, leaving an organisation running two systems and correlating between them by hand when something breaks.

The vendor's positioning is explicitly around being easy to use and affordable, and it has been in this market for over 15 years. In network monitoring that combination is a genuine market position rather than a slogan, because the established enterprise tools in this space are expensive and demand dedicated administrators, which puts them out of reach for mid-sized IT teams who still have complex networks to run.

The stated purpose is drilling down to the root cause of an issue and eliminating it, rather than only alerting that something is wrong. That distinction matters operationally: an alert tells you a device is unreachable, whereas root cause analysis tells you why, and the gap between the two is where most troubleshooting time goes.

Coverage spans network monitoring for device health, availability and performance of any IP-based device in real time, network service monitoring, and physical and virtual server monitoring to confirm servers are running at expected levels. System performance can be visualised across the estate. A 30 day free trial is available for download, which is enough time to run it against a real network through at least one incident, and that is the only meaningful way to evaluate a monitoring tool.