ScienceLogic SL1 vs SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1 is a very logical and powerful ideal software for monitoring every kind of technology in my organization, like servers, CPU, network, email, and many more. Their support team is very unparalleled and very proactive 24/7. While using this tool, any glitch in the network becomes easy to detect and can be detected and stopped. It's the best monitoring tool and is very recommended.

For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.

• Business Services are a welcome addition to the capabilities of the SL1 platform
• Collections capabilities. Being able to ingest multiple forms of data streams to provide a more holistic view of an environment
• Giving the clients the freedom to apply specific monitoring that is tailored to their environments

• Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
• Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
• It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.

• Dashboards have limitations in a couple of large enterprise use cases. New UI appears to be addressing these as it matures and resembles techniques seen in other enterprise tools
• Percentiles and baseline / deviation calculations on standard metrics are not what we've seen in the past from enterprise tools. However, more complex anomaly detection is now available as an advanced function

• Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
• Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
• More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.

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).

We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.

Product is capable of monitoring different
technologies like OS, MS Infra apps, cloud services, Databases, network etc...
this can be a single solution for most of the technologies end to end monitoring

It is more flexible for customization and
support is good

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.

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.

The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.

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)

The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.

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.

I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.

On our side (students), we had a number of teams who were provided the deep developer training.
Of those students, the customized training provided a complete, 5 day training which enabled the deployed platform team to successfully deploy and mitigate user-experience issues for the vast majority of our end-users, including some of the teams who attended the developer training.

The knowledge kept pace with the class and sped up / slowed down (within the time constraints) as needed throughout the course.

This was developer to developer training and for those students who were developers the training worked well. For those who were just coders it probably worked less well as some of the topics still do not apply (a function of our course outline specification based on our knowing nothing).

Due to problems in sequencing we did the developer course BEFORE the admin course and realized that our requested ORDER was wrong.

The onsite admin course was much better received and led to deeper understanding of the developer course held a few weeks prior.

Only cover the basic, the most powerfull part of the tool was not covered.

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

As far as Implementation is concerned, i think I never ran into any major trouble (whatever it is, it's just local infrastructure specific). Once all your NW ports and connectivity is in place, it won't take much of your time to install the product. configurations are also easy to complete. VM configuration takes no time, except the environmental configuration which is company specific. Onboarding is easy via SNMP based monitoring.

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

As I stated earlier, SL1 seems to be best used for Servers and Network Storage devices. It doesn't seem to be a direct replacement as SL1 doesn't have a configuration management piece, visual maps are very crude and not user-friendly, and the building of the maps is not intuitive, nor has the functionality of Solarwinds Topology Mapper.

It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.

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.)

It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up

• we are still in the process of implementation
• after all of our production devices are onboarded to SL1, we will be able to bring network monitoring in-house instead of it being outsourced as it is now
• I am Engineer/SL1 user only, therefore I cannot comment on ROI or similar numbers

• Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time.
• We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting.