SolarWinds Observability SaaS

What do you like best about the product?

It is very adaptable to complex network and application designs. I have found it easy to use, but you still need an understanding of monitoring, using solarwinds, and general knowledge of networking, applications, ITSM, and what is important to the business, not just the techies. SolarWinds provides integrations via API allowing you to link to other software, not just for data collection, but data sharing. This is powerful as you can put data in into PowerBI for example. Combining multiple data sources while still relying on SolarWinds to perform its main job of monitoring. The performance of Solarwinds has improved dramatically over the past ten years. Upgrades in a multimodule environment with additional polling engines used to take days as often as not. Now, I can scale a much larger environment, and the integrated installer upgrades them everything in about two hours. The ability to run more efficiently on the same server hardware specifications has improved too. The scale of element counts per server has increased a lot. This not only reduces cost of ownership as fewer servers are required, but makes maintenance and upgrades simpler too. The pricing has changed and it is hard to compare pure node count per module to the newer method of overall node counts. The combination of modules into a single product does make licensing simpler though, and the ability to split your licensing into multiple instances of SolarWinds is quite a benefit from years ago. For new users, the support and onboarding experience has changed for the better. There are learning pathways for new users and the onboarding experience gets organizations up and running quickly now. The SolarWinds Academy and the instructors do not get the love, respect and notice that they deserve. They are very knowledgeable and willing to get you answers even after a session. Finally we are seeing AI and improved anomaly detection. While anomaly detection is standard in the industry, SolarWinds has had a version for years, and it has only improved. The AI that is available now and coming is truly amazing and shows that they are not just keeping the lights on, but actively trying to integrate new technology in a way that is useful and not just for marketing. The AI can help with tasks, and create useful intelligent reports on the fly. This is a time saver. Knowing what to do with the data is one thing, but having the time and skill to curate and present that data for engineers to act on? This is a timesaver, especially when critical production is down and you want to find early indicators or correlate event timelines. The ability for users to self serve with the AI does not remove the skilled SolarWinds analyst, but frees them up to work on more urgent tasks. My only wish - I had this feature ten years ago....

What do you dislike about the product?

This is a hard question to answer as I generally like the product. Licensing is probably one of the bigger headaches for any vendor. This is no different. The on premise version has legacy use cases that do not translate easily into the new model. I have heard about difficulties with this, but the subscription model will keep you current and provide updates, support, and new features. One feature that I want to see more of... DARK Theme.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The ability to tag nodes with meta data provided an early CMDB and asset functionality that did not exist elsewhere. People assume that custom properties were just for alerts. Nope, you can do so much more with them. I was able to eliminate many thoughts of custom tables and programming with heavy usage the custom properties feature. I was able to define reports, reassign alerts, create custom dashboards much quicker by simply leveraging custom properties. SolarWinds talks about them, as do many users and there is good reason for this. USE THEM. This one feature will enhance everything that you do with SolarWinds. Also, look at the other modules of aspects of the monitoring capabilities. You will find the ability to monitor a lot more than what you expect. You can define custom API calls, custom snmp gets, custom WMI calls, etc to generate more data, data that your org needs, to keep things running. It is also not just alerting, CMDB and Asset tracking from the SolarWinds Observability stack that can be overlooked. You should be using the data to generate performance graphs and utilization for future hardware requirements. This is actually an out of the box capability too. I have had to stop engineers from powershelling their afternoons into usage charts and tell them to use SolarWinds. The data is there, the trend lines are there, just open the web site and start looking. You can create a report to download too. Stop the madness.

What do you like best about the product?

Rolling all the modules into the product has definitely improved and we're seeing improvement of new product releases (features not bug fixes) in recent releases. There has been a definite uptake in feature requests being ticked off that we hadn't seen for some time, so this is good.
AI additions are good but focus needs to remain on the many requests still outstanding from the community.

What do you dislike about the product?

Licensing tiers and cost is offputting, and competitors have had time to catch up.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Bringing all the observavility and monitoring into one tool without the hassle of tying in different components. The advantages of having the option to integrate Incident Management is also a plus.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that it’s user-friendly, and that when I run into a problem, I can investigate the source of the issue on THWACK.

What do you dislike about the product?

The interface includes so many features that it can sometimes be difficult to quickly locate specific settings.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Real-time change notifications and configuration back-ups of network devices.
Network security compliance.
Syslog monitoring.
Tracking EOL&EOS of software and hardware.

What do you like best about the product?

It helps reduce downtime and makes it easier to trace errors.

What do you dislike about the product?

Nothing to complain about—everything works well. It’s easy to use, has an interactive interface, and is straightforward to integrate with other APIs. Overall, it provides a good return on the investment.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

It helps us onboard new servers and applications to our network, and then monitor and support them.

What do you like best about the product?

Ease of use and good product and the ability to monitor network .

What do you dislike about the product?

It took a long time to set up our instance.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The status of on prem network equipment.

What do you like best about the product?

The functionality that comes out of the box but also the ability to create custom monitoring is fantastic

What do you dislike about the product?

Dashboard creation is a little lacking but getting better recently. Also saas product not being on prem capable

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Being able to be more proactive on our enterprise

What do you like best about the product?

Solarwinds offers a wide range of plugins and widgets that can be used effectively for seamless monitoring. It has a good UI and provides a very smooth overall experience.

What do you dislike about the product?

There’s nothing specific when it comes to checking error logs, and there isn’t an easy way to understand the logs.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use it for day-to-day monitoring on our production system. It makes it easy to identify issues quickly and work through them smoothly, and many problems can be fixed directly in the SolarWinds console. For example, if the SolarWinds agent is reported as down, we can start the agent from the console itself to resolve the issue.

What do you like best about the product?

Provides alerting for network devices so we know when our circuits go down at our offices.
Disk space alerts for Servers

What do you dislike about the product?

Some of the new modern dashboards don't have the same functionality as the old

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Network observability

What do you like best about the product?

Vendor agnostic features, scalability and self hosted.

What do you dislike about the product?

Slow adoption on some vendors and technologies .

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Bandwidth Analysis, performance monitoring and correlation .

What do you like best about the product?

Ease the of use, setting of performance monitoring

What do you dislike about the product?

UDP pollers and SQL help are useful, but it’s hard to configure legacy devices when using SNMP pollers.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Consolidating alarms and systems