Introduction
Rapid and extensive constant growth of IP-based networks in addition to increasing dependencies on these networks has made their management and maintenance tremendously challenging. Round the clock monitoring and maintenance of the networks is significant so as to reduce the down time of the network. The increase in the dependencies of Internet Protocol-based network and the importance of their continuous monitoring has resulted in the rapid growth in the application and use of automated network monitoring systems (Chiang et al., 2009). The paper outlines the differences and similarities that exist between two different network management systems: PRTG Network Monitoring and OpenNMS.
PRTG Network Monitoring was launched in 1999. It is a powerful and effective network monitoring and management system. As opposed to most network management systems, PRTG Network Monitoring is an open source application. It is mostly used by organizations to discover and solve problems associated with information technology infrastructure. PRTG Network Monitoring has the capability to alert the technical staff with pertinent information in case of problems in the network (Josephsen, 2007). The timely alert provided by PRTG Network Monitoring is significant in resolving network problems before they spread and affect mission critical components of the system. As compared to other commercially available network monitoring systems, PRTG Network Monitoring competes well regarding cost and efficiency. It is imperative to note that PRTG Network Monitoring perform better than most of the commercially available network management systems.
Similar to Nagios, OpenNMS is also an open source application used in network management systems. It was also started in 1999. As opposed to Nagios, OpenNMS is a highly scalable, enterprise-level network management system. The application is used to manage a network containing an estimate of 70, 000 devices (Qadir, 2010). In most cases, OpenNMS is utilized in monitoring information technology infrastructure and conduct automatic device discovery, service management, performance assessment and event monitoring. OpenNMS can be employed to monitor and address issues in different types of networks including distributed network. It uses service monitoring features to monitor a range of networks from TCP port checks, ICMP pings to Mail Transport Monitor and Page sequence monitoring.
On the other hand, PRTG Network Monitoring employs different and comprehensive monitoring features to monitor and manage services, applications, network protocols, operating systems, infrastructure components and system metrics (Barth, 2008).
The application employs the use of different features in data collection as compared to its counterpart. While OpenNMS is capable of collecting a different type of data, PRTG Network Monitoring conduct very little data collection. The application requires additional software for more extensive data collection on the conditions and status of the network (Qadir, 2010). As opposed to Nagios, OpenNMS allows for extensive data collection pertinent to the performance of the network. It collects a different type of performance data for different types of network protocols including JMX, SNMP, XML, HTTP, NSClient, WMI and JDBC. In contrary to Nagios, the network management system (OpenNMS) is capable of gathering, storing and presenting data as well as verifying the data against thresholds (Chiang et al., 2009).
In contrast, PRTG Network Monitoring requires additional software and applications to be able to perform both data collection and manipulation as compared to OpenNMS. The application exhibits a high scalability regarding data collection given that it can collect an estimate of 1.2 million data points through the use of SNMP after every 5 minutes.
PRTG Network Monitoring and OpenNMS are both effective and freely available network management systems. While both of them present efficient network management services, it is apparent that OpenNMS is more effective and comprehensive than Nagios.
References
Barth, W. (2008). Nagios: System and network monitoring. No Starch Press.
Chiang, C. Y. J., Levin, G., Li, S., Serban, C., Wolberg, M., Chadha, R., & LaBarre, L. (2009,
July). Enabling Distributed Management for Dynamic Airborne Networks. In Policies for
Distributed Systems and Networks, 2009. POLICY 2009. IEEE International Symposium
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Josephsen, D. (2007). Building a monitoring infrastructure with Nagios. Prentice Hall PTR.
Qadir, M. (2010). Comparative Analysis of two Open Source Network Monitoring Systems:
PRTG Network Monitoring & OpenNMS (Doctoral dissertation, Blekinge Institute of Technology).
