Exactly what you want in a monitoring system... but at a cost!
November 04, 2019

Exactly what you want in a monitoring system... but at a cost!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Remote Monitoring & Management

SolarWinds Remote Monitoring & Management is being used by out network teams which include monitoring audio video equipment. We use it to monitor network devices to determine if the device is up or down and to monitor processes within the device. We also use SolarWinds to manage devices into locations and to group them into like devices. This solves the problem of know what devices you have where they are located and if there are issues with them.
  • Able to design the system to fit your needs. There are lots of features that help you tweak the system to have it work best for you.
  • SNMP Mibs are already available no need to import your own, they also keep them up to date.
  • Love the customizable dashboards. You have the info that is most relevant to you at you finger tips.
  • You are able to open devices directly from the dashboard through links, so no need to copy and paste. Just click.
  • There are so many features and options that it can be overwhelming in the beginning.
  • Wish there was a way to add custom fields to reports.
  • The GUI is crowded or links aren't clearly described on certain pages. I find myself forgetting how to get to certain views.
  • The software can start to lag after a while even if the hardware is specced out correctly. I would definitely recommend over-speccing the device.
  • API is just OK, wish they would put more effort into this.
  • SolarWinds has saved us money and downtime by monitoring system processes and giving us solid data to know when we should upgrade hardware.
  • We bought SolarWinds mainly to monitor and manage our devices but have found that is can do much more that we had anticipated when has made it so we don't have to purchase other tools.
  • The fact that the reports and graphs are already templated has been tremendous for us and a time saver. We now don't have to spend hours compiling data for graphs and reports.
SolarWinds definitely is the the most ready out of the box as far as getting is up and running and you can start using it where other system go from need ing a little setup like importing MIBS to completely needing to configure the system. As far a performance once things are up and working I feel they all do a good job at basic monitoring and management. The difference is that SolarWinds does a good job at having things templated but allows you to customize some attributes. If you are want to make major customization for alerts and monitoring and other things SolarWinds is not the best option. But, then again, you will not need a team just to manage the system.
Aruba ClearPass, Aruba Networks Wireless LAN (WLAN), Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches, Graylog, Splunk Enterprise, Infoblox DDI, Okta Customer Identity, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Palo Alto Panorama, Slack, Zoom, Zoom Video Webinar, Zabbix
If you are a large corporation and have lots of devices that may or may not be in the same location, SolarWinds can help you manage where they are located physically and also logically. You can group them and give them parent/child relationships so if a main device goes down you don't get an alert for every device that is behind the main device. With those same devices, SolarWinds can monitor them so you know the online status of them. SolarWinds can pull SNMP data from your device and create monitoring objects like CPU, memory, disk space and even create SNMP traps you so can get alerted if anything happens on that device.

If you need to have a variety of ways you want to be alerted to SolarWinds alerts, this is a great product. You can be alerted by standard email or by SMS and more. If you are wanting export data or to pull data via the API to other systems I have found this to be difficult and not as easy as other systems I have used. If you are dealing with smaller amounts of devices, SolarWinds can handle them but I feel that SolarWinds is quite pricey and requires more hardware resources than most would want to pay for smaller deployments.

N-able N-sight RMM Feature Ratings

Remote monitoring
9
Network device monitoring
10
Patch Management
8
Policy-based automation
7