BMC Helix Client Management vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

This tool will work the best in homogeneous environment where systems are running on Windows OS. In heterogeneous environment like ours where we have Windows, Linux and OS X operating systems, roll out and integration will be a challenge since not all the systems will have accessibility from a common credential

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Easy to use
• Easy to upgrade
• Highly flexible without customization
• Great community/support
• Patch management provides the flexibility to deploy patches using a test to production methodology. It also allows us to customize restart actions which helps with compliance but eases disruption to the business.
• Computer imaging and software deployment work together to improve speed to delivery.
• Financial asset management is very useful providing all of the information we need to support our PC replacement process.

• 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.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if it were possible to export search results
• Schedule my reports to automatically, run at intervals of my choosing with the results either emailed or dumped to disk as a CSV
• Easy report writing

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The process followed by the support team for incidents as well as support requests will become bottleneck for dynamically growing organisations as nothing works fast from a support point of view. A few of the requirements that we asked for took more time to execute and most of them came with a cost.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

Incentivized

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

Incentivized

As we decided to go for BMC Remedy for ITSM, BMC Helix Client Management was the better solution than other tools for ITAM solution as integrating ITAM and ITSM was easier than other tools and also from support point of view, it will be one throat to choke. The reporting module was elaborate and customisable.

Incentivized

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.

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

Incentivized

• BMC Client Management has improved our speed to delivery, quality of service and security by providing the necessary automation tools to improve our processes.

• 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.

Incentivized