AlertSite vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

AlertSite is used in our organization to monitor our website and web applications in real-time to collect the super important metrics reflecting web page load time but from the user end (E2E) and that approaches helps us to understand what our website is experiencing in real-time.

Incentivized

On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.

Incentivized

• The Deja-Click Recorder is an excellent tool.
• Good UI that translates to large NOC screens well.
• Easy Alerting and Reporting.

Incentivized

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Incentivized

• Tool is complicated for Alert creation
• AlertSite GUI need improvement. As compared to Datadog, it needs improvement in GUI
• While using AlertSite, many times we faced false alerting, they need to take a look at it to improve performance.

Incentivized

• We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.

Incentivized

Reviewing other cost saving options

Incentivized

Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.

Incentivized

Pretty good product only issue was cost

Incentivized

SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

I've been unable to contact support after several attempts.

Incentivized

SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.

Incentivized

Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis

Incentivized

We moved all of our services to Site24x7 after several years with AlertSite. We looked at Uptrends and Pingdom to name a few whilst evaluating options. Pingdom lacks functionality and Uptrends we found to have quite a steep learning curve. AlertSites platform and in particular the Deja-Click recorder is a standout tool against the other platforms. Sadly the upscaling costs of multi-location transactions can quickly add up.

Incentivized

The operation began using Nagios XI, after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• A negative thing is Monitoring locations would have issues and cause false-positive alerts and due to that monitoring team's repetitive work has increased.
• A positive thing that I have noticed so far is the fact that the AlertSite customers support team is trying to build relationships and go the extra mile to make sure we can overcome any occurring issues and they are quick to respond and provide sufficient guidance for implementing efficiently, and fix products issues.

Incentivized

• VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
• VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
• VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.

Incentivized