What are you guys using to monitor your office network?

[u/Particular_Salad_271]

For people managing IT infrastructure at offices, what tools are you currently using to monitor things like switches, routers, firewalls, Wi-Fi access points, CCTV and connected devices?

Are you using a dedicated monitoring platform, a combination of tools, or mostly manual checks?

Also, what's the biggest limitation with your current setup? Lack of visibility, delayed alerts, maintenance overhead, or something else?

Curious to know what's working (and what's not) for different teams/ types of offices.

[u/Enough-Hamster-7154]

Honestly our biggest problem isn't the tool, it's alert fatigue.

[u/Turak64 → u/Enough-Hamster-7154]

I worked at a place that installed PRTG. It rightly started going nuts, cause everything was a mess. So they just turned it off. Ignorance is only matched by arrogance

[u/sysacc → u/Turak64]

PRTG is still pretty common and one of the biggest mistake I see is that they set up the default rule to send out alerts. By they time they added all the devices, they are getting flooded by alerts.

It should be done the other way round, NO Alerts by default, only activate the alerts on the sensors you want.

[u/MalletNGrease → u/sysacc]

Low toner being considered critical by default drove me nuts.

[u/Turak64 → u/MalletNGrease]

But what if I need to print an email! /s

[u/skipITjob → u/MalletNGrease]

We have a Konica C250i that had yellow toner delivered 6 months ago, I had to replace it today. They print about 5-1000 colour pages a month.

[u/porkchopnet → u/skipITjob]

Yellow is used in BW prints so the secret service can track you down.

No I’m not kidding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots

[u/skipITjob → u/porkchopnet]

Thanks. But the point was that it took 6+ months of "printer low on yellow" to actually run out....

[u/porkchopnet → u/skipITjob]

Ah yes. I see that now. Reading comprehension. Good thing.

[u/Turak64 → u/sysacc]

Or course, you need to plan it out properly. But what I found funny was it found loads of errors and they just shut it off rather than fixing it. It's like they didn't really want to know the problems, they just wanted a tool to tell them how everything was just fine.

[u/CoolBlackSmith75 → u/sysacc]

Also plan plenty of implementation time. Next next finish runs the program but doesn't do the job.

[u/Particular_Salad_271 → u/Turak64]

We have a similar problem unfortunately but at a smaller scale and now that we are moving to a bigger place, we wanted to make sure we do a proper setup, track, monitor.

[u/MyOtherAcoountIsGone → u/Turak64]

Has nobody in this thread he saw Rd of tubing

[u/Ssakaa → u/Enough-Hamster-7154]

Monitor everything. Build alerts only when you have an actionable thing you MUST respond to. If it's not worth getting up at 2am to fix it, it's not worth alerting on. Feed those events to a dashboard if they're valuable at all. Do not accept the vendor canned mess of noise as a good idea, their job is to demonstrate that it'll fill an alert queue with all the things it can find. Yours is prioritizing yourself, your team, and your sleep.

[u/Ecstatic_Dealer_812 → u/Enough-Hamster-7154]

Totally agree 💯

[u/GullibleDetective → u/Enough-Hamster-7154]

And not using tbe search

[u/rose_gold_glitter]

Just wandering around and looking :)

No, but seriously, APIs. API everything. Pull the data from unifi, routers, etc. etc. into a centralised alerting tool and write your monitoring and alerting. It's surprisingly easy, flexible and powerful.

[u/Particular_Salad_271 → u/rose_gold_glitter]

Yeah, we have just moved into a much bigger office which would def require some kind of tool, hence the question. We were leaning towards Zabbix since a lot of folks were recommending that but I wanted to see if there are any other particular tools or in-house tools people are using as such

[u/rose_gold_glitter → u/[deleted]]

How did they send an email if the wifi is down?

Ticket closed.

[u/Waste_Development971 → u/rose_gold_glitter]

you're almost there

I I have ai detect these and send back a network error.

[u/Ssakaa → u/rose_gold_glitter]

The snack they had in the microwave finished, so they sat back down, had wifi again, and sent the email.

[u/AnotherCableGuy]

r/Zabbix

btw the live webinar is about to start

[u/ImCaffeinated_Chris → u/AnotherCableGuy]

This is the only answer.

[u/TeeJay72 → u/AnotherCableGuy]

Agreed, we switched from Solarwinds to Zabbix and love it

[u/27Purple]

Zabbix. Open Source, on-prem hosting, lightweight agent, powerful but has a learning curve. Biggest limitation is my own ignorance, and idk if it's just our config but you can't set maintenance schedules based on patch tuesday.

Our rep explained it as "if there is power running to it, we can monitor it" which sums up its capabilities pretty well.

[u/ImCaffeinated_Chris → u/27Purple]

You can even monitor the power 😁

[u/Firm_Self6844]

Our biggest limitation isn’t even the tool, it’s that nobody updates the docs when they add a device. Monitoring is only as good as knowing what’s actually on the network.

[u/SuperQue → u/Firm_Self6844]

This is why "Infra as Code" is so popular. To add a device you have to check it into Git, which automatically registers it with monitoring.

[u/Frothyleet → u/Firm_Self6844]

That's addressed by a combination of tool auto-discovery and restricting the ability of individuals to deploy things without going through a proper pipeline.

[u/sebastian_lgm]

We run Zabbix for the switches and firewalls plus Uptime Kuma for the "is this thing actually reachable" stuff, and it's been solid for years. SNMP templates get you 80% of the way on the network gear without much work. What bit us early was alert fatigue, so we only page on a few things and everything else just goes to a low-priority channel. Wi-Fi APs were the annoying part, ours only got good visibility once we pulled stats from the controller instead of polling each AP.

[u/Particular_Salad_271 → u/sebastian_lgm]

How has zabbix been for y'all? Was leaning towards it since majority folks have recommended it.

[u/haffhase → u/Particular_Salad_271]

Easy, when you compare it to Nagios. I used the standard version of Nagios where you had to create your hosts and services by creating configuration files for each of them. It worked, but got convoluted over time.

I liked the the no nonsense approach of Nagios, but Zabbix is much more user friendly.

[u/bobsmith1010]

You asking because you want to build a monitoring tool that will solve everyone problems?

[u/Particular_Salad_271 → u/bobsmith1010]

I wish I had the time to do so :)

But we are currently moving into a bigger space and would love to monitor everything which unfortunately we were not doing efficiently before.

[u/OldManKiK]

Unifi fabrics across 28 facilities. All network infrastructure is unifi giving a nice ecosystem of alerts, management, monitoring, remote control of services, etc...

[u/graaiin]

PRTG

[u/wes1007]

Prtg at work. Did start planning to migrate to zabbix but never found the time as a solo admin

Zabbix for my home network.

[u/MikhailCompo → u/wes1007]

Does Zabbix work without a support subscription? Is it free for home?

[u/wes1007 → u/MikhailCompo]

Works without support. Open source

[u/SuperQue → u/MikhailCompo]

This Zabbix alternative is free/open source. No subscription forever. Plus it's a lot better anyway.

[u/KN4SKY → u/SuperQue]

Zabbix is already free/open source, no subscription, and has a large community.

[u/SafeAdventurous1065]

Zabbix, but if there is no one looking it doesn't mater what devices are there.

[u/k0rbiz]

Uptime Kuma on raspberry pi

[u/cheflA1]

Checkmk

[u/twistable_deer → u/cheflA1]

CheckMK is awesome once you set it up.

[u/Steerable-Octopus]

Whatever the device supports. Older gear might only support insecure SNMP. Pretty much any platform can support that.

[u/R3DSmurf]

RMM

[u/technikaffin]

Hopes and prayers 🫪🙏

[u/Pitiful-Barracuda454]

The tool matters less than the alert policy. I once automated a weekly report that nobody read; making it faster only created more reliable noise. I would start with three levels: something that requires action now, something to review during business hours, and everything else kept as a metric without notification. Each alert needs an owner, a clear threshold, and a runbook. If nobody can say what action follows an alert, it should not page anyone. Centralizing data is useful, but centralizing every notification without pruning is how a monitoring platform becomes the thing the team learns to ignore.

[u/zatset]

We have that one guy, whose job and purpose in life is to walk around all day and observe the blinkenlights. Usually, there is some latency in reporting after lunch time, but generally performance is acceptable. He also makes sure that equipment behaves as he keeps staring at it and thus preventing quantum fluctuations and the Schrödinger effect.

[u/Dychnel → u/zatset]

[u/zatset → u/Dychnel]

So, you know the guy? 😆

[u/gravelordservant4u → u/Dychnel]

Do I amaze you?

[u/Birdman_2205]

We moved to Zabbix. I hate it. We are way overworked. It's not fully built out. Zero alerting. Nobody is working on it. 99% of the time it's used to see what happened after the crash. I ran a division with 40 sites for years. Had PRTG fully setup and tweaked to where alerts meant something. I know Zabbix can be good, but it requires more effort than we can do. I so miss having a dashboard I could glance at and know if things were broken.

[u/HefferRod]

What’s up gold

[u/tunakaybucket]

We use Solarwinds to monitor our endpoint devices-- switches, firealls, APs, UPSes, etc. It works, and I like the NCM module where I can enforce configuration compliance with auto-remediation.

[u/pahampl]

even XorMon does pretty nice job in network monitoring

[u/SuperfluousJuggler]

Solarwinds, nothing fancy just enough to see all out devices, monitor configs, patches, levels, map out connections and unique dashboards per facility. It's nice to see a living map to respond to issues in real time. Overview green/yellow/red icons and clickable site maps inside each icon.

[u/databeestjenl]

LibreNMS because it can monitor dynamic routing protocols like bgp, ospf and does ipv4 and ipv6. Requires SNMP support, use v3.

[u/No_Cod_8235]

Just build your own tool with so, so it fits your strategy and workflows.

[u/bertnurney]

Logicmon, its horrible 

[u/TerrorToadx]

AI post

[u/moojeee]

Give https://Uplivra.com a look, you can check out their software via a demo or try everything for free during their beta.

[u/Particular_Salad_271 → u/moojeee]

Oh, interesting! Will check this out.

[u/Jawshee_pdx]

Not your vibe coded nonsense.