Observium Review

Auto-Discovery Process

Observium is an auto-discovering network monitoring platform. Thus it is designed to discover, collect, and graph information about devices and other monitored elements automatically. But how does Observium perform auto-discovery?

The platform gathers information about the devices on the network using SNMP protocol. Then, it utilizes the information it collected to discover the internal sensors and interfaces of those devices. After that, it detects neighboring devices through the aid of protocols like CDP, LLDP, FDP, and EDP. Once it discovered the neighboring devices, it gathers information about them using routing protocols.

If Observium finds new devices during the auto-discovery process, it will try to connect to these devices. These new devices are added to its database in case their IP addresses and identifiers don’t have matches in the database. Observium will continuously discover devices on the network until it’s done mapping the entire network.

Extensive Device, Platform, And OS Support

The network monitoring platform can easily auto-discover devices. This is because it supports a wide range of devices. It can collect system and network statistics from traditional networking devices, such as routers and switches, that support standardised MIBs or management information bases. MIBs are databases that are used for handling communication network entities. It can also collect platform-specific metrics from security-related appliances like firewalls, load balancers, proxy servers, antivirus appliances, VPN concentrators, and IDS devices. These metrics include session and connection numbers and load balancer configuration and statistics.

Observium supports wireless infrastructure devices such as WiFi access points and controllers, allowing users to collect wireless metrics from these devices. The other categories of devices it supports are servers, appliances, and workstations; storage devices,  UPS and power distribution devices, and printer and print servers. Observium is also compatible with several Out of Band (OBB) and remote access platforms, as well as with many environmental monitoring and sensor platforms. Lastly, it accommodates different operating systems which  include Cisco, Windows, Linux, HP, Juniper, Dell, FreeBSD, Brocade, Netscaler, and NetApp

Threshold Alerting Feature

The network monitoring platform comes with a threshold alerting feature. With this feature, users will be able to set and configure thresholds and failure states for different types of entities. They can even automatically generate thresholds for some entity types, wherein the thresholds are directly collected from the devices being monitored. To ensure that their alerting system is attuned to the configuration of their network infrastructure, users can instantly set up alerting entries during the auto-discovery process.

Traffic Accounting

Observium has a traffic accounting feature which is built for simplifying the tracking and billing of customer bandwidth usage. Through the aid of its traffic accounting module, measurements for ports are stored in database tables. These measurements then are used for creating bills based on the data. In addition, the platform generates graphs and charts so users can visualize traffic patterns and gain insights that can help them upsell services to customers.

Integrates With Third-Party Tools

Observium can be integrated with some third-party applications such as Collectd, Munin, Smokeping and RANCID. As a result, the metrics and configuration data gathered by the third-party tools can be accessed by users within Observium. In addition, the platform provides them with the capability to create their own application modules which they can use for collecting, reporting, and displaying data from the applications.