Likelihood to Recommend This tool was integrated with Control-M, so whenever we receive any job failure, long-running job, job not started yet, etc, we receive an alert against it. This tool is also integrated with Maximo where we receive the incidents as well for it. Alert's color was as per the criticality of the job and that makes it very easy for an associate to act on it to resolve. We have the SLAs for the jobs as per the urgency of the jobs.
Read full review If your IT team isn't proficient in automation and scripting, Solarwinds NCM can fill that gap (assuming your company's security team signs off on approving SW in your environment given the hack.) Basic device configuration, pushing mass changes reliably and backups are NCM's strong suites. If you have a complex scenario where if/then cases are needed, NCM is a bit lack luster. Auto discovery isn't as easy either as certain parameters need to be met for that feature to work 100% of the time
Read full review Pros This is one of the best monitoring tools. Very simple to user. Color code makes it very simple as per severity. We receive the heartbeat alert every hour that shows the system is running up and fine. We have black, red, yellow, and orange color alerts that show the critical, urgent, major, and minor incidents. Read full review Integrates with Network Performance Management for Alerting and Reporting. NetPath and detects issues due to Configuration Change. Keeps a record of which user made the change. Which devices are not being backed up, devices where backups are failing, dashboard and alerting available. Read full review Cons Sometimes color differences of the incidents as per the criticality . We don't receive the heartbeat alerts sometimes. If the tool is down and we don't receive the alerts on the console we wait for the heartbeat alert and it makes some extra delay in resolving things. Read full review For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
Read full review Usability The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
Read full review Support Rating To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Read full review Online Training Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
Read full review Implementation Rating it was a fairly easy implementation and everything was pretty straightforward. only challenge we had was getting all the snmp communities updated on the networking equipment
Read full review Alternatives Considered This is one of the essential tools for monitoring. This tool was integrated with Maximo and Control-M in my organization. So whenever any job failed in Control-M, we receive an alert against it in the IBM Netcool/OMNIbus. We receive the alerts in different colors as per the criticality. Black for critical ones(Sev1), red for urgent (Sev2), yellow for major(Sev3), and orange for minor(Sev4). So it makes an easy to operate and act on the alerts as per the severity. This tool is very user-friendly and easy to use. No additional training is required for the tool to operate, just a simple KT is enough.
Read full review Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a great tool and matches much of the functionality of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. Nothing about
Ansible will likely be overwhelming to an engineer with a little time to spare, but that spare time combined with SolarWinds already being our monitoring tool made the decision easy. Time is at a premium in small teams and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very easy to use right out of the box without all the tweaking required by powerful command line driven tools like
Ansible .
Read full review Return on Investment Color feature of the alerts as per the criticality is the amazing feature. Heartbeat alert is also an unique feature. No additional training is required to use this tool. just a simple KT is enough. Read full review The time savings from automatic daily backups is significant The compare configuration tool is super helpful at spotting errors when small changes occur that are hard to detect otherwise. The compliance check tool saves countless hours going through configurations for errors. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Screenshots