Likelihood to Recommend In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).
Read full review I would recommend all system administrators use some form of network monitoring if they are not already doing so, and I'd definitely recommend people consider OpenNMS if they're shopping around. Small businesses will benefit from the low-cost of entry (it's free!), whilst getting all the enterprise features. Larger businesses can benefit from paid support plans.
However, there's no getting around the fact that you will require some advanced networking and sysadmin knowledge to get the most out of OpenNMS, or at least, be prepared for a steep learning curve. If you don't have the resources to devote this time initially, you may struggle.
Read full review Pros Remote tasks - entry-level techs can run basic tasks without physically touching a piece of equipment. Remote support - remote controlling user devices is easy and saves a lot of time with having to initiate a remote session. Management of devices, particularly patch management and anti-virus management - you can automatically approve and deploy patches and schedule automatic AV scans. Read full review Report on SLA Group network areas Discovery of elements Read full review Cons Expensive software The support team are terrible Sales team will promise the world to get you over the line Subscription management is tedious Old software with very little development and the support team will not provide any further information on this - no roadmap Integrations galore - but none of them are effective Read full review We've had a few issues with delayed alerting. I haven't quite figured out how to make topologies work yet, but I haven't spent a ton of time on it either. We've also had a bit of trouble importing some MIBs, but that usually boiled down to working with the vendor to make sure we had the right MIBs and dependencies. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.
Read full review Usability The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.
Read full review Support Rating Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one
Read full review Alternatives Considered Our version of SolarWinds was old and running on old hardware, but it was way easier to setup and do things with. It did not do everything N-able does such as patch management, or at least we didn't have a module to do so if one existed. However it definitely seemed easier to use and possibly more stable.
Read full review OpenNMS's more attractive GUI and its price break were the main reasons our company chose to explore and use this product. However, it never managed to actually replace
Nagios which had a much more established hold within the company. Perhaps we were over-monitoring, but our company claimed a $100k loss per hour of downtime.
Read full review Return on Investment Reduced time to manage and support servers and endpoints. Provides support dept with more accurate information to assess and resolve issues quicker and more efficiently. The subscription cost associated with N-central, to our clients has a good profit margin for us. Read full review Initial adoption required quite a lot of resources and time to get everything right. Totally worth it for us; just be prepared for a gradual process that will get better and better with time. Once setup and running smoothly, it provides us with all the reporting we could hope for, at near zero cost. With OpenNMS, we're able to offer a much more reliable service to our customers, and spend a lot less time dealing with issues. Read full review ScreenShots N-able N-central Screenshots