LogicMonitor vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

We have several government departments and universities as our clients, and we conduct online examinations for them. Therefore, our servers require additional security to prevent unauthorized access to our systems remotely without our permission. We were performing an examination for one of our clients when someone from outside attempted to access our systems by creating a backdoor to our servers. Our team was busy handling the examination process and ensuring its smoothness. However, thanks to LogicMonitor, we were alerted at the right time, and we were able to save our data and clients' information with its help.

Incentivized

[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].

Incentivized

• LogicMonitor is very customizable. We can build whatever modules we need, because it uses standard protocols like HTTPS, SNMP and WMI to gather data and metrics.
• We like that LogicMonitor is an agentless solution for our use case. Not all customers will allow an agent-based approach to 3rd party tools.
• LogicMonitor has thousands of out of the box modules, which work on their own and also act as good baselines for the ones that we will end up customizing more. We are rarely starting at zero when we decide to do something new with LogicMonitor.
• LogicMonitor has great documentation, and support has been helpful in the instances where we've needed them.

Incentivized

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Incentivized

• Because of the rapid change in technology, maintaining DataSources to the most current level can be time-consuming for staff.
• The network discovery and mapping capabilities are not as robust when compared to other solutions
• While it can back-up configuration files on devices, it does not have the ability to push or modify configuration files back to devices.

Incentivized

• Server trending could be stronger. A server which sits at the same resource usage day in and day out can be normal operation while Virtualization manager may report it as an issue.
• Orion in general can be painful to change a node page with the desired screens and widgets

Incentivized

This product has met virtually all of our needs. It was easy to implement and has been simple to support. Customization has been intuitive with many options available. They keep adding features and expanding available options. The future of LogicMonitor looks even better than it is today which is very promising. The management and support teams at LogicMonitor are always helpful

Incentivized

Critical component for companies ability to maintain services both customer facing as well as internal systems. Without insight into our VM estate provided by VMAN outage duration as well as frequency would increase to unacceptable levels. VMAN has allowed us to consolidate multiple monitoring mechanisms into one, as part of the Orion suite providing us with 1 solution. This has the added benefit of enabling our engineers to focus on learning 1 solution oppose to multiple solutions, meaning we're able to handle administration and support of our monitoring across the whole company alot more efficiently from a time spent resource as well as savings on costings.

Incentivized

Set up is super easy. Just stand up a small Linux or Windows server to act as a collector. There are no agents to install on monitored devices and all you need is SNMP or WMI access. When creating dashboards, all you have to do is find the widget on the device you want to show up and choose the menu option to add it.

Incentivized

SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

The sales team support we received was top notch. They worked hand in hand to make sure the product met all expectations. So far we have not really had to work with support that much; we have worked with setup team after purchase to deploy product fully. No issues so far and we are four weeks in.

Incentivized

SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.

Incentivized

Add good training

Incentivized

The training is good but room to improve

Incentivized

I did not truly dedicate myself to implementing LogicMonitor. However, I overheard the IT team members explain that "LogicMonitor is perfect for us as it has made most of the work automated, and implementation and training sessions were perfect for us." Thus, I can state that everything went smoothly with our implementation.

Incentivized

Pretty straighforward, as long as you check Solarwinds site for recommended installation path. KEY ITEM - be sure that you know which versions of all SolarWinds products you are using, because there are incompatability issues between versions for many products. It took me about 2 hours with a spreadsheet to figure out an upgrade path. Don't assume that the version you downloaded is the right/most current version without checking first!

Incentivized

We did not use software like LogicMonitor for the same work before, but I must say that my experience with LogicMonitor has been outstanding so far. It helps me to be free of tension. I can now concentrate on the actual work I was hired to do for my company.

Incentivized

To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to offer as well as having it integrate into our already existing SolarWinds SAM environment.

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• We have been able to eliminate multiple tools through LogicMonitor's ability to use collectors to run scripts and collect any numerical data from any reachable endpoint along with the customization and widgets available for dashboards. This has allowed for reduced costs and consolidation to a single point of view.
• The ability to grant our clients access to see their data in real time has improved both our client satisfaction surveys and attributed to a few point gain in our NPS score. The ease of getting to the data has also reduced the quoting time for our sales teams during renewals to quantify what a client is consuming.
• The amount of data that LogicMonitor collects affords our technicians a wide area of review when trying to isolate an issue and find a root cause. With the standard out of box data that is collected we have often been able to set a new threshold on something not previously thought of to proactively alert us in the future after identifying those root causes. This has reduced our Major Issues from 3-5 per month to usually 1-2 or less per quarter.

Incentivized

• VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
• VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
• VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.

Incentivized