Item: SolarWinds ipMonitor
Rating: 8
Author: Rekha Yadav

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds ipMonitor is being used as simple fault and availability monitoring of our remote network devices IP and some of the critical application services and URLs. This tool has a wider visibility in terms of operations as there is a quick response team aligned and monitoring objects very closely and 24*7 of business critical components.

Pros and Cons

network Monitroing
Servers and Services Monitoring
Alerting and reports
Modern Dashboard

More custom capabilities of monitoring
Detailed network monitoring such as for netflow
Integration with 3rd party tools
integration with native SolarWinds on-premises products

Return on Investment

Underlying monitoring infrastructure management is not required
Single place to monitor network, servers and services
native integration with SaaS based SolarWinds products

Alternatives Considered

ManageEngine OpManager, SolarWinds Network Automation Manager (NAM) and Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (formerly HP Network Node Manager)

The way SolarWinds has clubbed the features and capabilities in SolarWinds ipMonitor is not available in other 3rd party or native tools. Even if they are available then they are very costly. I think SolarWinds is positioning ipMonitor so as to test their footprint on SaaS world with these small scale monitoring tools such as Loggly, ipmonitor, AppOptics which is a good sign to enter the SaaS based monitoring solution.

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

SolarWinds Network Automation Manager (NAM), DX Spectrum (formerly CA Spectrum), Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (formerly HP Network Node Manager)

Usability

I wanted to give 10 plus rating to ipMonitor, reason for giving 9 rating is as follows -
1. SolarWinds is not creating much awareness in their already established customer base to start switching to ipMonitor from NAM bundle or NPM modules.
2. Product is not mature enough so as it can compete other SaaS based products such as LogicMonitior, ScienceLogic etc.

Support Rating

Overall experience with SolarWinds support team is good. We never faced any delays or issues with the support team, they are knowledgeable or at least documentation is available to them I guess . Direct phone support is also nice and better than opening a support ticket in the system.
Sometimes logs analysis take a lot of time and it seems support team is buying some time to fix the issue or to do more research on the issues but that is fine.

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds ipMonitor is well suited in situation where customer do not wants to hold the responsibility of underlying monitoring infrastructure management such as Servers, Database, website and their high availability. And of course when you need Network, Servers, Services fault and performance monitoring. When you have specialized network monitoring requirement such as Configuration backup, netflow traffic analysis then this is not the right tool.

SolarWinds ipMonitor Review

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds ipMonitor