No nonsense review of SolarWinds
December 21, 2018
No nonsense review of SolarWinds
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds is used as an operations alerting center for our networks. We have 70 branches across 12 states. With SolarWinds, we can see the health of our network and know when a problem arrives and can quickly work on resolving the issues.
Pros
- Monitor voice network and quality
- Monitor exchange databases
- Monitor network connectivity
- Server uptime
Cons
- The ability to remove modules without having to rebuild the whole system. The recent test of WPM has shown that when using the trial version it becomes embedded and difficult to remove all parts
- The requirement for 3.5 dot net. The system is old and should be updated.
- I like the SolarWinds help group, but sometimes you don’t get replies for weeks regarding some of the more obscure problems. Easier to open tickets than have to wait for help from others.
- The monitoring tools have grown by 50% in the last 3 years. We have increased our original network monitoring to include virtual servers, Cisco voice network quality manager, and server application management to name a few.
- We have been able to alert our network carriers before they can see the problem. This has helped our uptime connectivity by being proactive and not waiting for an outage to occur.
- One of the unexpected benefits is UPS monitoring at every location. We have set up alerts to notify us of aging UPS devices so we can swap them out before a power outage occurs and we find out too late and cannot handle the loads.
We have used and still use live action on our network tools as a secondary alerting system. After all, you cannot get alerts if you run only a single server of SolarWinds. If that site or network goes down how will you know if there is a problem? By having two monitoring tools that run concurrently, each at separate co-locations, you have a better handle ob the network. SolarWinds has the bulk of the monitoring rules and alerts and is the easiest to review, but we do see a need to have reporting from a separate source.
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