F5 Beacon vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

It is very well suited in complex, multi-cloud application environments where it provides holistic, application-centric visibility by ingesting data from NGINX and other telemetry sources. It helps troubleshoot performance issues in high-availability and regulated environments where outages have a high impact on strict SLAs. It is less appropriate in situations where organizations rely on unmaintained or archived integrations.

[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].

Incentivized

• It supports seamless multi cloud and hybrid monitoring with easy integration.
• It provides actionable insights for faster troubleshooting.
• It delivers comprehensive end to end application visibility.

• 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.

Incentivized

• F5 needs improvement in Platform Stability and Maintenance gaps.
• It has limited built-in insights and relies heavily on customization.
• Application modeling and data ingestion setup is complex.

• Server trending could be stronger. A server which sits at the same resource usage day in and day out can be normal operation while Virtualization manager may report it as an issue.
• Orion in general can be painful to change a node page with the desired screens and widgets

Incentivized

Critical component for companies ability to maintain services both customer facing as well as internal systems. Without insight into our VM estate provided by VMAN outage duration as well as frequency would increase to unacceptable levels. VMAN has allowed us to consolidate multiple monitoring mechanisms into one, as part of the Orion suite providing us with 1 solution. This has the added benefit of enabling our engineers to focus on learning 1 solution oppose to multiple solutions, meaning we're able to handle administration and support of our monitoring across the whole company alot more efficiently from a time spent resource as well as savings on costings.

Incentivized

The reason for the above rating is that F5 Beacon delivers clear visibility, helpful insights, and streamlined decision-making, which, in turn, translates into a better user experience. Beacon easily ingests telemetry from multiple sources, including NGINX, BIG-IP devices, and third-party platforms. The Beacon insight engine generates actionable recommendations and performs anomaly detection.

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.

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Pretty straighforward, as long as you check Solarwinds site for recommended installation path. KEY ITEM - be sure that you know which versions of all SolarWinds products you are using, because there are incompatability issues between versions for many products. It took me about 2 hours with a spreadsheet to figure out an upgrade path. Don't assume that the version you downloaded is the right/most current version without checking first!

Incentivized

F5 Beacon is best for F5-centric, hybrid, app-centric visibility, whereas Datadog is best for cloud-native, distributed observability. F5 beacon is superior for understanding BIG-IP flows, WAF, ADC behavior at the app level. It has a unified view of F5-powered applications. F5 Beacon simplifies troubleshooting across multicloud F5 deployments. Beacon provides business logic level visibility.

To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to offer as well as having it integrate into our already existing SolarWinds SAM environment.

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• Positive - It provides deep, application-centric visibility by aggregating telemetry from NGINX and other sources.
• Positive - It improved decision making about scaling, security, and resource allocation.
• Negative - Setup and Maintenance is a bit complex.

• 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.

Incentivized