SolarWinds Network Device Monitor vs. VMware Skyline

On its own, it's a solid choice for an SMB or Mid-size Enterprise if you're price sensitive and looking primarily for core functionality. SolarWinds has a large family of products that can also be leveraged in conjunction with SWNDM. Turning the product loose on a very large environment for discovery and mapping should be done with care and concern for a number of reasons but including the performance of the product for this task. If you're looking for an all-in-one product with some presumed supporting features built in (config manager, etc.) you'll need to look elsewhere.

Incentivized

VMware Skyline is free yet is priceless. Skyline gives you the health of your VMware products in a single pane. Here you not only get issues pointed out to you but the suggested solutions for each issue. Doesn't get better than this.

Incentivized

• Monitor for and record network device configuration changes.
• Allow for the creation, or modification, of hardening standards for multiple vendors' network devices.
• Automate the creation of alerts that can be sent to owners for correction of compliance violations.
• Allow you to organize a visualization of your network devices.

Incentivized

• Easy setup
• Stable
• Data collection

Incentivized

• More security put into the product, the Orion hack was not good news.
• More frequent releases to address small bugs rather than big releases that are rare.
• More IPv6 related features to make it easier for people familiar with IPv4 to learn IPv6.
• Ability to edit dashboards using JSON or another similar language.

Incentivized

• Sometimes the recommendations do not make sense.
• Sometimes the advice is general, but not for us.

Incentivized

It's super easy to use.

Incentivized

MS is meant for windows monitoring and up/down for mostly everything else. Moved away from MS System Center. Now we have better visibility and management can get reports. The other teams have added Linux to Solarwinds and also see improvements in monitoring. Whether you use snmp (v3), wmi or some other credentials to connect to you system, Solarwinds will more than likely be able to manage and monitor it.

Incentivized

I've used other products such as VMAN and such yet Skyline is different. This is not aimed at your virtual machine's internal usage but at the VMware / Hypervisor level. This looks and monitors at hardware drivers, VMtools versions, and VM hardware versions. If you have Horizon it will look at versions and current vs minimum driver versions.

Incentivized

• Reduced site visits and recurring issues by 25 to 35%
• Enables proactive warning, thereby reducing downtime caused by unforeseen issues
• Provides a central panel for monitoring the entire network at a glance
• Allows for SLA management thereby increasing accountability by 50%
• Reduced time to repair by 35% as techs are more informed of root cause

Incentivized

• Weekly reports helps gain long term statistics
• service requests can be easily resolved

Incentivized