SolarWinds Across the Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Currently it is deployed to monitor our IT infrastructure. We use it to monitor the network, servers, virtual infrastructure, services, UPS, workstations and printers. This monitoring is across the entire organization though other departments are not currently using or monitoring these resources. We are attempting to define customer pain points and proactively monitor for the causes of those pain-points. In addition we use SolarWinds to help us efficiently resolve issues in a re-active situation such as site outages or unplanned service outages.
Pros
- Netflow information and configuration management of network devices works really well for us. As these two comprise two of the core products of SolarWinds Orion suite it's good that it does this
- SAM (Application manager) Provides excellent insight into services and service states and is very customizable.
- Support community is excellent (THWACK) as is the available free training from the SolarWinds Customer Portal. Which is good, you're going to need it due to the depth and complexity of the software suites.
Cons
- SolarWinds Orion is not just one product. It's a bunch of cobbled together products gained from acquisitions. Because of that finding a standard way to manage devices is difficult, and understanding one product is no guarantee of understanding another.
- The pane of glass that is Orion is very customizable. It is based on widgets but none of the widgets operate in a predictable way. There may be one that does what you want but you are going to have to find it and you will probably have to try 4 before you find one you like for what you are looking to do. A huge time-sync
- The network-atlas software that lets you put your Orion objects in a visual layout is terrible. Right down to what you can set as defaults for fonts or labels and all the way to stability it is terrible.
- Quickly identifying root cause has helped us reduce downtime.
- Development of organization processes has had a marked improvement on our fire fighting requirements and put them closer to pro-active positions
Nagios is fantastically customizable but when we tried it it has a very large and steep implementation curve. Cisco Prime is great at Cisco but less so at other parts, and HVAC software is good for the HVAC. SolarWinds allows us to combine all of that into a single software suite that, while perhaps less good at the individual things that the above do exceptionally well, is good enough for alerting and proactive that the additional benefits of the single pane of glass HEAVILY outweigh the features of the others.
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