Solorwinds

Any one use it, any thoughts?

I was liking the look of it for a medium scale deployment, but does any one have horror stories using it, it looks nice and stright forward interface and moduler so only get what you need.

Just doing my homework and market research before I add it to the short list.

Cheers

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Comments

Bundiman

We use it to monitor all of the network gear were I work and it works great. Easy enough to setup just need snmp configured on all of your devices.

FloOz

We use it as well. Simple and straightforward. We are looking into replacing it with SevOne though. We are looking for a solution that dives much deeper into the details of network monitoring.

QHalo

We use it as well. Works pretty well for monitoring just about everything we have. Almost got the storage module but I have other methods to monitor that stuff and they charge by the number of disks you want to manage. /facepalm

DevilWAH

Cool guys cheers.

The current guys here have never monitored the network full stop, and we need a single tool that can do it all so they can learn the basics and migrate lots of badly configured tools in to a single solution.

From what you say it seems you confirm my thoughts that its a decent product that would support what we need.

SteveO86

I'm a big fan of SolarWinds, I've deployed at quite a few companies. I've found it to be very reliable and customizable. The Thwack community is awesome to.

Only downside is when you have multiple pollers and modules running upgrades can get a little tedious.

But other then that I love the tool. Took my SCP test a few weeks and passed to.

kohr-ah

I administer it for a multitude of customers. One with 31000 nodes.

If I worked for a company and I knew I was going to use it to just monitor my company I would use it.

As a person who has to use it to monitor about 100 customers with a lot of nodes each a lot of times when we have an issue the developers seem to use us as a guiney pig which I dont appreciate at all. Also as said before once you start scaling up in pollers it is tedious to upgrade. (If you ever add failover engines dont get me started on that)

So I would say for the case you are looking to use it for it is a good product with a lot of things you can do with it. Report Writer is great to use and you can create your own custom pollers for SAM. The report features of it are great too.

Mrock4

I've worked with Orion several years now in a variety of environments, and most of the time it's been OK. Except for that time that Orion 10.1 had a bug that caused Cisco 6500 CPU's to spike each time the server polled them...

That being said, SolarWinds support is pretty great to work with, so kudos to them for that. All in all I think it's a good monitoring tool, and reasonably easy to customize reports/pollers/etc.

WafflesAndRootbeer

I've played around with it and taken the tutorials and such but I never ever see any employers putting it on job listings. That doesn't mean it's not used because I know it is and it's been around for ages, so someone is obviously putting it to use. It just means they aren't talking about it but as we all know, there's a huge big gigantic enormous large gap between what companies should be looking for and what they are putting in their listings as far as skills go, especially when rainbow sherbet recruiters are involved.

SteveO86

Failover Engines!!! Some real fun right there. (I knew I forgot to mention something)

I've actually seen SolarWinds referenced in some job descriptions 'SolarWinds experience a plus', however if you dedicate some time to SolarWinds you can pick it up very quickly at the end of the day it is just a management server that relies on SNMP, however as with everything else the more experience you have the more 'tricks' you learn

gorebrush

I've used WhatsUp Gold quite a lot. Anyone else?

Not tried the SolarWinds gear though.

SteveO86

I used WhatsUpGold as well, I've actually ripped out the instance after 6-8 months and replaced it completely with SolarWinds. WUG is actually on the bottom of list network management, of course it could have been an old version they were running. PRTG, Nagios are also pretty good.

gorebrush

Yeah, I'd like to see something else be used, but alas, it isn't up to me to decide these things

DevilWAH

Again cheers for all the feed back guys. Read a lot about solorwinds and been playing with the demo, but always good to hear from people who use it. and so far no one has slated it

I do think having experience of network monitoring and management tools on a CV is a great thing, but not sure I would bother listing what applications unless the job description mentioned it. Wait till they ask at the interview.

kohr-ah

DevilWAH wrote: »

Again cheers for all the feed back guys. Read a lot about solorwinds and been playing with the demo, but always good to hear from people who use it. and so far no one has slated it

I do think having experience of network monitoring and management tools on a CV is a great thing, but not sure I would bother listing what applications unless the job description mentioned it. Wait till they ask at the interview.

I list that I manage it. Servers, onboarding projects, etc otherwise I don't count it as a major thing either .

There is a lot of cool things you can do with it once you learn how to start having fun with it. Like see if owa logins are working , we actually have algorithms that test our polling engine poll rates, database stats, and more.

Thwack has a lot of good templates too

SteveO86

Plus the joy of network management servers is the fact they all pretty much run off SNMP so being familiar with SNMP/MIBs/OIDs, is the same no matter what platform it is.

DevilWAH

kohr-ah wrote: »

There is a lot of cool things you can do with it once you learn how to start having fun with it. Like see if owa logins are working , we actually have algorithms that test our polling engine poll rates, database stats, and more

We already run severally monitoring tools, but we have one for server hardware, one netflow collector, one that polls and backs up network hardware, logging collectors. Etc... So thankfully I have tidied up all the SNMP and credentials and am running a lot of network, hardware and application monitoring.

solor winds would be a replacment and consolidation. Of all our current old legacy systems. like SteveO say its all just SNMPso should be a simple migration.

blargoe

We are considering Solarwinds as an option for monitoring our entire datacenter as well (servers, network, applications, VMware, etc).

They aren't listed at all in Gartner's magic quadrant, interestingly enough.

networkjutsu

The very first time I've used SolarWinds is from my previous employer. I was actually tasked to upgrade their existing monitoring system which was an older SolarWinds product. I quite like it. At first, I was really apprehensive about the project since I've only used NMS and never deployed one. I've applied what I know and what my colleagues wanted to see from the monitoring. As Steve mentioned, if you spend time with it then you'll pick it up soon. I had zero knowledge in deploying one and it was up and running in a few days. Though, I have to admin that the SQL part I had help with since I have zero knowledge of configuring SQL.

Things I've used in the past are the following: CastleRock's SNMPc, Concorde/Computer Associates' Ehealth, and EMC's Smarts.

Mrock4

A bit off topic, but I highly recommend giving Cisco LMS an in-depth look for the network engineers out there. It's integration with devices is fantastic. It can be a bit buggy, but once set up properly, it's incredibly powerful and it completely eliminates the tedious work, leaving you more time for the fun stuff.

DevilWAH

Mrock4 wrote: »

A bit off topic, but I highly recommend giving Cisco LMS an in-depth look for the network engineers out there. It's integration with devices is fantastic. It can be a bit buggy, but once set up properly, it's incredibly powerful and it completely eliminates the tedious work, leaving you more time for the fun stuff.

Cisco Prime Infrastructure

yes its great, and it does combine wired and wireless in to nice single interface. once you tie in ISE and mobility management it gives a really good view of the network and whats happening. I am just rolling out a nice wireless project with it, and it will carry on managing config and backup with it. Solorwinds we want for a more generic monitoring across the board. You can do a lot with PRIME but it does get expensive rather quickly.

SteveO86

I've finally consolidated NCS and LMS into Infrastructure just a few weeks ago!

Although I am still waiting for Infrastructure v2 for more LMS Features to be integrated. I must say I very happy with it, configuration management and IOS management is just awesome!

Granted the one thing I prefer about SolarWinds is the fact is manages multiple vendors F5, Juniper, Cisco, HP SolarWinds can handle it.

FloOz

Has anyone used SevOne?

Mrock4

SteveO86 wrote: »

Granted the one thing I prefer about SolarWinds is the fact is manages multiple vendors F5, Juniper, Cisco, HP SolarWinds can handle it.

Absolutely. I'd never pitch LMS for ANY other purpose than managing a 100% cisco shop, but it is a great tool. I use it all the time to push mass configs for certain things (ACL modifications, NTP configs, enabling/disabling global features, etc). It's awesome. And yeah- the IOS management part is great. My only gripe is the Cisco documentation on LMS is horrible. I recently went through a few LMS upgrades/issues for one of our customers, and it was quite a headache working through that. Once it was working properly though, it's a beautiful thing!

xXErebuS

I like PRTG personally; Solarwinds is expensive and they could never get what we needed to work (they put a Senior Engineer to assist); where as PRTG did it from the box.

Zartanasaurus

Has anyone ever dealt with Solarwinds tech support before? This is the first time I've ever used them, and all I can say is I hope I got a bad support person.

kohr-ah

I deal with them at least 2 - 3 times a week.

It is.. hit or miss.

90% of the time I get the answer being "The issue is your equipment not our product"
Or my favorite is "It is fixed in the next version, you need to upgrade" then we upgrade and "Oh, I will have a Dev create a buddy drop (hotfix) for you"

There are some good ones there but I have to say 60% of the time, not so much.

Zartanasaurus

kohr-ah wrote: »

90% of the time I get the answer being "The issue is your equipment not our product"

This is exactly the answer I got. I always go out of my way to provide lots of information in tickets since I know how much of a benefit it is. It's like the guy was looking for a reason to say "nope that's your fault". Then after I replied with even more information, he suggested I try something that I already mentioned I had tried in the initial ticket. I guess it's going to be one of those days.

Node Man

I use and like Solarwinds. Easy to monitor equipment.

Mrock4

I worked with SW tech support a couple of times. The first time they didn't respond at all for about a week. Second time I never got an answer- I got an email from them months later asking if it had been resolved (I had since left the customers site, and the issue was resolved).

kohr-ah

Node Man wrote: »

I use and like Solarwinds. Easy to monitor equipment.

I like the software. Just not a fan of their support :P