Great experience and value from SolarWinds
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use and ability to fully customize to fit my environment.
What do you dislike about the product?
Performance can be quite slow sometimes.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
ability to perform complex actions for monitoring and resolution to low level alerts.
A unified platform designed to monitor the entire infrastructure
What is our primary use case?
The primary use cases are for customers who require complete infrastructure monitoring. I mean IT infrastructure, which includes network devices, security devices, and server environments, whether physical, virtual, or cloud-based. The platform can manage any infrastructure component that needs monitoring.
It's an all-in-one platform with all the necessary modules. For instance, server and application monitoring, network performance monitoring, and network configuration management are all part of it. It's a unified platform designed to monitor the entire infrastructure.
Imagine monitoring the network infrastructure, the web server, and the database server. With SolarWinds HCO, I can perform database analytics, web server monitoring, and network infrastructure monitoring.
AI capabilities come into play through correlation. For instance, SolarWinds HCO can identify high utilization on the interface connecting to the database server, indicating a lot of read-and-write operations between the front-end application and the back-end database. This correlation can help determine whether the network condition caused the server issue or vice versa.
The AI continues learning and analyzing patterns such as CPU, memory, and network utilization spikes. If it detects a CPU spike first, it might indicate the server was at fault. If it notices a network spike, the network could be the issue.
What is most valuable?
SolarWinds HCO platform offers various features spanning components, such as network, security, server, virtual, and application components. Common features include dashboarding, reporting, and alerting. These features provide comprehensive visibility, allowing you to see how one area's issues affect others. For instance, if a network issue impacts server performance, this visibility is crucial.
One of the biggest advantages of this common platform is its ability to correlate issues. For example, if a network alert occurs and the server experiences downtime, you can be alerted to both issues.
Recently, two significant features were added: anomaly-based alert detection and an alert stack mechanism. The alert stack mechanism is particularly useful. For example, if there's high interface utilization on a network switch and concurrent server performance issues, the platform’s correlation engine will link these alerts and show them as a common alert stack, indicating a likely correlation.
What needs improvement?
The tool's escalation process needs improvement. More support is needed for the new generation of solutions, particularly SD-WAN support and newer storage components. Additionally, as more vendors move towards API-based monitoring, we anticipate SolarWinds HCO will increase integrations with other solutions.
Another area for improvement is reporting. With infrastructure becoming increasingly diverse, the static infrastructures of the past are evolving into dynamic setups. Traditionally, we had wireless in the office, a backend Internet connection, and connections to head offices and data centers. With the advent of SD-WAN, multiple service providers, and cloud-based options, infrastructure is more dynamic.
Today, most customers are not using on-premise solutions exclusively; they are opting for Office 365, G Suite, or similar services. Therefore, monitoring requirements are no longer limited to on-premise infrastructure but span diverse environments—some on-premise, some in the cloud. This is why SolarWinds is moving towards hybrid cloud observability.
We would like to see more integrations and support for third-party vendors. For example, current support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is limited, and expanding this support would be beneficial.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with the product for three years.
What was our ROI?
The tool helps save costs through its additional features and unified platform. Monitoring all components in a single platform reduces the need for separate consoles for different tasks. This consolidation saves time and money, as it eliminates the manual correlation of data, which is prone to errors.
I rate the overall product an eight out of ten.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The solution's pricing is quite reasonable. It has moved to node-based licensing, simplifying the process. They don't distinguish between different types of nodes, such as server nodes, physical routers, or switches. One node equals one license, making it easy to manage. If you have 500 devices, you need five hundred licenses to get all the features of this unified monitoring platform.
What other advice do I have?
We don't recommend other vendors since we have built our capabilities around SolarWinds. However, it innovates and keeps us occupied.
SolarWinds - good monitoring tool for IT
What do you like best about the product?
Keeps IT abreast of the status of critical apps and services. We display the status on a TV screen in the IT bay. Convenient for everyone to view. Also sends alerts.
What do you dislike about the product?
Not always clear as to what specifically is down.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Helps us know when services are down.
VERY GOOD IN NETWORK MONITOR
What do you like best about the product?
The best program for monitoring networks and infrastructure. It is very easy to integrate, but there is difficulty in configuring the settings.
What do you dislike about the product?
difficulty in configuring the settings AND PRICE
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
There was a problem while configuring the settings, but I called support and they helped me
Easy and simple to monitor
What do you like best about the product?
One of the best features of this is that it is easy and simple to monitor the network, and I think it is better than PRTG because it is compatible with everything and predicts problems before they occur.
What do you dislike about the product?
High cost and difficulty in configuring the settings
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Monitors the network and its infrastructure
I have 8 months experience
What do you like best about the product?
It helps to detect and analyz our networks.We use it to monitor our routers, switches and Firewalls.
We use to manage hardware helthand and update hardware health statistics in deployed SolarWinds Platform.
It's easy to use because it has very simple of GUI.
When we need to configure or have a problem we call support to solve it so this is helpfull.
What do you dislike about the product?
we do not have access to configure some features and customize any thing that help us in our work.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
To make it easier for us to monitor the performance of devices, it solved this problem by collecting these devices in one environment to see them all.
Most used Scalable Engines in the Indsutry
What do you like best about the product?
It's capacity to provide capacity, performance and development of all sizes and it's monitoring capabilities makes it the best in industry.
What do you dislike about the product?
I noticed there are some potential scalable issues with larger deployments.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It is helping me in managing larger environment by distributing the load across engines
Save time effortlessly
What do you like best about the product?
Easy heat mapping allows to see everything in a single pane of glass
What do you dislike about the product?
I don't have any issues with the simple setup
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
With a single click I can shut down devices
Knowledge is Power
What do you like best about the product?
The amount of information gathered and the KPI we can see and monitor.
What do you dislike about the product?
The level of difficulty with deloying and customizing.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Insight into systems and network
SolarWinds Your comprehensive solution for critical Servers and applications
What do you like best about the product?
What I like is the ability to automate tasks and responses to alerts, allowing for the configuration of custom actions to resolve issues without the need for human intervention. The flexibility to integrate with other SolarWinds and third-party tools is a standout feature, providing the capability to expand monitoring capabilities. Additionally, it offers a wide range of reporting and analytical capabilities, enabling the evaluation of performance over time, identifying trends, and making informed decisions.
What do you dislike about the product?
Some of the updates or maintenance of this tool can be complex, especially in environments with multiple instances or customizations. In very large and complex implementations, you may encounter challenges in terms of scalability and performance. Managing multiple instances can be a bit intricate
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
SolarWinds is addressing monitoring by the SOC for the customer's deployed equipment to have first-degree control
