SolarWinds ipMonitor vs. Tivoli Monitoring (legacy)

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

If you are looking for a software that looks decent but is not something you truly rely on, this is it. I have had bad experiences with IBM Tivoli Monitoring reporting on system errors that were not evident on the systems themselves at all. There is a lot of specific alerting you can set up which is nice.

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 GUI is easy to read.
• The software is fairly easy to configure.
• Almost real-time.

Incentivized

• 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

• The software is not reliable at all.
• Reports errors that are false-negatives.
• Hard to configure alarms/alerts.
• Bulky installation (takes up quite a bit of space).

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

We selected IBM Tivoli Monitoring as a bundle deal, other than that I would have probably gone with another vendor. We use Brocade Network Advisor for our SAN also which I would suggest to anyone over this software. The software has not been that reliable for me since we started using it.

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

• I would not purchase this again.
• Other software monitoring tools have been more reliable and easier to manage.
• Difficult to manage, if you patch the server the software is installed on and have to reboot it, IBM Tivoli Monitoring does not come up clean.

Incentivized