Austin-based SolarWinds offers Internet Protocal address management (IPAM) networking service.
N/A
TOPdesk
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
TOPdesk is the flagship highly-modular cloud-based or installed ITSM service desk and asset management solution from the Dutch company of the same name, for enterprise companies.
$76
per month Per agent
Pricing
SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)
TOPdesk
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Essential
$76
per month Per agent
Engaged
$109
per month Per agent
Excellent
$155
per month Per agent
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)
TOPdesk
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
SolarWinds professional support is included to help customers on active maintenance 7 days a week, 365 days a year.
The TOPdesk license model:
- Modular: Organizations purchase only the modules needed
- Saas or On premise
- Supports unlimited number of assets.
- Service agents based.
- Discount available for annual pricing.
SolarWinds IP Address Manager is very useful the bigger and more complex the environment. Smaller organizations will have to consider the cost as it provides little benefit over monitoring maybe 2-3 servers. But I have over 24 DHCP servers with on average 15 subnets each so tracking and monitoring all that was very time-consuming. As a result, it was generally ignored until there was an issue. With SolarWinds IP Address Manager, I was able to set alerts to monitor scope utilization and duplicate IP addresses.
We had a smaller team of 6-7 people and for us it was perfect. It was very easy for us to book time per ticket and keep track of what we were spending the most of our time on. Escalating tickets was easy because of the prebuilt emails and message saving features. The typical features are all there of course such as incident, project management, etc. TOPdesk is highly customizable and we felt like we always had a good oversight of the KPI's, time management and customer satisfaction ratings. Our management liked the reporting features, the customizable dashboard and the data visualization. In my personal experience, TOPdesk also had the best search feature, and with the tags we were also very easily able to find the tickets we needed.
With IPAM automated address scanning, we can be confident that we are looking at an up-to-date, accurate snapshot of our network.
The built-in alerts are a great safety net. We know that even if we aren't paying close attention to our IP address space, IPAM is. If a range is nearly full, IPAM lets us know before it becomes a real problem.
IPAM's event logging gives us insight into any and all changes made by our network engineers.
The user experience is not as intuitive as other products. We have to be more restrictive around level 1 help desk access compared to NCM or NPM in SolarWinds.
Making and enforcing changes, not just monitoring, has been hit or miss in some instances.
We are heavily invested in SolarWinds. We currently own Network Performance Monitor, Netflow Traffic Analyzer, User Device Tracker, Server Application Monitor and Network Configuration Manager. We have NOC mode setup for deskside support for monitoring any down devices that may effect our network across the globe. This application gives us the information we need when we need it.
It just works, has some continuous development and an easy-to-use interface, which is important especially because not all our colleagues are technical experts (or in other words, "capable of more than switching on and off the computer"). We use a large range of functions and therefore it would be really hard to replace TOPdesk in our company.
SolarWinds IPAM is like what SolarWinds itself says, i.e. easy to use and simple. SolarWinds has really made their orion and non-orion platform products so simple that any newbie can give a try and make the best use out of it. I learned SolarWinds IPAM by myself in a POC environment, and not just IPAM but other modules and now I own 6 certifications. You see how easy to use this product is.
In short, we've been able to remove many pain points, automate multiple things, and empowered the end-user by being able to manage more items via the Self Service Portal. We've been able to do more than we were able to do with our previous ITSM platform. The TOPdesk development team added some things recently that will allow us to make some other things more efficient.
Like I said somewhere else in this review: the helpdesk of TOPdesk is top of the bill! In the Netherlands, that is. I can not plea for the helpdesks in other countries, but I guess the TOPdesk organization will make sure the quality of the helpdesk is the same in every country.
We do not integrate IPAM into other systems other than the standard Orion integration. The performance is reasonable, however, we are running all the SolarWinds applications on a very large server.
Although being a SAAS solution, TOPdesk performs pretty fast. One can imagine that any SAAS solution is slow or has hiccups, but we have not experienced such with TOPdesk. Pages load quickly, logging in goes smoothly. We have made reports on premise in the past - that always took some time, as you might expect with such complex tasks. It seems that in the SAAS solution TOPdesk somehow has managed to make it even faster!
I have not contacted customer support and therefore have no experience in this area. I know we have some issues with our VAR support at this time for Orion, but I don't know if the IPAM falls into the same support structure. Perhaps others in the organization may know more regarding the support area.
Most if not nearly all questions are answered within the same or a few days. The helpdesk is very knowledgable about their product and are always willing to help. The only downside is that for more difficult questions it can take a while due to the experts being further removed from the helpdesk. But they are always willing to answer questions, even if they are not directly related to a problem with the service.
We had Topdesk in-house here training staff for almost a month (2-3 hour meetings 3x a week.) It was invaluable and we were able to take that training and share with the rest of our IT staff. Once implemented we were able to fly from there. The challenges we found were in how to get started. Once started the knowledge base offered from Topdesk has been invaluable.
Online training documentation is easy to access and consume. There is no real challenges with finding information on how to use the product and some really helpful knowledge base items that show us how valuable these options are in our own implementation of it. The online training we've used has been self driven
It was a challenge to port over years of the same thing and we ended up keeping old ideas in Topdesk that we will eventually weed out as time passes and we learn how users view categories and flows of tickets. Planning is key but bear in mind that just because you used to do it this way doesn't mean you still have to
SolarWinds IP Address Manager was cheaper than both alternatives and far easier to manage. Device42 interface is years behind what Solarwinds offers. It is very outdated; BT Diamond required remote management and we constantly had to message support, it reached a point where it was better not to have the product at all.
Spiceworks is an easier-to-use Help Desk solution but it lacks all other features that Topdesk has. Freshdesk was just too much for our environment. It was cost-prohibitive for our intended use. TOPdesk fit our org size and budget better than the others.
We have not experienced any scalability issues with this product. However, SolarWinds needs to allow users to scale horizontally without any license restrictions. For example, we would like to separate Netflow and Orion onto different platforms but are unable to due to license restrictions.
TOPdesk is very flexible and scalable. Every department in you organization can you the software. Perhaps some persons need some training, but that can be provided by TOPdesk ot some keyusers.
IPAM has saved countless hours of running scripts and gathering data to compile reports to plan re-subnetting globally.
IPAM has reduced helpdesk incidents by immediately spotting bad DNSR and IP conflicts.
IPAM has helped eliminate blocks on projects whereas there is not currently enough address space requiring major changes to accommodate more IP'ed servers, gear, etc.
