Likelihood to Recommend Blackfire.io is super helpful in allowing proactive testing of applications before releasing on the production environment. Blackfire.io provides actionable insights to improve code proactively by integration with the development software. Also tracks the live production environment and is able to highlight any loading issues or unusual bounce rates. Blackfire.io also monitors HTTP requests and SQL queries which again help improve efficiency for developers and reduce development time.
Read full review On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.
Read full review Pros Provide details on processes eating up valuable server resources Alert against bottlenecks and find bottlenecks Performs load tests in code before moving to production environments Read full review I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage. I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget. Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management. Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes. Read full review Cons They count same API endpoint AND same method (e.g. POST, OPTIONS, GET etc) as different profiles Customer service needs a lot of improvement The documentation can be a bit more detailed to remove any scope of doubts Read full review We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact. Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Likelihood to Renew Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.
Read full review Usability SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.
Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Performance We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.
Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Support Rating SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
Read full review Implementation Rating Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis
Read full review Alternatives Considered blackfire.io definitely provides an edge over competing products such as
Datadog due to the level of monitoring and analysis it provides.
Datadog is a great tool however when evaluating and catching inefficiencies in lower non production environments, blackfire.io provides a level of reporting that were did not find any competing products.
Read full review The operation began using
Nagios XI , after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.
Read full review Scalability Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.
Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Return on Investment Reduce in bugs by 50%, more happy customers 2x decrease in load time for the website 100% performance validation before production release Read full review VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware. VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined. VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Screenshots