Fortra's Intermapper Reviews

We are a service provider. We operate a Juniper-based IT NTLS core, and we build access utilizing different technologies for getting connectivity to the customer.

It tremendously cuts down our troubleshooting timeframe because any problem can be traced. You have access to a portal, and in the portal, you can see just all of your devices. You can basically have devices broken by different groups. You can see devices with some minor or major alarms. You can see devices in the complete down state. If you see any device in a red state, you can just simply click on it. It will take you right into a map, and you can see what the problem is. In real life, you can see if it is an access network or a core. It is one of those features for which we should say "wow" to HelpSystems Intermapper.

What is really cool about HelpSystems InterMapper is that because of its SNMP base, you can integrate all different makes and models on the same map. You, of course, can have more than one map, but you have an option to have visibility into the entire network from one centralized system. You can monitor IPs, routers, radios, DC power plants, and UPS. You can do it all from one network management and monitoring solution. That's what really makes HelpSystems Intermapper great.

Another great thing about HelpSystems InterMapper is that you can really bundle different probes under one device. You can have a bundled device. You can monitor the physical status of a host based on the IP availability. You can also monitor services and actually see if anything happens. You can quickly determine whether it is the application layer, host layer, or network layer.

HelpSystems Intermapper gives such a unique representation of a network. Ever since we started using HelpSystems InterMapper, we don't have to document everything in a detailed format and store it somewhere. Right now, it is really a combination of network topology, network monitoring, and network analyzing. So, in my opinion, it is awesome.

When you have your SNMP topology defined, you don't require a dedicated NMS engineer to manage your system, which is another great thing about HelpSystems InterMapper. I see how our operators get so excited by having the ability to map a device or interface and connect interfaces together.

HelpSystems InterMapper is also very operator friendly; not just user friendly, but also operator friendly. This is a unique feature, and it works really great.

They can do a better job with SLA reporting. It does some basic reporting, but it really doesn't offer the ability to monitor devices by groups, customers, or carrier to give an overall health performance of specifically-defined environments. That's where HelpSystems Intermapper could have done a better job. 

I would love to see advanced SLA monitoring and reporting in this solution. They already have a lot of ingredients. They already have SNMP polling. It is really about what people are looking for from SLA monitoring, especially someone who looks at the network topology. You want to see your endpoints. You want to see half of your endpoints by simply analyzing ICMP or SNMP-based availability of your endpoints. Having an ability to define your group and how you bring devices into your group would be a huge benefit.

I have been using HelpSystems Intermapper for the last 15 years.

It depends on the environment. If you put an SNMP base and it's an SNMP-based solution behind a stateful firewall, you will see an issue, but it isn't an issue with HelpSystems InterMapper as such. You need to have proper environment sources. If you put HelpSystems InterMapper behind a fast network and do basic inspections and filtering, I would say it is extremely reliable.

I didn't have problems with its scalability. We have managed to go from about 100 devices to almost 4,000 or 5,000 devices, which is a pretty good number. What makes it cool is that you don't have to build everything in one environment. You can develop different tabs, and you can add device maps, for example, by a geographical area. You can break these maps by functionality. You can create maps for your IT group and your enterprise customers. You can also create maps for customers to whom you offer managed services with UPS, firewalls, and Wi-Fi. 

We have 20 or 30 users of this solution. Some users have just web access. Our support team has read-only access to HelpSystems InterMapper, which is the web-only access that is required to see a device in the red state. People can look at it quickly to get an idea about the uptime and some indication about the power issues.

It is used quite well in our organization. By having access to HelpSystems InterMapper, our support team doesn't have to really escalate too many tickets. We have a team for building new sites and keeping their eyes on our current sites. We have an engineering organization that is responsible for core maps and assisting the operators and support teams with different maps.

If you put some energy into it, you can create a lot of reference points in HelpSystems InterMapper. You can put information in the cloud and use it for the circuit ID in HelpSystems InterMapper. You can have an escalation with a circuit ID at the click of a button. You don't have to go and start looking up different records.

With carrier maps, you can create all of your nodes. Earlier, you had to go and search through the back of a system. Now you just click on it, and it takes seconds for an operator to see the flashing device in the carrier list, like the Verizon carrier map. You can click on the flashing red device and get the circuit ID for the flashing red device. Similarly, you can click on a carrier icon, and get the carrier escalation. 

Their technical support is pretty decent. I would probably rate them a seven or an eight out of ten. When you have some simple and straightforward questions, you get answers in a very decent timeframe. We had escalated some issues related to a reporting server or application, and we were not fully satisfied. They were okay. They weren't great.

The initial setup was simple.

I would recommend this solution, but it really depends on what you're looking for. HelpSystems Intermapper is more like a network topology tool in my opinion. This solution is more relevant for service providers, like SP organizations. That's where it helps as compared to other systems. You can take different environments for other systems, for example, Azure can be extremely important for intensive application monitoring. 

For a company for which I build the network, we had the IT system and homegrown systems. Some homegrown systems were SNMP-based, but we didn't have an SNMP system admin. We just had a person who was responsible for utilizing different applications, such as KRTG or Cacti. There was a lot of struggle in dealing with all these systems. These systems weren't exactly network interactive. It was back in 2002 or 2003 when I became familiar with HelpSystems Intermapper, and it really got my attention right away. You could see live networks and live devices. I like HelpSystems InterMapper ever since.

I am kind of a huge fan of this solution. In my 15 years of managing different software, I feel if InterMapper had a better SLA reporting and monitoring feature, it would have been especially awesome. It is almost perfect.

I would rate HelpSystems Intermapper a seven out of ten. If somebody would pay attention and add advanced SLA monitoring to the map, it would be a nine.

The solution is a network representation of the entire L2 level network diagrams, and it also gives notification triggers as to how we want to monitor the network diagramming, which is one of the uses we have for it. The second use is for all our application and network performance monitoring. We want to have the network level connectivity diagram, the architecture, know how the networks are connected, how the ports are interconnected and want to have a visual representation of our network. That is our core objective.

I work as the Head of IT, Engineering and Infrastructure in our company and we are a customer of HelpSystems.

The solution has a couple of features which are really interesting. It's not a fancy or expensive solution but we wanted to have a cost effective one and it's doing its job pretty well. We wanted to have the whole network connectivity diagram. It shows the color coding, where the connectivity is green, for example. If there's a problem it changes color from amber to red and we get notifications via email and SMS, so we're immediately aware if something is going wrong. 

There is a mobile app which we want because today most of our field engineers are not always in the office. It's all today portal-based which is a good feature for us.

There are a lot of expectations if you compare this product with other solutions like  SolarWinds, for example. That is a very advanced tools, and it's not fair to set that expectation on the smaller solutions designed for a specific purpose. I think this tool is fit for purpose and we're able to achieve what we want so we don't have any specific requirements from this tool.

I've been using this solution for over three years. 

It's a stable solution. 

It's a scalable solution. 

Technical support has been fine.

Initial setup was done by my network team and I believe it was relatively simple. We have around five people who use this product and it's used on an occasional basis. 

My advice is to make sure that you are clear about your requirements rather than going for a solution-based approach. You should know your needs and what you're looking for. There are thousands of product offers on the market which can do network monitoring but it should start with your needs. 

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

It's our default, go-to product for up/down monitoring in real-time. We have seven individual servers that we're running Intermapper for, and we monitor about 30,000 devices right now.

It's a nice graphical interface, a nice map, that relates Layer 1 to Layer 3, virtually instantly, for the Helpdesk support staff. It provides a default place to get critical information so we can deploy our staff. We service over 111 local school districts.

The most valuable features are its

• log history
• real-time monitoring capabilities
• accuracy -  the number of false positives is very low
• mapping features.

I'd love to see more of the network management side of it coming back into it. If we were able to run scripts to bounce ports on switches, that would be great. It's asking a lot, but it's actually very doable because I do it through scripting into other products. If we could incorporate that directly into Intermapper, that would be fantastic. I'm looking to enhance the product with other products that it will work with it but give me extra features, such as the ability to balance ports.

I love the information I get off Intermapper, but I need to do more. Once I get the information, I need to function with it. If I could take it to the next level in a single pane of glass would be great, but right now, I bounce between six different products to get the job done. That's why I would love to see a single pane of glass; if I could find something that could reference the Intermapper databases that are already built. I don't want to replace Intermapper, I want to enhance it with other products.

The stability is absolutely fantastic.

Regarding scalability, it does well. If you're trying to do flows, it's limited because of the hardware requirements in the background, but if you're using it for up/down-type monitoring, it scales up very well.

I've used tech support once or twice. At the time, it was when HelpSystems had just taken them over. It was a little rocky. But that was probably three years ago.

The setup was very straightforward but we've been running Intermapper for 10 years.

We're looking at SolarWinds and the new version of Intermapper - we're grandfathered in for it, so I'm not worried about that. We want to definitely deploy that. The cost of SolarWinds is too high. Extreme has an educational program that is priced right. It's about $5,000 for 35, 000 nodes.

Put Intermapper in as your base to start from, hands-down.

My most important criterion when selecting a vendor is product reliability. It actually has to run. A lot of products make promises and the stuff just doesn't work.

I would rate Intermapper a nine out of 10. Actually, it's a 10 because it does what it says it will do. In and of itself it's a 10. But I would like to see additional features put into it.

The graphical alerting with the ability to obtain a quick overview of a monitored device is my favorite feature. Information (gathered via Simple Network Management Protocol - SNMP), such as recent outages, basic information about the device (OS, serial number, etc.), its IP address, and any recent packet loss is a few simple clicks away. When a monitored device starts alerting, I can quickly get a feel for what is going on and obtain its IP address or fully qualified domain name (FQDN) quickly if I need it to investigate further via CLI.

It is also nice that it is relatively simple to add monitored objects, or whatever graphics we chose.

We have one of the remote access clients displayed on a big quad monitor in our NOC. Everybody in the NOC can immediately see if something major is going on. Systems administrators can quickly determine if server alerts are related to a site outage.

I have seen instances where Intermapper does not seem to recover from network changes. For example, if a switch is replaced, a connecting switch may generate a slew of black lines on the GUI for all the VLANs between the two switches. 

We have an older version of Intermapper. We might have an older version of Intermapper, and I do not know if network discovery is better in the newer versions.

I have been using this solution for at least three years.

On my desktop, I have Intermapper RemoteAccess 5.8.1 (Build 1786) for monitoring.

We also have a big quad monitor in our NOC that is using Intermapper RemoteAccess 5.6.2 (Build 02). The actual application is Intermapper 5.9.3 for Windows, which is running on a Windows 2008 R2 server.

No, Intermapper seems rock solid. The application runs 24/7 in our NOC. I cannot remember an instance of it ever failing.

We have not encountered any issues with scalability, and we are a global organization. To be fair though, the overall number of monitored devices is shrinking. On the plus side, the Intermapper RemoteAccess client has zero issues connecting to multiple servers.