Great product, core functionality is very strong!
February 19, 2019
Great product, core functionality is very strong!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We use Orion for hardware monitoring, specifically for servers in our environment. It is a very powerful tool that with the appropriate access can provide valuable information about server uptime and utilization without installing agents on every device. We have used it for several years at my current company and have been very happy with the results.
- Hardware monitoring is the main reason we bought the product, and we use it to monitor over 4,000 servers.
- It also great for network monitoring, although we use other products for this function also. This is mostly because we are a big, siloed organization and is less to do with any issues with the functionality provided.
- Application monitoring is also a capability of Orion. We have experimented with its function, but we have not rolled it out full-scale.
- You still need other tools, so it is not a true enterprise solution. We still use products like Splunk for detailed log info and ThousandEyes to see when/where users are logging into our apps. There are also other products in use like ExtraHop and Dynatrace, but I believe that is more a function of my organization and less to do with product capabilities.
- Sales methodology is very different because they don't travel and have a rep out in front of you. They do everything remotely, so if you are a big company this may take some getting used to.
- The licensing/contracting model is unique. Everything is recurring on a set of data every year. They don't do MSA or SOW, just agree to the EULA and pay for the product. Again, I think this is different than what most large companies are used to.
- We have gained tremendous value from Orion enterprises device data and monitoring. It allows us to see what devices in our network are having problems or need attention.
- The alerting engine in Orion is very powerful and can be configured to meet the needs of the customer.
- Networking mapping and monitoring is also very powerful and provides real-time information about network up and downtime.
We use Orion for a very specific use case and do not leverage all the available functions of the tools. I do think the product is very capable and the different modules are very powerful. We are a big company and we already had several systems in place that provide the same functions. We use Orion specifically for monitoring our devices and network.