Likelihood to Recommend 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 If your IT team isn't proficient in automation and scripting, Solarwinds NCM can fill that gap (assuming your company's security team signs off on approving SW in your environment given the hack.) Basic device configuration, pushing mass changes reliably and backups are NCM's strong suites. If you have a complex scenario where if/then cases are needed, NCM is a bit lack luster. Auto discovery isn't as easy either as certain parameters need to be met for that feature to work 100% of the time
Read full review Pros Report on SLA Group network areas Discovery of elements Read full review Integrates with Network Performance Management for Alerting and Reporting. NetPath and detects issues due to Configuration Change. Keeps a record of which user made the change. Which devices are not being backed up, devices where backups are failing, dashboard and alerting available. Read full review Cons 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 For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
Read full review Usability The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
Read full review Support Rating To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Read full review Online Training Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
Read full review Implementation Rating it was a fairly easy implementation and everything was pretty straightforward. only challenge we had was getting all the snmp communities updated on the networking equipment
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a great tool and matches much of the functionality of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. Nothing about
Ansible will likely be overwhelming to an engineer with a little time to spare, but that spare time combined with SolarWinds already being our monitoring tool made the decision easy. Time is at a premium in small teams and SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is very easy to use right out of the box without all the tweaking required by powerful command line driven tools like
Ansible .
Read full review Return on Investment 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 The time savings from automatic daily backups is significant The compare configuration tool is super helpful at spotting errors when small changes occur that are hard to detect otherwise. The compliance check tool saves countless hours going through configurations for errors. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) Screenshots