- What was life like before using SolarWinds? (Include what you were using and why you decided it was time for a change)
Our company was using combinations of commericial and open source products which included WhatsUp Gold, Nagios, MRTG, Kiwi SYSLOG, and in-house built monitoring applications. While Nagios/MRTG were great, an important elements such as ease of use and support for the ENTERPRISE environment was lacking. Its great to have a company that built and support the products to be there for you at any given moments to answer questions on metrics being measured or potential bugs in the environment causing erroneous collections of data.
- Which SolarWinds product(s) saved your bacon?
We use NPM, NCM, EOC, and NTA. With these tools, it have helped us tweaked and optimized our networks as well as assist in isolating problems quickly at a glance. The realtime change control to the nightly configurations backup to the Netflow reports have been valuable tools. The APIs provided gave us a lot of flexibilities to manage the bulk add, delete, updates of our monitored resources.
- Did you consider other options, and why did you choose SolarWinds?
We evaluated other products but at the end of the day, the people behind the products is what matters much more than the technology or tools. In our evaluations, we felt Thwack is very commited to providing excellent and fast service. Solarwinds products are feature packed and we did not have to rely on additional vendors and tools to supplement. Their software design is well thought out from allowing us to build a scalable NMS system and redundant system. They have published hardware/software guidelines, well written manuals, and most important as mentioned is the support team.
- How has life been since you've rolled out SolarWinds in your environment?
Life have been BUSIER because Solarwinds pinpointed out issues we were not aware of or neglected because of other priorities. This is a GOOD thing and since than, we have addressed many of the issues discovered and administrations of our global networks is much more manageable using one suite of products
-Tuan Le
Senior Network Engineer
