Netwrix Auditor is designed to enable auditing of the broadest variety of IT systems, including Active Directory, Exchange, file servers, SharePoint, SQL Server, VMware and Windows Server. It also supports monitoring of privileged user activity in all other systems.
According to the vendor, Netwrix Auditor eliminates these blind spots by delivering complete visibility into all changes to system configurations, content and permissions across the IT infrastructure. Moreover, Netwrix…
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SolarWinds AppOptics
Score 8.2 out of 10
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SolarWinds AppOptics (formerly Librato) is an IT infrastructure monitoring service and APM, based on technology acquired by SolarWinds with Librato in 2015 to expand its cloud monitoring portfolio.
Netwrix [Auditor] is a great tool for any SysAdmin no matter the company size. Licensing is determined by users, not employee count, and that makes it a great product from a small business to an enterprise application. The time savings coupled with the increased productivity is a key factor is determining this tool over other products.
AppOptics is good for small to medium-sized organizations with less than 150 servers or less than 40 services to monitor. It performs well for this use case where people need to get an overview of application performance, and 95%ile data is okay. Somewhere every data point and every record is critical; it should be avoided.
Netwrix Auditor performs the audit collection process in a method that does not burden the systems it is auditing. It usually just pulls the log and event logs data from the machine it is auditing and then performs the extraction of the information in these files on the Netwrix Auditor server. This reducing the audit processes to only pulling log data from the server but does not keep the server busy processing the data.
Once the log data has been pulled from a server being audited, Netwrix will store the log data in a compressed form in its Long Term Archive. This allows the database to be kept smaller than the all the data being kept in the Log Term Archive and therefore makes creating reports much faster since the database is not as big as it could be.
Since Netwrix Auditor uses standard Microsoft SQL Server and SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) to perform reporting, working with the results of the audit is much easier. Anyone who knows SQL Server and SSRS can work with the data and create their own reports.
The predefined reports that come with Netwrix Auditor cover most of the items required to properly report on the status of a system. They have many predefined reports for FedRamp, PCI, HIPPA, and other compliance regulations.
The only thing that I would add is the possibility to display every single query our servers receive to eventually analyze them and query through them. We could also generate nice visualizations from that. Right now I believe we can only see averages.
We have renewed already the licensing of the product minus SQL Server and Oracle Database because the organisation believes the modules are very expensive and have identified a different product for auditing Databases Other modules are very important like the User Activity monitor, AD queries that we can not get from the native AD itself or you have to run complicated powershell scripts! Easy to use interface Pre-defined Reports Easy way to subscribe to important alerts e.g Privilege account group membership changes
The product has user friend pre-defined queries which takes off the stress and horrors of having to query Active Directory with complex Powershell scripts! You can subscribe to certain functions when they are done and you get an alert e.g privileged accounts actions and you don't need to have programming skills The product has a desktop version of the software and donot have to login to the server all the time you need to use it. You can see very fast the posture of your environment of the overview screen and deduce what exactly is wrong and what has to be done
As far a usability is concerned for AppOptics, it is just as matter of few minutes away even if you start from scratch, as all you need to do is register on the site and you will get the URL and password. And after this all you have to do is follow the instruction, as per the configuration wizard (tool tip) within the console for various technology such as SQL, IIS, .NET
Customer support has always been fast and helpful when we run into any issues. The smaller issues are usually resolved within a day or two. It is great support and I feel like I am in good hands anytime an issue comes up. However, we don't run into many issues
Solarwinds AppOptics is rated as 9 out of 10 and the reason is there are still few areas where AppOptics needs to improve such as Service Now Integration, GCP Cloud Support, Better Dashboard visualization for application transactions flow. Other than these feature everything is there in AppOptics and that's a reason given 9 points out of 10.
Make sure you trial the software and understand the fundamentals of each module that you are interested in Make sure you get the buy in from both Management and most importantly your team members (the product users) for a successful implementation Watch the webinars of the product from the product website
I can only compare it to SolarWinds. Their similar products have larger foot prints and seem a little clumsy in comparison. The Netwrix product turns on a lot of the auditing options that were required for the product to work properly where it seemed I had to do a lot of manual tweeking with the SolarWinds product.
What we found positive in AppOptics from others is:
Easy to install and manage.
Various stack support.
Point to point deep-dive metrics and correlation.
Metrics like DB connection, query analysis, latency in API calls, and other connections, response codes for various APIs, etc are the key ones in our case, which AppOptics provides efficiently.
