Solid, reliable and configurable monitoring and alerting solution

We started using Panopta over a year ago after having continual problems with some of the other better-known monitoring solutions; continual false-negative reports and convoluted interfaces were causing continual problems for us. Panopta's service has proven to be very reliable, allowing us to configure the points from which our servers are monitored which mean we're getting alerts from regions very close to our users, and we've been able to extend this past simple 'ping' type tests. Their alerting services are easily configurable and adaptable, meaning our staff receives alerts promptly when necessary. We have also had no issues with simple integrations via API to any services we've wanted so far. A couple of times we haven't been able to figure out issues on our own their support has proven to be very fast to respond and diligent with following up on any lingering concerns. Happy to recommend Panopta to anyone looking for a reliable, robust monitoring solution.

Pros

Ease of use; reliability; configurability; alerting systems; easily integrated with other systems

Cons

They don't have as many 'out of the box' integrations as some of the better-known solutions, however, it hasn't proven to be a big hurdle with a little work.

Just the right amount of monitoring

We use Panopta as our front-line monitoring system at Nutshell, a SaaS product. In particular, we needed a tool that would notify the team via phone call, for late-night coverage. Panopta made this easy. We struggled with the iPhone app at first, but they've launched a new version which works great for us. It's nice to get an iPhone notification as a heads-up before we escalate to phone/text. The UI to attach notification schedules to services is a bit unwieldy, but they've made significant progress. We lean toward a simple configuration, ("Is the app up?"), and put members into several escalation groups (iPhone -> text -> phone). The effort, cost, and overhead of PagerDuty haven't proven necessary. Panopta's actual core monitoring platform has been bulletproof for us: no false positives, immediate notifications. It helpfully covers things like SMTP, DNS, and SSL expiry, too. We use other monitoring platforms, but Panopta is the source of truth, for both the operations team and the rest of the company!

Pros

Phone call alerting, bulletproof monitoring, straightforward monitoring of an HTTPS endpoint

Cons

The UI to add a new team member to an existing schedule is a bit kludgy

Solid performance, mostly

Overall we're happy - all outages seem to be notified. The issue we do have is false notifications, that tend to wake up engineers in the middle of the night for no reason.

Pros

Mostly accurate

Cons

False positives.

Basic Network Monitoring Platform for startups

not so satisfied but I think the amount of money we pay for Panopta is just fair to the benefits we receive

Pros

What I like about Panopta is it is very easy to setup. The other thing is that it has built-in SMS notification system which can be used when there are critical alerts.

Cons

Panopta lacks SNMP polling. It is limited to ICMP monitoring

Great System Monitoring Solution

Panopta has been wonderful for providing server monitoring for our applications. The ability to add custom dashboards to show key metrics and add alerts when those metrics are out of policy has been key to monitoring our physical infrastructure and has allowed us to focus on running our products vs running our systems. I would highly recommend to anyone looking to monitor public/private cloud and physical systems.

Pros

- Cheaper than competitors - More features than competitors of similar price - Very robust dashboard an alert system

Cons

- Dashboards can be a bit difficult to change - Not all features are obvious and can take some getting used to