Look forward to using long term
Updated July 19, 2020
Look forward to using long term
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
This is vital to our full stack monitoring solution. Spanning global datacentres and branch offices SW VM provides full coverage of our virtual estate. It's main benefit is resource both in human and technical sense. As an engineer allowing me to diagnose and resolve outages in a significantly quicker timeframe. Benefitting both end users for internal systems but also our customers.
Its in depth coverage also allows us to identify wasteful resources and maximise our efficiency bringing real savings to infrastructure on premise costs.
Its in depth coverage also allows us to identify wasteful resources and maximise our efficiency bringing real savings to infrastructure on premise costs.
- In depth VM and Host coverage, particularly metrics such as CPU ready time, no more calculations working out % based on ms latency - its all available at glance of a chart.
- Coverage of both SAN and VM environments compliments eachother really well allowing us to diagnose any bottle necks within 15 minutes compared to an hour prior to using SW VM.
- Custom dashboards allows all our engineers to customise their NOC views allowing the umbrella departments to quicker respond or be able to proactively work with other departments to avoid downtime.
- AWS coverage, not had major chance to research but seems to lack native compatibility for AWS specific services - such as ECS / Cloudfront metrics etc.
- Some container technologies such as Docker, again not had much time to research but upon first investigations doesn't seem as native to implement monitoring compared to say VMware.
- AD deep dive monitoring - replication times etc.
- Maximising computing and storage resources as easy visibility of waste.
- Long deployment lead time (but more due to resources on our end).
Easier out of the box experience saving 100 of man hours configuring checks. Also much friendly UI. But main benefit is the full stack picture it can provide which seems to be forever growing.
Using SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
30 - Solarwinds VMAN is utilised across multiple discipline teams spanning from management, service desk, project engineers of all tiers. VMAN is fully integrated into our custom NOC set up from Solarwinds Orion suite providing a single pane of truth with across our entire VM estate. Due to Orions integration we're able to cover multiple environments (cloud vendors as well as our VM estate) consolidated into just one NOC environment.
20 - We have a full service desk and technology engineering department utilising VMAN spanning multiple skillsets whether that be management, 1st tier support to 4th tier support. VMAN consumption for less technical users due to simplicity of UI, whilst simple administration is made relatively seamless with way VMAN leverages your vcentre environment. Some more advanced customisation requires more Solarwinds VMAN specific knowledge which I've found documentation is more than sufficient and if any further issues their support team have always been able to resolve.
More in relation to Orion oppose to VMAN but we do also have SQL DBA's who maintain the DB.
More in relation to Orion oppose to VMAN but we do also have SQL DBA's who maintain the DB.
- NOC visibility
- Out of hours alerting
- capacity planning
- custom dashboards integrating multiple Orion components
- automated remedial action based on certain alerts
- More use of automation functionality
- better use of capacity planning
- reporting features to improve efficiency of vm estate