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 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.
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 Best overall coverage of montioring different technologies. Easy to use in any environment Customizable being able to generate your own reports, dashboards, DA's, RBA's, etc. Have very good out of the box integrations with other monitoring solutions such as ServiceNow Always improving and regularly releasing new versions and upgrades to the system/DA's. Interactive community 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 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 The reporting feauture is a very untouched area. 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 We migrated away from our 20-year-old homegrown solution and have no back-tracking capability. ScienceLogic is demonstrating new capabilities that we would not have been able to do on our own using our legacy system. We understand the capabilities of competitors based on our bake-off selection where ScienceLogic won on capabilities and future near-term potential (expandability, platform growth). We know that those competitors are not really close to where we have been able to push ScienceLogic (as a partner).
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 We use ScienceLogic SL1 in our organization to serve effective monitoring solutions to our external customers. Our customers depend upon us for critical events/alerts related to their IT infrastructure gears and using SL1, we're able to provide them with a proactive monitoring solution that resolves an issue before an impact is noticed by the customer. There are very few monitoring solutions that can cater to a variety of Cloud platforms like Public Cloud (AWS, Azure) and private cloud simultaneously and SL1 addresses this business problem very well
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Performance 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)
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 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.
Read full review In-Person Training When I joined our company, I did not know about the in person training at firts. Logging onto the SL University, I realised that there were different sessions being held at different times throughout the year. The training itself was good, but being in a different time zone, made it difficult to attend, but the sessions that I attended was great!
Read full review Online Training 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.
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 Love to use Science logic tool as our first monitoring tool to provide services to the customer. Auto restart feature in Sl1 will allow us to get event when those crucial services has not started after server reboots and also minimize the P1's that we have as a result of that.
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 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.
Read full review Scalability 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.)
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 Once a powerpack is developed and configured for a device for one customer, it is easy to deploy the same powerpack on a second customer estate and configure specifically for that customer without having to reinvent the powerpack. This saves time and therefore money. Once the customer estate tuning is complete, the Operations team have come trust the alerts. This is especially true when transient or self-correcting alerts are automatically cleared without ops team involvement, but a record is still available for audit and debugging purposes. This saves time and therefore money. When setup correctly, it provides good visibility into applications, devices and whole customer estates. This saves time and therefore money when issues arise. Read full review ScreenShots N-able N-central Screenshots ScienceLogic SL1 Screenshots