HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) vs. N-able N-central

This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products

Incentivized

N-Able is perfect for an MSP environment. It gives all the standard functionality an IT professional needs out of the box and can be configured to show almost anything required. For example, we have configured a dashboard to show when our backups need attention for each customer. This is achieved by running a small script on repeat via N-Central everyday/evening, and the result gives us information on the dashboard to help us identify exactly what is working and what needs looking into.

Incentivized

• One point of view the events of servers's farm.
• Tools that show an inventory update of hardware componenet of each servers.
• Include a wonderful module that permit to upgrade remotely the firmware of all of them.

Incentivized

• Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment.
• Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session.
• Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans.

• I think some of the areas that HP Systems Insight Manager can improve is non HP hardware.
• This software also sometimes struggles handling larger environments.
• This software also has issues managing environments that aren't set up perfectly.

Incentivized

• Customer support just points to online guides and I feel they aren't helpful.
• During the trial they turn on a lot of features. In my experience, if you play around with the features, they charge you for them. Keep this in mind if you move forward with N-Able - they will charge for "trialed" services.
• In my experience, some services that you're being charged for can't be disabled or monitored by you or your team. You only see them on the monthly invoice.
• In my opinion, the "Scripting Automation" doesn't provide value. You're either going to be writing your own batch or Powershell to make scripting work.
• In my opinion, monitoring software deployments is painful.
• The default monitoring template can't be duplicated, edited, or referenced. You'll find that the default monitors in an unusual way and will throw needless recurring alerts into your ticketing system. To avoid this, you need to create a template from scratch which takes many hours to set up.
• In my opinion, they're more concerned about a quick buck than customer service. "Buyer beware" company.

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

Incentivized

The gui is really useful to do many things. We are a compliance team that hace a reduce user con this platform that they are using on its monsthly technical audit. Ther are very happy with SIM. In the other hand, they are a sysadmin teams that usually use SIM all of day to detect a reporte to HPE Technical Support for hardware fail. All of then are on the moon with SIM.

Incentivized

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

Incentivized

Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.

Incentivized

It's good for small organizations that use HP branded equipment

Incentivized

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

Incentivized

The project of deploy SIM in our company came from one project to buy HPE Hardware and sevice for Data Center.Fastly we knew that the potenciality of this product over the new HPE's servers, switches and storages.Nowaday, our Data Centers have device from different vendors like Lenovo, Dell and HPE. For example we have Dell OpenManage for managing Dell Powereldge servers. And in comparative with SIM is useless for no technical user.

Incentivized

Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.

• Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
• This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
• I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.

Incentivized

• We have lost hundreds of hours on the phone/emailing support with no resolution for any of our issues
• We had to move all of our services away which was very painful
• Staff satisfaction was low having to deal with this company