- What was life like before using SolarWinds? (Include what you were using and why you decided it was time for a change)
Like walking around in a pitch black room blind-folded trying to find the light switch. With over 80 servers, over 400 switches, routers, WLAN controllers, and Lightweight and Autonomous AP's we needed some insight, capacity planning, performance logging, and much more which the Orion suite of products provided for us.
- Which SolarWinds product(s) saved your bacon?
NPM, NCM, NTA, VQNM - One example - I happened to be on vacation and being the only Network Administrator for a very large organization, a switch failed and had to be replaced with a spare we had in inventory - another colleague was able to quickly rack the replacement, plug everything in, and download the failed switch's config into the replacement minimizing downtime. Also, we were all notified that the switch had failed via e-mail alert and hardware monitoring provided by NPM.
- Did you consider other options, and why did you choose SolarWinds?
Sure - All the way from Open Source (Nagios, Cacti) to other paid apps (Cisco Prime, Whatsup Gold, ect) but none of them provided the benefits, ease of use, functionality, and vendor support that the Orion suite provides (and continues to add more support with every release). Also, the awesomeness that is the THWACK Content Exchange has made sharing and adding additional functionality and vendor support very user friendly and extremely easy - Just export/import custom pollers, add them to your node(s), and you're now gaining even more insight into your network's health and performance.
- How has life been since you've rolled out SolarWinds in your environment?
I recently changed employers and have been fortunate enough to be able to have Solarwinds products at both - I setup the Orion suite at my previous organization and used it for almost 5 years and it's great coming to an organization with a mature Solarwinds deployment and environment that is accomplishing everything required by the organization and its departments. The peace of mind and ability to see what's going on from a 10,000' view all the way down to digging into a single interface on a node is what makes the Solarwinds products so unique and invaluable. Solarwinds suite of products really makes you feel like you're in control of your network and devices and gives you the ability to focus on what really matters - Your users, customers, clients, members, or whatever your management team has dubbed them - we all know them as "end users" and they are the ones who let us know we are doing a great job. The Solarwinds suite of products is an arsenal of tools and a means to that end.