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Monitoring critical business systems and production applications ensures that they run as expected in the enterprise data center or edge locations. Comprehensive monitoring includes servers, virtualization environments, containerized workloads, networking gear, and applications.
What is ManageEngine OpManager?
ManageEngine is a well-established name in enterprise solutions. Their OpManager solution allows monitoring the availability, health, and performance of critical devices and applications in the enterprise environment.
It provides monitoring support for various types of hardware, including servers, routers, switches, firewalls, and other types of networking gear. You can also monitor virtualized environments from all major virtualization vendors, such as VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, Cisco UCS, and other hypervisors.
In addition, it provides application monitoring for all typical business-relevant applications and services used in the enterprise, such as Active Directory Domain Services, Microsoft Exchange, and SQL Server.
ManageEngine OpManager features
Aside from the wealth of monitoring objects OpManager covers, it offers many additional features and capabilities, including the following:
- Real-time alerting—Get alerts in real time, which helps to identify issues quickly
- Interactive dashboards—It provides rich dashboarding capabilities with widgets to visualize key performance indicators
- Network visualizations—These allow the creation of rack views, 3D floor views, business views, and others to monitor network performance and help pinpoint issues
- Fault notifications—You can create alert escalations for critical faults not cleared within a specific time frame, including SMS, email, and other alerts
- Built-in automated tasks and device templates—Network discovery includes prebuilt device templates to help accelerate the onboarding of detected devices during network scans
- Great scalability out of the box—OpManager is built to scale out of the box, as you can monitor and manage up to 10,000 devices and 50,000 interfaces; it also provides failover features
- Programmatic RESTful API—The RESTful API allows easy integration with other third-party solutions and other ManageEngine solutions
- Mobile apps for IOS and Android—It allows viewing monitoring information on the go with IOS and Android apps
- Extensible architecture—ManageEngine has provided many different plugins that work with OpManager to extend its capabilities, such as a NetFlow analyzer, a firewall analyzer, and an application manager
ManageEngine OpManager provides rich monitoring and management on desktop and mobile devices
Installing ManageEngine OpManager
The installation of ManageEngine OpManager is straightforward and includes downloading the .exe installer for Windows or the Linux .bin installation file. It is excellent to see that ManageEngine provides installers for both platforms, allowing organizations to use free and open-source operating system platforms to install the OpManager server component.
Note the following minimum system requirements:
- CPU: Intel Xeon Quad Core, 2.5 Ghz
- RAM size: 16 GB
- Hard disk: 40 GB
- OS Windows: Windows 11/10/8/7. Windows Server 2022/2012 R2/ 2012/2008 R2/2008.
- OS Linux: Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Fedora, and Mandriva (Mandrake Linux)
- Database: MSSQL 2008, 2012, 2014, and 2016 | OpManager bundled PostgreSQL
The Windows installer is a simple "next, next, finish" type install process that makes it easy to get up and running with the solution.
Beginning the ManageEngine OpManager installation
During the installation of OpManager, you will be prompted to choose which database you want to use with OpManager. You can use the bundled PostgreSQL database or Microsoft SQL Server.
Choose the type of database you want to use to install OpManager
After finishing the installer, you can log into OpManager using the default admin/admin credentials.
Logging into OpManager for the first time after installation
Basic configuration, setup, and adding devices
ManageEngine has done an excellent job of making OpManager user-friendly and easy to get basic monitoring in place right after a successful installation. After logging in, you will be presented with a Getting started workflow, allowing you to easily start configuring the solution, even if you have little to no previous experience with OpManager.
Getting started workflow in OpManager after installation
It was great seeing OpManager start scanning and inventorying discovered devices without configuration. Below, right after the installation, OpManager scanned the subnet for new devices and added them to the console. You can also add different subnets you may have in addition to the subnet where OpManager is installed.
OpManager runs an initial scan of the environment adding discovered devices to the console
It was easy to add a connection to a VMware vSphere environment. Under the Virtualization > Add Device menu, you can add the following:
- VMware
- Hyper-V
- Nutanix
- XenServer
To add virtualized environments, you need only populate the host and the credentials for connecting.
Adding a VMware vSphere virtualization environment for monitoring
After adding the vCenter Server address and credentials, OpManager discovered that the ESXi hosts are connected to the vCenter Server and the virtual machines in the environment.
Discovered ESXi hosts and virtual machines from the vCenter Server connection
Another essential infrastructure component to monitor is the network. OpManager provides a wealth of monitoring capabilities for network monitoring. These include monitoring routers, switches, firewalls, wireless, IP address management, IPSLA, and others. In addition, OpManager allows admins to monitor interfaces, statistics, CPU utilization, device health, and even config changes.
OpManager can monitor many different network devices and configurations
The IP Address Management features of OpManager allow you to effectively discover subnets, manage IP address usage, and reporting.
IP Address Management with OpManager
It also allows you to have an effective way to manage the configurations for network devices, including versioning, and auditing of changes made.
Monitor your device configs using OpManager
Monitoring applications with OpManager requires installing a plugin called Application Manager. You can do this from the Applications menu in OpManager. Once you install the Application Manager plugin, you can create various application monitors for monitoring application health and performance.
Unlike many monitoring solutions that are still on-premises-centric, OpManager is keeping pace with modern cloud environments, such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and OCI, and containerized platforms like Kubernetes and Docker.
Monitoring applications with OpManager
Under the Applications menu, once you have the application manager plugin installed, OpManager offers an extensive catalog of included applications that you can monitor using a very wizardized, user-friendly approach that is easy to configure.
OpManager application monitoring provides a large selection of application monitoring in the box
Another powerful feature of OpManager is its reports. Monitoring solutions can provide a wealth of data for auditing and reporting since they aggregate information about most, if not all, of the devices in an environment. This is the case with OpManager, which includes many prebuilt reports that allow you to create great-looking reports on your device inventory, applications, auditing, etc.
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OpManager includes a large number of reports for reporting on discovered resources
Wrapping up
In this overview, we have only scratched the surface of ManageEngine OpManager. It is an "everything and the kitchen sink" monitoring solution that allows organizations to manage most, if not all, of their critical infrastructure, no matter where or what technology it is running on. It is easy to set up, configure, add devices, and start seeing a quick time to value by providing visibility and managing devices in the environment. You can download a free 30-day trial of ManageEngine OpManager for Windows and Linux.
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