- 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?
Hmm... What was life like? Well, this is the 3rd job I've been at that has used Solarwinds. I was the one to implement it at the first two, but at my current job it was already in place and being used. At the first job, they were using a unix server with MRTG to graph a few interfaces on the core routers for bandwidth, maybe 2% of the total interfaces they had out there. I had made some custom perl scripts to automate doing many of the rest, but managing this and coming up with a way to display the data well was difficult in the least. One day I was playing with a demo of NPM (one of the first versions) and the Director of IT snuck up behind me and saw a map of the US with a couple of our locations on it and said "What's this!!". Within about 3-4 minutes he authorized the purchase and within a few days of getting it set up I had all the routers with all the interfaces in it, and a short time later all the switches. That would be over 200 routers and about 2500 switches. Needless to say my life was much easier since then! For quite some time we used Ciscoworks to manage the configurations on the switches, but it was very cumbersome and difficult to work with. Once NCM came out we purchase that and pretty much the same story, very quickly we were archiving configurations for most of our devices if not all. I've just installed NCM into my current companies NPM installation a day or so ago and already have about 300 devices in it, including all of our core devices - including firewalls and wireless controllers.
What product saved my bacon? Probably NCM even though I'll have to say I'm partial to NTA. NCM's archiving of configs is definitely one that probably keeps your feet out of the fire at times, but NTA gives you very cool visibility in diagnosing problems. Touch choice.
Considered many products. Ciscoworks just doesn't do enough of the critical stuff that SW and its modules can do, not to mention very expensive. HP Openview was just too complex. What's Up Gold just didn't have the feature set or the ease of use. Some of the open source tools were nice, but you definitely have to play with them a ton to get to the point that an out of the box SW installation will do. I've also run into Spectrum (horrid and no native bandwidth monitoring) and the CA tools (way to expensive and difficult to use). I would have to say that back when another Austin TX company was out there (NetQoS) I preferred their Netflow product, but they're now part of CA and the product itself has been stagnant and the support was awful - I actually had to teach their techs about the basics of the products. So I still prefer SW overall for doing the majority of the network monitoring. We still do use Cisco Prime for managing our wireless and such, but for monitoring and diagnostics its SW all the way.
How has life been changed? Hmm... No longer do I have to play around with Opensource products like MRTG and others and do my own scripting to get nice robust network management. And its done in a way that the bosses can get in and poke around and get the reports and such they're interested in. Major timesaver!!