Item: SolarWinds ipMonitor
Rating: 6
Author: Dylan Eikelenboom

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds ipMonitor is a monitoring tool for all devices in your internal network. We use it for checking the performance of the devices, as well as monitoring for unknown/rogue devices in the internal network. Any new device in the network will be added to our ipMonitor tool.

Pros and Cons

Gives quite some in-depth information about computer performance (CPU, disk, memory)
Shows known issues with critical processes on desktops
Easy to use and set up

The user interface is quite outdated
Scans sometimes take a very long time
It has a bit too many configuration options

Return on Investment

It allows us to immediately detect rogue devices in our network
It allows us to verify computer performance with any problems our employees encounter

Alternatives Considered

Pulseway and Atera

Both alternatives were great offerings, but were too extensive for our business needs. We needed something that had very low set-up costs, was easily usable, and did all the basics we need; performance metrics analysis, rogue IP detection, network mapping. In the end, along with the reasonable price point, SolarWinds offering won out.

Key Insights

Do you think SolarWinds ipMonitor delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds ipMonitor's feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds ipMonitor live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds ipMonitor go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds ipMonitor again?

Yes

Other Software Used

GitLab, Icinga, Nmap

Usability

SolarWinds ipMonitor is a perfectly decent network mapper and performance metric gatherer, but it is held back by the UI, which can be hard to navigate once you have more than a couple dozen assets in there. It is fairly priced, but it also sometimes takes a really long time before results come in.

Support Rating

I have had no experience with SolarWinds support team. All information I needed was readily available online.

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds ipMonitor is very easy to set-up and use, but can be quite slow to execute. Therefore, I don't think it will work in a medium-to-large organisation. Also, the interface is not suited for 100s of devices. The customisibility could also be better, so enterprises that require strict branding rules need to look elsewhere.

Good network mapping software held back by some outdated design choices

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds ipMonitor