- What was life like before using SolarWinds? (Include what you were using and why you decided it was time for a change)
- Which SolarWinds product(s) saved your bacon?
- Did you consider other options, and why did you choose SolarWinds?
- How has life been since you've rolled out SolarWinds in your environment?
1. What was life like before using Solarwinds?
Life was chaotic. Life was fire drills. Across the company there was little confidence in IT's ability to deliver support. We had various tools which included the system/device/application native tools. But in reality we had the end users. For hardware failures and systems offline, we had no ability to be proactive. Scarily enough, the mentality of our Network & Systems team was our biggest roadblock. They believed they didn't need anything enterprise-level. Ohh, and we had an unmanaged version of Quest's Big Brother! running basically doing ICMP/ping monitoring.
2. Which Solarwinds product(s) saved your bacon?
Hahaha! (In my best kung fu action movie villain English-dubbed laugh!) First it was NPM, which showed us all of our network problems, network resource capacity issues, latency and saturation. Once that was under control we moved onto SAM. SAM showed us all of our pending hardware failures, warranty expirations, high temperatures, Windows Services issues, bad I/O. After those layers of the onions were peeled we decided to cry some more and purchased LEM. Being a heavy BYOD company LEM shed the light on millions, upon millions, of weekly AD failures from rogue or dead devices. Also, hundreds, upon of hundreds, of thousands of failures from Windows Services that were assigned user credentials for authorization that were now using expired credentials. I'll save you the rant about network devices and security devices. Oy Vey! So then we decided to stab ourselves in the leg and buy Patch Manager so we could get our arms around our disparate operating units and their lack of a Patch Mgmt strategy. We all wept openly. In 2016 we have purchased NCM and NetFlow. I have also put in the budget Group Therapy sessions for the Network & Systems team.
3. Did you consider other options, and why did you choose Solarwinds?
Sure! There were many vendors beating down our door and we had to consider them. But in the end the Solarwinds products won based on the following criteria:
1. Intuitiveness - This cannot be oversold for Solarwinds products, with the exception of LEM in its current incantation.
2. Price - Solarwinds pricing is extremely competitive.
3. Incumbent - Once NPM was entrenched the pipeline was set. The fact that most of the other products overlay on NPM allowed for the "centralized dashboard" mantra. As we all know, each device, or application, comes with their own dashboard/admin page. You would have to have 150 windows up everyday to keep an eye on them. Using custom pollers and dashboard design we were able to eliminate the need to log into 75% of them quickly. The remaining 25% are in scope.
4. Thwack - The user support community exceeds all others on the market. Nuf Ced!
4. How has life been since you've rolled out Solarwinds in your environment?
Hmm... Enlightened? We no longer have our head in the sand when it comes to our IT landscape. We have a lot of work to do across the board. But at least now we know our fate. Also, our Solarwinds implementation isn't just a network & systems monitoring tool. It is truly an enterprise resource planning tool. We use it for: Enterprise Architecture, Configuration Mgmt., Capacity Mgmt, Availability Mgmt, Performance & Forecasting, etc.