SolarWinds RMM - The Effective Ugly Duckling
Updated February 22, 2019

SolarWinds RMM - The Effective Ugly Duckling

Bryant Lee | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Remote Monitoring & Management

This question, I believe, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what exactly SolarWinds RMM (SWRMM) is and it's target market. SWRMM is primarily targeted at Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who are companies that outsource IT for other organizations. As such, it solves one of the core business needs for our industry.

SWRMM is used by the majority of our company (all the techs), so it manages several thousand endpoints on behalf of our customers. It gives us most of the solutions we need to manage, monitor and maintain these endpoints. In essence, the business problem it solves is our need to be able to quickly support several thousand endpoints with a small team.
  • It provides fantastic remote access capabilities. The Take Control tool gives us a robust platform that is capable of remote controlling almost any endpoint we need to and the chat, file transfer, and screen recording tools are all exceptionally useful.
  • SolarWinds RMM is particularly useful as a single pane of glass solution that allows us to monitor and manage thousands of endpoints across dozens of different clients. It does a solid job of allowing us to sort, organize, and filter based off of who and what we want to see at any given time.
  • Due to its client based nature, the platform excels at in-depth monitoring of services, event logs, and the functionality of systems with custom script checks.
  • Manageability of Customer logins to the dashboard is poor.
  • AV whitelists don't apply to behavioral scans which makes them nearly worthless.
  • The "Networks" tab doesn't let you monitor a network that isn't on the same subnet as a network adapter even if a monitored machine can access a different subnet.
  • Vulnerability scans/patch management break ALL THE TIME. We have to uninstall/reinstall it on 5-10 systems per week.
  • "Network Devices" is extremely limited in value. If each device also supported a list of SNMP check that could be customized, they might actually be useful.
  • They need a new UX team. The settings menus are atrocious. I should be able to access ALL settings for any given product from its single settings menu, not have to try figuring out which of the three settings menus for that product actually contain the settings I need.
  • The SolarWinds name carries a good bit of clout in the industry. This has definitely helped secure a few deals.
  • The addition of Cloud Backups had a positive impact because we were able to easily add it as a bolt-on for existing clients. We have now added this offering to almost 20% of our managed servers.
  • We are in the process of moving into a "co-managed" business plan. SolarWinds RMM has facilitated this by allowing us to help in-house IT teams with offloading server management and maintenance while they are able to focus on big-picture objectives.
SolarWinds supplies a price competitive product that is feature rich and constantly adding new offerings in an ever-changing market.
It works extremely well when trying to perform basic monitoring on a large number of endpoints and you also wish to perform some management tasks all from a single location. It isn't great at anything network related. A lot more data needs to be exportable, especially in the form of CSVs.

N-able N-sight RMM Feature Ratings

Remote monitoring
9
Network device monitoring
6
Patch Management
6
Policy-based automation
6