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.
Tech Lead
What do you like best about the product?
More flexibility and ease to implement ,good customer support ,integrations, more features
What do you dislike about the product?
solarwinds hybrid cloud observability all good , no dislike
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
most coverd all the Infrastructure monitoring
Full of features
What do you like best about the product?
Alerts notification and reports capabilities are great
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometime longer retention date can decrease Solarwinds performance
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Alert and reporting
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
All in One
What do you like best about the product?
The cloud observability is just amazing, it does everything for me from managing to scaling and from monitoring to contolling. It seems there is no where else to go for my application for such simple implementation and integration. Even the customer support is very effective in terms of reply and efficiency. I recommend to some who is looking for standalone platform to manage cloud services for their application.
What do you dislike about the product?
According to me only one thing I was little dissappointed which is pricing. May for someone its fair with large application to handle but not for everyone. Also, the frequency of the usage needs to be monitor at every stage.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
One place to look for multiple things decreases my time delay and increases productivity.
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.
Can be free and full of features
What do you like best about the product?
It's easy to use with the free subscription. It's easy to integrate with Ubiquiti Unifi UDM and many features for the price. I use it daily to get an idea of the health of my network including firewall rules, router and switch issues and more. To implement, I just had to put the url into my UDM. After I figured out how I want to use the log, I save processing and data by putting filter logs directly in papertrail in order to prevent it counting useless data to my data cap. Prices for adding additional log processing is low and on demand which makes it easy to only pay for what you get.
What do you dislike about the product?
It wasn't easy to figure out how to do the log filters with severity. At first, it is easy to put in strings to exclude from the filters, but I still haven't figured out how to filter out severity when the severity text is not actually in the string. It is a number.
I would love to see a feature to help find anomalies and security issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Detect issues with port scans and IPs that constantly hit my router. Port flapping and STP issues. Router or switch errors and configuration issues.
Matured product for your device monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
We are a user of Solarwinds NPM from last 3+ years. This product is allowing us to monitor 700+ Virtual Firewalls of different vendors hosted as NFV devices on prem. We are able to monitor and act immediately using its integration to create tickets on salesforce and trigger emails. We are also able to generate reports using its easy to use feature. This helps in generating reports and sharing with upper management for review. In simple words, it does best whats its supposed to do and brings ease for the users in implementing. Auto discovery is one great feature.
What do you dislike about the product?
Although it has a bigger community where you can find answers to your questions. However, their customer support is not that great. We feel that there is huge delay in raising query vs getting response back from them, We are a regular user of this product..almost daily basis and so we need them to provide us immediate response when in need so that we solve the issue.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
To manage multiple firewalls hosted by us on prem across wide customer base, we wanted a monitoring solution that is stable, matred and provides redundancy. Multi tenancy is one great and best feature which helps us to manage multiple firewalls with conflicting IPs byt moving them into different groups.
