SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) Reviews and Ratings

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We (IT) monitor two EMC SANs for performance and capacity. One is production, the other is remote office production and DR. SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) gives us a historical view of capacity and latency, with the ability to alert on metrics, including customizing alerts. All alert management is centralized in the Orion interface so there's no separate alert management for SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM).

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) is pretty good at forecasting capacity consumption, which was a must for us. If you have LUNs that have high latency in a normal environment (user shares, for instance), you'll need to customize the alerts to tune out the noise. As with all SW modules and most other products, there is a time lag between what is in the console and what's happening now. Data in the console and alerts are typically 5 to 15 minutes old.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Storage Resource Manager was part of our strategy to answer the question "<i>But isn't our storage fast enough</i>?" or "<i>If our storage frame were to fail, what would the impact be?</i>" SRM, though primarily used by our Storage team, was instrumental in giving our DR team and our CMDB team the insights they needed to handle performance planning, DR planning, and what we called <i>Infrastructure Lineage</i>.

Likelihood to Recommend

Are you in the Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, other) -- you won't be able to use SRM. This does not give visibility into block and/or object storage.

Do you have high-performance, multi-tiered storage solutions from vendors like HP, Dell, IBM, or others? Do you have a VMware environment hosted by your shared storage solution? Then this is the tool to link everything together for you.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have a wide variety of Dell SANS across our estate, ranging from Dell EqualLogics, Compellents and MD (FC and iSCSI) shelves. We recently purchased the SRM module for Orion to integrate with Solarwinds DPA and NPM. Its made a huge difference in terms of visibility and linking up with performance issues from storage.

Likelihood to Recommend

SRM is another great Solarwinds product that should definitely be added to any core Orion deployment. The ability to link your datastores to any database instances which are being monitored in the database performance analyzer is fantastic and you can then create dashboards with a single pane of glass view of database and storage. Issues are easy to spot and can be tackled before users report issues.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

This is only being used by our IT Department. We use it to monitor our storage for performance issues as well as plan ahead for expansion. It helps us find out if certain systems need to be moved to faster storage arrays.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for our medium-sized environment where we have different storage arrays some have better performance than others. I can't imagine that it would be needed with a small environment where you only have 1 storage array or are not monitoring performance of the servers on different arrays.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor allows us to see at a glance all of the metrics that are available on our storage devices. Without this tool we would either have to connect to the CLI and look for specific things or build scripts and custom dashboards on our own. This makes monitoring and reviewing much easier.

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have rare, very old or very uncommon devices you may need to look elsewhere, but if you are using current tech then this product probably supports your devices.

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the SolarWinds virtualization suite and storage resource manager for monitoring our environment. It is currently used by our managed services to monitor, create, troubleshoot, and assign tickets. It is also used by our network team to monitor endpoints. It is a great monitoring tool and statistical basis for our troubleshooting and engineering teams to get involved with problems as seen across the environment.

Likelihood to Recommend

The software is great for historical trending data and realtime alerting. It lacks proactive recommendations to make corrective actions in the environments that it monitors.