Something I haven't been able to figure out is why NetXMS isn't one of the first things I see when I Google for opensource network monitoring software. I had to stumble across it and then the information was sparse. Most of my introduction to NetXMS was from Tomas Kirnak on TheBrothersWISP and the training videos he made. If it wasn't for him I probably never would have dug any deeper.
After loading it up I was surprised at what it could do. It exceeded my expectations by a decent margin and I was expecting a lot, lol. Some very intuitive thinking came into play on making this program work.
After I got the server up and running on Debian I setup the management program. What!? It's portable! It have "everything" I need from Netflow to development programs running portable now (veracrypt volume on thumb drive, to abstract my apps from the workstation and, security). I was tickled pink.
I just don't get why more network/sys admins aren't using this? Too much of a learning curve?
If I'd hazard a guess:
Reason #1: Is the one you gave. If you google network monitoring software, NetXMS pops up once in one of the top ten hits, inside an article. With like two paragraphs. It's simply not visible enough.
Reason #2: Templates. There aren't a lot of them publicly available. If you have a reasonably sized network, you have a lot of template building to do. That costs time and may also require additional learning. I certainly learned SNMP and SNMP Traps in more depth as a result of this. Not everyone has the time to do so. Not everyone has the support of the employer for that either. Which brings us to
Reason #3: Learning curve/time investment vs. "just buy something". The way I see it, when you buy something like PRTG you basically pay for the work they put into the templates. You install it, let it scan your network and you have pretty graphs and things out of the box and you can move on with life. Until maybe you notice something's missing or eventually the cost of ownership creeps up too much and you start looking around again. But you already spent so much money on the product.... (with NetXMS that'd be the other way around... you already spent so much time on making the solution work "just right" for yourself, you probably feel emotionally attached).
Over the last 15 years I have used or tried many, many NMS. Ironically, I stumbled onto Netxms when I went looking for an old favorite "the dude", having become frustrated with the latest NMS we are using. We seem to have the knack of finding NMS solutions that are either become too expensive, become split into numerous products, discontinued when vendor buys new NMS and tries to force swap to their latest NMS - and the latest - cannot handle SNMP traps with special characters - a comma or a forward slash.
I have spent a week now with Netxms and to be completely honest - I was just about to give up and move on again. As Tursiops correctly points out - without templates, Netxms is hard - really hard. I know SNMP traps and I know SNMP - but I do not know Netxms and as powerful as it is - intuitive is certainly not one of its features.
Why am I still here? - Tursiops - plain and simple. I have a couple of thousands devices that I use SNMP to monitor yet there was no SNMP template. I was surprised and shocked. First off though - SNMP traps. There is so little out there that does this well. CA Spectrum lost its best friend in CA Ehealth who got EOL. ORION has a trap listing, OpManager cannot handle special characters, NNM scrolls just one line at a time - BUT - NetXMS looked promising!!
I imported my unique mib I built. Even though I had formatted it as per RFC and all descriptions and fields declared, NetXMS requires each trap to be manually and painstakingly entered for each parameter. As bad and as horrible a time wasting task that is - the upside is that I was able to get it loaded - and see what my traps looked like.
First off - send some traps with special characters. No point beating around the bush - either it can handles it or it cannot. Passed with flying colors!!! Absolutely fantastic.
Second off - I want traps from my Production devices to have a different severity than my Dev devices - or at least be able to filter them somehow. Absolutely fantastic again!! I created containers using includes and matchs / imatch and !imatch - option 2; and then worked out how to use event processing policy to create one policy for Prod and a different one for Dev. Option 1 solved. Again - Tursiops assistance was required to get syntax working.
Even though adding trap processing is incredibly manual - unnecessarily so (the mibs have the oids for each trap - just import them by default) - I had the minimum that I needed.
So what was I to do about the lack of templates for SNMP - start from scratch? - yep!!. Tried that and after asking about why no SNMP template was included - a miracle!! - Tursiops mentioned that there used to be a Linux template. As Windows SNMP and Linux SNMP are both based on RFC 2790 - that "old" template held out the hope that usability would be possible without the monstrous learning curve envisioned.
Tursiops was kind enough to locate that template and posted it. Ten minutes after I saw that - it was downloaded, imported, in and running!!! Linux - was now covered!!
For Windows - I have copied across the file system DCI which is working perfectly for file systems and memory(with a little mod of my own - unassisted!!). CPU is "in progress"
Even though NetXMS solved by trap processing problem - the lack of basic templates for Windows and Linux for SNMP would have been a show stopper. Yes there were templates for agents - but agents are another level of complexity. If I was going to be forced into agents, I would have probably gone Grafana / Prometheus and wmi export etc..
All I wanted was decent snmp trap processing and basic snmp monitoring - CPU / Storage / Memory. Once I get the Windows CPU worked out, I will have that.
For the many sites in the world that needed a SNMP based CDM monitoring option once CA Ehealth (snmp based CDM monitoring) went EOL 2 years ago - NetXMS would have been a fantastic drop in solution - if it had those two simple templates - Linux and Windows. It is a fantastic product with great capabilities - but getting started is just too hard.
I was lucky - I was annoyed enough with traps to persevere - and the miracle of Tursiops with the template meant that I could get over that initial hump.
Whats next? - if / when I get the Windows template up and working - customizable thresholds by mount point included - I might just see how many of my other monitoring products
NetXMs can replace in addition to the three I am currently looking at.