SolarWinds ipMonitor vs. NETSCOUT TruView vs. SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset

SolarWinds ipMonitor is well suited in situation where customer do not wants to hold the responsibility of underlying monitoring infrastructure management such as Servers, Database, website and their high availability. And of course when you need Network, Servers, Services fault and performance monitoring. When you have specialized network monitoring requirement such as Configuration backup, netflow traffic analysis then this is not the right tool.

Incentivized

Netscout’s TruView monitoring system gives your IT department the perfect view of your network landscape. With the pulse hardware app, you can perform VoIP or HTTP network monitoring tests from specific remote locations and it will populate the analysis results into your console. This will give you perspective on how your sites are performing and detect any out of Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance even before users report it.

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I have found the toolset especially useful for scanning subnets to discover devices, and for setting up temporary real-time monitors when we are troubleshooting or setting up new connections. The most useful aspect has been the ability to apply the tools to help troubleshoot and pinpoint intermittent issues. More general tools like Orion often do not have the granularity to detect issues like intermittent packet loss which are especially impactful to applications like Voice. The toolset gives us another level of capability to dig into issues.

Incentivized

• Both network devices and servers may be easily located on the network.
• It notifies the user whenever any network device undergoes a change in status.
• Powerful reporting capabilities that provide vital data about your network's devices (uptime, space, utilization of resources on your devices)

Incentivized

• The app monitoring gives you the details to set different filters and do a quick identification of the root cause of the problem.
• Remarkable ability to store details of performance to analyze baselining, run advance troubleshooting, error detection and catalog by trends.
• The ability to sync with a device/interface whether is physical or virtual gives me the standpoint to set analysis upon network traffic across LAN or WAN and also get the insight of Cloud segments, setting the triggers to find out where the behavior changes to non-production traffic.

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• Various monitoring
• Stores history
• Suggests indices
• Helps to find the SQL query text
• Helps to see what machines/users the bad queries are coming from
• Shows current blocking session

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• It is a very complete and versatile software, but its price can be somewhat high for small companies.
• During the analysis of the collected data the process can be somewhat slow, so it takes more time than expected.
• Its configuration process can be somewhat complex since it requires several configurations so having prior knowledge is helpful.

Incentivized

• Product features are sometimes overwhelming if the IT team is not used to this technology. For a small and mid-size company, the number of settings and work that is needed to implement the solution could be a long and exhausting process.
• A "lite" version of Visual TruView could help a lot to small sized environments looking to develop the solution.
• I would like to add some mitigation tools for simple/common problems that could be easily managed by a monitoring tool like Netscout TruView.

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• The unifying component that is intended to be the initial interface to the tools seems clunky. I prefer to start the tools individually rather than using it.
• The port scanner could use some improvements to make it easier to use.

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I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products

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SolarWinds ipMonitor is a perfectly decent network mapper and performance metric gatherer, but it is held back by the UI, which can be hard to navigate once you have more than a couple dozen assets in there. It is fairly priced, but it also sometimes takes a really long time before results come in.

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Very easy to use and intuitive. Just be careful with the WAN Killer...it does what it says.

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Although I had not much support ticket with ipMonitor support team but I can share my overall experience with SolarWinds products and support team. I am working with SolarWinds support team since last 7 years and in last 2-3 years I have seen a significant improvement in knowledge documentation which is helping end users to troubleshoot problems by themselves. Apart from this SolarWinds phone call based support is very nice as tickets and emails might take some time but a direct phone call can get your job done quickly comparatively.

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As mentioned before, our deployment success depended on their expertise. Recommendations and overall response from their support engineers was out of this world. We, as supporters ourselves, are very critical in regards to the response times and knowledge of support services representatives. Often they just want to resolve your ticket not caring about the result, or focus only on the performance review we could give them. That's a standard behavior in most overseas support centers. The TruView engineers and management cared about us, our needs, and how they delivered the help we needed.

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Our organization uses it regularly. It is reliable, and we keep finding new uses for it

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We were trying to evaluate different providers and ipMonitor suited us because we had on-prem and cloud instances and management decided to check the paid tool. The ipMonitor is a very responsive tool and it served the purpose well but as IT is evolving and needs are changing, we discontinued the ipMonitor and shifted to Zabbix due to the customization which was the need at the time.

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Visual TruView is a solid competitor with solutions such as SolarWinds NPM, Nagios, PRTG, or SolarWinds NTA. Why we chose TruView was because it goes straight to what we were looking for, no hidden modules or subscriptions to secondaries licensing terms, to get the results that we were expecting. TruView takes it to another level.

Incentivized

I haven't compared any tools similar to SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset. This might be because I'm pretty biased when it comes to monitoring, and reporting solutions. I've found that SolarWinds provides the biggest bang for the buck in my opinion. I'm sure there are other solutions on the market that compete, but I haven't tried any of them because I've been very satisfied with SolarWinds.

Incentivized

• We currently use an outside service to monitor critical network nodes. We will do away with that service shortly.
• We no longer have to wait to hear from our users if there is a network device down. We will be proactively alerted and we can begin to remediate immediately helping to limit downtime.
• After initial setup and some tweaking, it requires little to no time to maintain.

Incentivized

• Tool consolidation, an amazing GUI that shows the most from the very beginning helping the IT Teams to set their own dashboards according to their needs.
• When they meant one price tag, that's it! You won't get a headache after the purchase process is done.
• Better be ready to set the scales your organization requires because if you miss something in the design you could get an application size that overrides your initial budget.

Incentivized

• Spend less time downloading free buggy tools
• All the tools in one spot, so you don't have to look around for tools
• Get to the solution sooner

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