HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) vs. Watchman Monitoring

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

If you are in IT consulting or manage any fleet of computers, both Mac and PC (and yes Linux) - you should have this installed. It will be able to provide you the information needed to repair computers and avoid productivity loss by users.

Incentivized

• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at scanning for devices and adding them for monitoring is almost effortless.
• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at detecting most HP hardware and integrating with local management software.

Incentivized

• Super easy to deploy.
• Integrates well with ZenDesk and YourComputerInventory.com.
• Website is very clear and email to manage.
• Support is awesome.
• Super lightweight package.

Incentivized

• 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

• Would like to see non-computer deployment agent - such as Synology.
• Since it's mainly reporting, this isn't necessary improvement, but it would be good if it can receive data - so in case we can't ping a machine, maybe use Watchman as a backdoor - but that would go against it's main principles.

Incentivized

For basic functions it's very easy to set up and use. However, for more advanced functions it takes a lot of time to figure out its quirks

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.

Incentivized

• 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

• I've been using it since the day it came out - there have so many times where a machine has had an error reported by Watchman that we've been able to save the client before something terrible happened.
• The ROI is there - you can easily resell this product to your clients, or wrap it into your product offering.

Incentivized