MSPs
and IT professionals use N-able™ N-central® to monitor and manage devices and complex
networks remotely. N-central provides
visibility and efficiency as the user's needs scale. N-central can help users:
1. Proactively monitor everything on a customer network—not just servers
and workstations—and troubleshoot.
2. Stay on top of threats with features like MFA, antivirus, integrated endpoint
detection and response, data backup, disk encryption, email protection,…
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ScienceLogic SL1
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
ScienceLogic is a system and application monitoring and performance management platform. ScienceLogic collects and aggregates data across and IT ecosystems and contextualizes it for actionable insights with the SL1 product offering.
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Pricing
N-able N-central
ScienceLogic SL1
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
N-able N-central
ScienceLogic SL1
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
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ScienceLogic SL1 offers four tiers:
SL1 Advanced – Application Health, Automated Troubleshooting and Remediation Workflows
SL1 Base – Infrastructure Monitoring, Topology & Event Correlation
SL1 Premium – AI/ML-driven Analytics, Low-Code Automated Workflow Authoring
SL1 Standard – Infrastructure Monitoring – with Agents, Business Services, Incident Automation, CMDB Synchronization, Behavioral Correlation
To get pricing for each tier, please contact the vendor.
SolarWinds N-central is on the more unique side of tools because it can do so many things, and do most of them quite well. For patching, it is much easier to use than SCCM. In terms of monitoring, it is not great out of the box and requires tweaking to take full advantage. …
ScienceLogic SL1 has a greater understanding and maturity on what Infrastructure monitoring needs to be and has to include at a decent price point for what it offers compared to its competitors.
SL1 stands apart from the others, imo, in their workflow automation capabilities. Giving customers a Python snippet environment to develop customer-coded diagnostic and remediation solutions stands out for us. Some of the other products I've looked at provide similar …
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).
Appropriate if you are setting up a monitoring suite in new Infrastructure Environment. Definitely NOT suited for Migration Projects. ScienceLogic SL1 cannot cater to a lot of monitoring requirements which already would have been configured in old monitoring suite. Plus, limited support for customizations and having to go to "Feature Requests" route makes in extremely complicated.
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.
More freedom to create custom dashboards as on the previous versions we could do much more
The Performance TAB windows is too small and cannot be resized or maximized when looking at reports for "Overview", "File System" and any of those items.
There are not enough widgets to create stunning dashboard in AP2
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.
It is simply because of all the best possible autonomy solutions it is providing and getting better day by day. Using AI and Devops along with handy automation, The monitoring and Management of devices becomes much easier and the way it is growing in all the aspects is one the best reasons too. Evolution of the SL1 platform in the autonomy monitoring and management is quite appreciable.
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.
The core functions are there. The complexity is due to the complexity of the space. The score is based on comfort (I no longer notice the legacy UI) and the promise that I see in the 8.12 Unified UI (a vast improvement). It is also based on the fact that with 8.12, you can now do everything in the new UI but you still have the legacy UI as a fallback (which should now be unnecessary for new installations)
Science Logic SL1 provides the option of Distributed deployment where multiple instances of each appliance can be deployed to manage the load and availability. SL1 provides a High Availability feature for Database Servers and Data Collection. If one of the Data Collectors in the collector group fails, it will automatically redistribute the devices from the failed Data Collector among the other Data Collectors in the Collector Group. The high availability feature for the Database server ensures that SL1 performs failover automatically to another server without causing the outage to the application.
The performance is entirely dependent on the complexity of the environment/network being used to host the platform. Outside of those factors, the platform runs very efficiently and quickly out of the box. We have integrations with other platforms and neither seem to take a hit from our moderate API usage. Any issues with performance would be experienced by choices made in infrastructure or complexity of things built by the customer to display in the GUI (overly complicated and cluttered dashboards for example)
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.
So far, it's good as part of my overall experience, except for a couple of use cases. The support team is well knowledgeable, has technical sound, and is efficient. When support escalates to engineering, the issue gets stuck and takes months to resolve.
It was good, Do the online training first and understand it and you will get the most out of the in-person training that way.This also takes you to an advanced level which is very good and the training as been overhauled once again along with new product coming in such as Zebruim / Skylair, worth going through again if it a while back that you first did this.
There are a lot of educational materials and courses on the SL1 training site (Litmos university). However the recording quality is sometimes not very good - screen resolution is low. There is a lack of professional rather than user-oriented documents and there are mistakes in documentation and education is not well structured.
As first time developers, getting to grips with powerpack development using SNMP, Powershell and Python etc, was not helped by poor and badly organised online documentation. In many cases, we had to look at existing powerpacks and try to work out what it was doing and why - not always with much success. Even after receiving expert level training, the development of some powerpacks would not have been possible without access to the SL1 support staff.
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.
Science logic SL1 is so user friendly and it's really easy to navigate between function. I would recommend Sciene logic SL1 to all of them who are looking for really useful monitoring tool and expecting easy way of managing it.
Our deployment model is vastly different from product expectations. Our global / internal monitoring foot print is 8 production stacks in dual data centers with 50% collection capacity allocated to each data center with minimal numbers of collection groups. General Collection is our default collection group. Special Collection is for monitoring our ASA and other hardware that cannot be polled by a large number of IP addresses, so this collection group is usually 2 collectors). Because most of our stacks are in different physical data centers, we cannot use the provided HA solution. We have to use the DR solution (DRBD + CNAMEs). We routinely test power in our data centers (yearly). Because we have to use DR, we have a hand-touch to flip nodes and change the DNS CNAME half of the times when there is an outage (by design). When the outage is planned, we do this ahead of the outage so that we don't care that the Secondary has dropped away from the Primary. Hopefully, we'll be able to find a way to meet our constraints and improve our resiliency and reduce our hand-touch in future releases. For now, this works for us and our complexity. (I hear that the HA option is sweet. I just can't consume that.)
