Likelihood to Recommend Appropriate if you are setting up a monitoring suite in new Infrastructure Environment. Definitely NOT suited for Migration Projects. ScienceLogic SL1 cannot cater to a lot of monitoring requirements which already would have been configured in old monitoring suite. Plus, limited support for customizations and having to go to "Feature Requests" route makes in extremely complicated.
Read full review For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
Read full review Pros Best overall coverage of montioring different technologies. Easy to use in any environment Customizable being able to generate your own reports, dashboards, DA's, RBA's, etc. Have very good out of the box integrations with other monitoring solutions such as ServiceNow Always improving and regularly releasing new versions and upgrades to the system/DA's. Interactive community Read full review Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud. Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines. It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers. Read full review Cons More freedom to create custom dashboards as on the previous versions we could do much more The Performance TAB windows is too small and cannot be resized or maximized when looking at reports for "Overview", "File System" and any of those items. There are not enough widgets to create stunning dashboard in AP2 The reporting feauture is a very untouched area. Read full review Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions. Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count. More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product. Mike Hochstein Senior Director, Infrastructure Architecture & Standards
Read full review Likelihood to Renew We migrated away from our 20-year-old homegrown solution and have no back-tracking capability. ScienceLogic is demonstrating new capabilities that we would not have been able to do on our own using our legacy system. We understand the capabilities of competitors based on our bake-off selection where ScienceLogic won on capabilities and future near-term potential (expandability, platform growth). We know that those competitors are not really close to where we have been able to push ScienceLogic (as a partner).
Read full review We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.
Read full review Usability We use ScienceLogic SL1 in our organization to serve effective monitoring solutions to our external customers. Our customers depend upon us for critical events/alerts related to their IT infrastructure gears and using SL1, we're able to provide them with a proactive monitoring solution that resolves an issue before an impact is noticed by the customer. There are very few monitoring solutions that can cater to a variety of Cloud platforms like Public Cloud (AWS, Azure) and private cloud simultaneously and SL1 addresses this business problem very well
Read full review SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Science Logic SL1 provides the option of Distributed deployment where multiple instances of each appliance can be deployed to manage the load and availability. SL1 provides a High Availability feature for Database Servers and Data Collection. If one of the Data Collectors in the collector group fails, it will automatically redistribute the devices from the failed Data Collector among the other Data Collectors in the Collector Group. The high availability feature for the Database server ensures that SL1 performs failover automatically to another server without causing the outage to the application.
Read full review The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.
Read full review Performance The performance is entirely dependent on the complexity of the environment/network being used to host the platform. Outside of those factors, the platform runs very efficiently and quickly out of the box. We have integrations with other platforms and neither seem to take a hit from our moderate API usage. Any issues with performance would be experienced by choices made in infrastructure or complexity of things built by the customer to display in the GUI (overly complicated and cluttered dashboards for example)
Read full review The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.
Read full review Support Rating So far, it's good as part of my overall experience, except for a couple of use cases. The support team is well knowledgeable, has technical sound, and is efficient. When support escalates to engineering, the issue gets stuck and takes months to resolve.
Read full review I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.
Read full review In-Person Training When I joined our company, I did not know about the in person training at firts. Logging onto the SL University, I realised that there were different sessions being held at different times throughout the year. The training itself was good, but being in a different time zone, made it difficult to attend, but the sessions that I attended was great!
Read full review Online Training There are a lot of educational materials and courses on the SL1 training site (Litmos university). However the recording quality is sometimes not very good - screen resolution is low. There is a lack of professional rather than user-oriented documents and there are mistakes in documentation and education is not well structured.
Read full review It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
Read full review Implementation Rating Love to use Science logic tool as our first monitoring tool to provide services to the customer. Auto restart feature in Sl1 will allow us to get event when those crucial services has not started after server reboots and also minimize the P1's that we have as a result of that.
Read full review Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
Read full review Alternatives Considered Science logic SL1 is so user friendly and it's really easy to navigate between function. I would recommend Sciene logic SL1 to all of them who are looking for really useful monitoring tool and expecting easy way of managing it.
Read full review It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
Connie Inman Senior IT Technologist II & Desktop Support Supervisor
Read full review Scalability Our deployment model is vastly different from product expectations. Our global / internal monitoring foot print is 8 production stacks in dual data centers with 50% collection capacity allocated to each data center with minimal numbers of collection groups. General Collection is our default collection group. Special Collection is for monitoring our ASA and other hardware that cannot be polled by a large number of IP addresses, so this collection group is usually 2 collectors). Because most of our stacks are in different physical data centers, we cannot use the provided HA solution. We have to use the DR solution (DRBD + CNAMEs). We routinely test power in our data centers (yearly). Because we have to use DR, we have a hand-touch to flip nodes and change the DNS CNAME half of the times when there is an outage (by design). When the outage is planned, we do this ahead of the outage so that we don't care that the Secondary has dropped away from the Primary. Hopefully, we'll be able to find a way to meet our constraints and improve our resiliency and reduce our hand-touch in future releases. For now, this works for us and our complexity. (I hear that the HA option is sweet. I just can't consume that.)
Read full review It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up
Read full review Return on Investment Once a powerpack is developed and configured for a device for one customer, it is easy to deploy the same powerpack on a second customer estate and configure specifically for that customer without having to reinvent the powerpack. This saves time and therefore money. Once the customer estate tuning is complete, the Operations team have come trust the alerts. This is especially true when transient or self-correcting alerts are automatically cleared without ops team involvement, but a record is still available for audit and debugging purposes. This saves time and therefore money. When setup correctly, it provides good visibility into applications, devices and whole customer estates. This saves time and therefore money when issues arise. Read full review Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time. We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting. Read full review ScreenShots ScienceLogic SL1 Screenshots SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots