Pandora FMS vs. SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

I believe Pandora FMS is a solution that adapts to any type of scenario; it's useful for small businesses as well as large organizations. It more than meets the need to have a comprehensive monitoring system capable of sending alerts instantly and consulting historical data, logs, and trends. Additionally, for small businesses, the free version will be more than sufficient in most cases. And for those who do not want to deploy the service on-premise, there is an option for MaaS (Monitoring as a Service).

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• All-in-one software
• Flexible and easy configuration
• Multi-platform
• Design in PERL, CCS and HTML5

• 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.

Incentivized

• The interface is not intuitive due to the number of options it has and its organization.
• It has a free version with limitations, and another paid version. The commercial one has a quite high cost.
• It has a certain learning curve.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The solution is very complete, and even includes extras such as IPAM.
Deployment can be a bit unintuitive at first, but once you become familiar with the solution and thanks to its automatic deployment options it ends up being easier than it seemed. The power and options of the solution are its greatest virtue.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The support team answers very quickly. They are always willing to find a solution to any need that is required by us or one of our clients.

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Before using Pandora FMS, tests were carried out with all these tools:

• Nagios
• Zabbix
• System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)
• IBM Tivoli
• PRTG
• SolarWinds

Pandora FMS allows simple customization by making adjustments to text files, developing agent add-ons without the need to be a programmer, there is no scenario where we could not take data and save it in PandoraFMS, IoT, industrial products, and everything that any client needs to monitor.

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.

Incentivized

• Substantial improvement in monitoring service. Detecting alerts on time always results in economic savings.
• Improvement in the periodic report associated with the capacity plan. The tool is indispensable in decision-making.
• Centralization and tool savings. Pandora FMS's versatility allows centralizing several functions into a single tool.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized