Barry Nance reviewed 8 of the top Network Management products in Network World magazine, May 6 2013 issue, page 22 article. Solarwinds NPM & SAM were part of this review, on page 28, and Mr. Nance documented the good and the bad for all of these packages. SW NPM & SAM came in deep in the pack of many NPM products and the following observations were noted:
"NPM and SAM interfaces are not as responsive as we would've liked, the two products are pricey for larger installations and they don't have the ability to automatically correct problems by running scripts or restarting failed Windows services"
"However, NPM's root cause analysis relies heavily on what NPM terms group dependencies, which we found to be tedious to set up. We had to designate nodes as Parents and Children for NPM to know that, when a Parent failed, NPM should trigger a single alert for the Parent and report as "Unreachable" the (say) 50 Children connected to the Parent. Identifying Parents was easy, but designating the Children was a one-by-one, device-by-device process. NPM only let us tie a single Child or a single group to a Parent"
"NPM's browser-based interface is intuitive to use, albeit a bit sluggish at times. Drilling down to node details displays basic device data. The next lower drill down level reveals specific data, such as RAM usage, disk usage or bytes in/bytes out. Unfortunately, the browser interface is incomplete. Some tasks, such as configuring alerts, can only be done via NPM's native Windows interface."
I have also been complaining about the "slugishness" of the NPM Browser for years!
The Parent/Children issue should be an automatic and easily configurable integrated option and I find the opposite, extremely diffifult to configure and necessary to properly control alerting!
I am curious if anyone at SW reads these articles and more to the point, if anything is going to be done to improve upon the issues detailed in this and other reports?
We purchased SW Orion NPM & SAM and have since added more mods to hopefully monitor, manage, and alert on my Network, but, the problems I have encountered in my Network also come with the side issue of slow browser response! Sometimes no browser response. I have thrown more resources at my SW servers than I care to recount. The NPM browser sometimes doesn't afford me the ability to act as fast as I would like on issues and at times, the web interface is so "slugish" that I have opted to work on the issues outside of NPM! Almost every time I try to access our LEM instance, something has to be tweaked or restarted to make it functional. This makes me wonder why we spent all of that money in the first place. I point out these issues not as a total negative but rather as an opportunity for SW to improve on, what I believe is, a good product and make it better!
For the record we currently own licenses for NPM, SAM, NCM, VMQM, LEM, and Engineer's Toolset. And I also try to be included in as many BETA's as possible to help develop the best product possible!
SW already passed the the first two obstacles with me, the selection and purchase process. So, I found the software good or should I say, better than the rest at one point! Kudos! But since that time, more mods, more $$ spent, more necessary upgrades, more services crashed, more support calls after support call, tickets after tickets and sometime I wonder if my opinion matters at all!
Enough said for now!
Well, there you go the entire SW team has been challenged!
The question is now, How are you going to respond?