Proposal meeting for new NMS

Morning all,

I'm in the final stages of the evaluation of a new NMS solution. I'm sure, many of you have been here before and I'm just wondering if you have any advice before I meet with the company owner this afternoon.

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We are a small MSP and consulting company. We build, design networks mostly for new constructions but we also revamp old networks and for some clients even manage them. The bulk of our managed services are commercial properties like office towers and malls. Low user count, (minus guest wifi which is isolated) mostly building automation, cameras, digital directories and displays.

Before me, they had mostly junior net admins and their goal was to just maintain the infrastructure. I was hired to fill in the gaps of knowledge and improve security before shit hits the fan. I've been implementing security, standardization, and generally just fixing poor configurations throughout he portfolio. I've also implemented netbox and TACACS+ (both only span a handful of sites as I haven't gotten approval to do a full rollout yet)

Currently, they are using zabbix very bare bone installation. It hasn't been maintained for ~4years and has been failing. They don't want to fix it and told me to find them an alternative.

Over the past month i've tested OPmanager, PRTG, Domotz, and Solarwinds.

OPmanager, easy to implement and pretty happy with the out of the box experience. Less modular than PRTG and solarwinds.

PRTG, the licensing model doesn't work well for us. We'd need to really fine-tune the amount of sensor we use. Most of our switches have only a few devices despite being 24/48 port switches because they are for camera and wifi coverage.

Domotz, different than a traditional NMS solution but was pleasantly surprised. When it works it works well and could meet a lot of our needs at a very low price point. However, I found it buggy and any L3 devices disrupt its ability to do anything. Will definitely revisit this in a couple of years as it matures.

Solarwinds, network mapping, and modeling are what really stood out for me as a step above the others. The downside though was I found it the hardest to implement out of the box but with the most potential.

Zabbix, this is what we currently use. I want to spend time training on it and doing a full rebuild. If we're going to continue using it I need a way to assign work, and filter out useless information and alerts better. I'm convinced I can get what I need from it, the question is how much time can I spend on it.

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The company owner is a sales guy, electrical engineer architect type, guy. Not technical, but knowledgeable on core networking concepts. It's a small company and they've never invested anything other than man-hours into their MSP side. We're not currently meeting contractual obligations and I'm leveraging that for this whole project.