Observium
Observium is a bootstrapped, Isle-of-Man-incorporated network monitoring platform that provides automatic device discovery, SNMP-based performance metrics collection, threshold alerting and traffic accounting across multi-vendor infrastructure, sold via a Community/Professional/Enterprise freemium model to governments, ISPs, enterprises and managed service providers worldwide.
- Company typePrivate
- Founded2007
- HeadquartersMorpeth, United Kingdom
- Headcount1–10
- GTM typeB2B
- OfferingSoftware
What Observium does
Observium is a privately held network monitoring and management platform, founded in 2007 by Adam Armstrong, a veteran of the British service provider and telecommunications industry, and operated through Observium Limited, a company incorporated in the Isle of Man (Company No. 022546V). The platform automatically discovers network devices and services on multi-vendor infrastructure, collects performance metrics over SNMP using a proprietary autodiscovery engine and a broad MIB/OS library spanning over 458 OS types, and renders real-time and historical data through a web-based interface with threshold alerting and (in paid tiers) traffic accounting for 95th-percentile bandwidth billing. It supports discovery protocols (LLDP, CDP, FDP, AIP), standard and proprietary routing protocol metrics (BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, BFD, IP SLA, class-based QoS), a RESTful API, distributed polling at the Enterprise tier, and integrations with collectd, munin, smokeping, RANCID and application collectors for Apache, BIND, DRBD, Memcached, MySQL and NFS.
The company operates a freemium, community-led go-to-market motion. A free Community Edition is distributed under the QPL Open Source license via 6-monthly .tar.gz releases (most recently 26.01 on 16 January 2026) and serves as the primary top-of-funnel acquisition channel for home labs, small non-critical deployments, evaluation and MSPs. Paid tier revenue comes from Professional subscriptions at £250/year and Enterprise subscriptions at £1,500/year, with Professional offered free of charge to registered charities and open-source projects. Customers span internet and streaming firms (Twitch, eBay, PayPal, Yahoo, Spotify, Daily Motion), energy and government buyers (Aramco, US Department of Energy, Scottish and Queensland Governments), networking and infrastructure operators (Arista, Allied Telesis, FranceIX, Squarespace, CCP Games, eHarmony), and managed service providers (TechOptics, Custodian DataCentres).
Commercially, Observium is bootstrapped with no disclosed external funding, a small core development team (Adam Armstrong as Founder and Lead Developer, Tom Laermans and Mike Stupalov as Developers/Committers), and relies on community-driven marketing through documentation, a public MIB Browser at mibs.observium.org, a live demo, community Discord/mailing list engagement and an SVN-based release mechanism for paying subscribers. The product is professionally developed and maintained by network engineers, positioning Observium as a horizontally deployed monitoring tool used by tens of thousands of installations monitoring millions of devices worldwide.
Observium firmographics
Firmographics- Name
- Observium
- Legal name
- Observium Limited
- Website
- https://observium.org
- Company type
- Private
- Founded year
- 2007
- Operating status
- Operating
- Headcount range
- 1–10 employees
- Short description
- Observium is a bootstrapped, Isle-of-Man-incorporated network monitoring platform that provides automatic device discovery, SNMP-based performance metrics collection, threshold alerting and traffic accounting across multi-vendor infrastructure, sold via a Community/Professional/Enterprise freemium model to governments, ISPs, enterprises and managed service providers worldwide.
- Ownership category
- akta.pro rank
Observium industry classification
Industry- Product category
- Network Monitoring Software
- NAICS
- Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182), Computer Systems Design and Related Services (54151), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518)
- SIC
- Services-Prepackaged Software (7372), Services-Computer Programming Services (7371), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)
- akta.pro primary industry
- Network Observability & Telemetry (Flow/Packet/Streaming) (HDAFAGAB)
- akta.pro secondary industry
- Network Performance Management & Observability Services (BPAEAEAH)
Keywords
Where Observium is headquartered
LocationHeadquarters
- HQ city
- Morpeth
- HQ country
- United Kingdom
- HQ region
- Europe
Offices1 record
Markets served
Observium business model
Business model- GTM type
- B2B
- Offering type
- Software
- Cost components
- Personnel, Technology or R&D, Operations, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales
Revenue model
- Subscription Licenses: Annual subscription licensing model for Professional and Enterprise editions. Professional Edition provides daily bug fixes, security updates, new features, threshold monitoring and traffic accounting. Enterprise Edition adds 10 hours of support time and priority consideration for new features.
- Community Edition (Freemium): Free Community Edition distributed via 6-monthly releases under QPL Open Source license. Serves as top-of-funnel for paid editions while enabling wide adoption and community growth.
Pricing tiers
| Model | Billing | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Freemium | Pay-as-you-go | Community Edition - Free tier for home labs and evaluation |
| Subscription | Annual | Professional Edition - £250/year for SME and ISPs |
| Subscription | Annual | Enterprise Edition - £1500/year for large enterprises |
Go-to-market motion1 record
Distribution channels3 records
Marketing channels5 records
Observium product offering
Product offeringCore offering
Observium is a self-hosted SNMP-based network monitoring and management platform that automatically discovers network devices and services, collects long-term performance metrics, and delivers real-time alerts through a web-based interface. It is sold as three tiered software products — a free Community Edition (open source under QPL), a Professional Edition (£250/yr) targeted at SMEs and ISPs with traffic accounting and protocol coverage, and an Enterprise Edition (£1,500/yr) for large deployments that adds distributed polling and bundled live support hours — and is used by enterprises, ISPs, MSPs and governments to monitor multi-vendor network infrastructure.
Product overview
Observium is a comprehensive network monitoring and management platform offering three distinct editions: Community (free, open-source), Professional (subscription), and Enterprise (subscription). The platform automatically discovers network devices and services, collects performance metrics, and generates alerts when problems are detected. It includes a RESTful API, extensive device support spanning over 458 OS types, and built-in integrations with third-party tools like collectd, munin, smokeping, and RANCID. The platform also provides a companion MIB Browser tool for SNMP MIB database lookups.
Differentiator
Problem solved
Functional benefit
Products and services
- Observium Community Edition Free, open-source (QPL) self-hosted network monitoring platform distributed via 6-monthly .tar.gz releases with autodiscovery, alerting and a web interface; targeted at home labs, small non-critical deployments, evaluation and lab environments.
- Observium Professional Edition Annual subscription (£250/yr, free for charities and Open Source projects) edition of the Observium platform that adds daily SVN-based security and bug fixes, threshold/state/syslog alerting, traffic accounting for customer bandwidth billing (95th percentile), BFD/IP SLA/Class-based QoS metrics, spanning tree and pseudowire support, EIGRP/OSPF/BGP routing-protocol metrics, RESTful API and ability to scale across multiple servers; targeted at SMEs and ISPs.
- Observium Enterprise Edition Top-tier annual subscription (£1,500/yr) edition of Observium for large enterprises, including all Professional features, distributed polling across multiple servers for scale, 10 hours of included Enterprise-grade email and live support, and priority consideration for new feature requests.
- Observium MIB Browser Free, web-based companion tool that lets users look up OID names, numeric OIDs, MIBs and textual conventions across standard and vendor MIBs (BGP4-MIB, OSPF-MIB, ENTITY-MIB, IF-MIB, IP-MIB, HOST-RESOURCES-MIB, CISCO-ENVMON-MIB etc.), supporting the Observium platform and serving as an acquisition asset for prospective customers.
Quantifiable outcome
- Automated network monitoring with minimal configuration required
- +2 more outcomes
Companies that use Observium
Customer profileNamed customers18 records
Segments5 records
Ideal customer profiles3 records
Observium technology and API
TechnologyTechnology focussed Yes
API detail
- Has API
- Yes
- API docs
- API detail
Core technology
AI maturity
App detail
Integration10 records
Feature8 records
Observium partnerships and signals
Strategic signalPartnerships
One partnership is on record.
- Various Hardware VendorscoreObservium development team frequently works with hardware vendors to extend and test support for new devices, ensuring broad vendor compatibility.
Scale indicators4 records
Recent moves5 records
Expansion highlights4 records
Observium competitors and assessment
Company assessmentBroad incumbents
- LogicMonitor: LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based infrastructure and network monitoring platform aimed at enterprises and MSPs, overlapping with Observium at the higher end of the network monitoring market.
- Datadog (Network Performance Monitoring): Datadog is a broader observability platform whose Network Performance Monitoring module competes with Observium at the high end, offering cloud-native delivery, AIOps and unified logs/metrics/APM at much larger scale.
- ManageEngine OpManager: ManageEngine OpManager is a broad IT management vendor whose network monitoring suite competes with Observium, especially in mid-market and managed services environments.
Direct peers
- LibreNMS: LibreNMS is an open-source NMS with autodiscovery and broad device support, widely used by ISPs and similar to Observium in target user, technology approach and community-led distribution.
- Zabbix: Zabbix is a leading open-source network and infrastructure monitoring platform with both community and commercial editions, directly comparable in GTM model and feature set to Observium Community/Professional.
- Checkmk: Checkmk is an enterprise-grade open-core infrastructure monitoring platform with paid editions, directly competing with Observium in mixed server/network monitoring for large organizations.
- WhatsUp Gold (Progress): WhatsUp Gold is a long-standing commercial network monitoring product targeting the same SME/mid-market buyer, with overlapping features in autodiscovery, alerting and traffic reporting.
- Paessler PRTG Network Monitor: PRTG is a perennial direct competitor in the all-in-one SNMP/network monitoring category, offering similar autodiscovery, alerting and broad device support aimed at the same SME/IT-admin buyer.
- SolarWinds (Network Performance Monitor): SolarWinds' flagship NPM is among the most widely deployed commercial network monitoring platforms globally, competing head-to-head with Observium in mid-market and enterprise infrastructure monitoring use cases.
- Nagios (Nagios Core / Nagios XI): Nagios is one of the most established open-source monitoring frameworks, with a commercial XI edition comparable to Observium's paid tiers and a similar SME/MSP customer profile.
Market position
Strengths5 records
Weaknesses5 records
Competitive moat4 records
Key risks5 records
Key highlights6 records
Customer concentration
Observium social profiles
Digital presenceObservium financial estimates
Financial estimateRevenue estimate
Valuation estimate
Observium leadership team
Management profileNumber of profiles
Profiles3 records
Observium funding detail
Funding detailFunding overview
Funding rounds
Investors
Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Observium M&A and investment
M&A and investmentM&A
Investments
M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →
Frequently asked questions about Observium
What does Observium do?
Observium is a self-hosted SNMP-based network monitoring and management platform that automatically discovers network devices and services, collects long-term performance metrics, and delivers real-time alerts through a web-based interface. It is sold as three tiered software products — a free Community Edition (open source under QPL), a Professional Edition (£250/yr) targeted at SMEs and ISPs with traffic accounting and protocol coverage, and an Enterprise Edition (£1,500/yr) for large deployments that adds distributed polling and bundled live support hours — and is used by enterprises, ISPs, MSPs and governments to monitor multi-vendor network infrastructure.
Is Observium a public or private company?
Observium is a private company. It is classified as founder individual operated bootstrapped and is currently operating.
When was Observium founded?
Observium was founded in 2007. It employs 1 to 10 people.
Where is Observium based?
Observium is headquartered in Morpeth, United Kingdom, in the Europe region.
How does Observium make money?
Two revenue lines are on record. Subscription Licenses are the primary driver. The others are community Edition (Freemium).
Who are Observium's main competitors?
Broad incumbents on record are LogicMonitor, Datadog (Network Performance Monitoring) and ManageEngine OpManager. Direct peers are LibreNMS, Zabbix, Checkmk, WhatsUp Gold (Progress), Paessler PRTG Network Monitor, SolarWinds (Network Performance Monitor) and Nagios (Nagios Core / Nagios XI).
Does Observium have an API?
Yes. Observium provides a RESTful API that allows developers to build custom integrations and automate operations. The API is available in both Professional and Community editions, enabling programmatic access to monitoring data, device management, and alerting functions. Developer documentation is at docs.observium.org/api.
What industry is Observium in?
Observium's product category is Network Monitoring Software. Its primary akta.pro industry code is HDAFAGAB, Network Observability & Telemetry (Flow/Packet/Streaming), with a secondary code of BPAEAEAH, Network Performance Management & Observability Services. Its NAICS code is 5182 and its SIC code is 7372.