Likelihood to Recommend If you have to manage a large number of computers, especially spread over multiple clients or a large physical area. This is one of the main products that allows us to act as a Managed Service Provider (MSP) and actually manage our clients devices and not just react to issues as clients call them in. Clients really love the proactive approach it allows us to take.
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 It monitors computers and notifies us of any issues with any computer. It allows remote control of computers, such as requesting a computer to reboot itself. It is very highly configurable to monitor exactly what we need to monitor. For example, on server, we can have it notify us any time the server is shutdown or rebooted. On the other hand, for a desktop computer, we don't have to be bothered with notifications when a user decides to reboot his computer. 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 It would be nice if they increased their scope of supported third-party apps. It would be great if they would create an ios app for their ticket system. If they could possibly build in a location service for tracking devices, that would be helpful. If they had two-factor authentication, it would be nice. 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 Pulseway is very user friendly. The system is labeled in terms and grouped together by function so that anyone can understand and locate the functions that they need. We use this system to monitor a file server that we have that can have an unstable power supply. This allows us to easily see that the system is offline and get it back to operational with minimal downtime.
Read full review 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 I haven't really needed much support for Pulseway, so I can't really say a whole lot about their support. Pulseway has been pretty much trouble-free for us. There are regular updates and new features. The updates never seem to break anything or cause problems. It just works.
Read full review 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 Pulseway has the most features, the best looking app with the best design and better usability than any others we evaluated. We liked the uniformity of the app design across all platforms (Windows, Android, Apple) and the notifications displayed on each platform. The price was a major contributor to our selection of Pulseway compared to the competition.
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 Problems can be dealt with more rapidly because I have access to systems from anywhere. I don't have to carry a computer with me nor do I have to find a location with potentially non-secure wifi to gain access to my systems. I can handle 99% of my system admin tasks using Pulseway and never have to touch a system or connect to the console. Pulseway gives so much control over a system that I don't need to spend extra money on other software to perform management tasks. 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