HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) vs. Pulseway

This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products

Incentivized

Pulseway is well suited for just about any situation where there is a need to remotely monitor and manage computers. The most basic features are available to anyone with a free account, so even a home user can set it up and use to keep an eye on computers. The more sophisticated features require a fairly inexpensive subscription, but are well worth the cost for a business wanting to monitor the health of their servers, etc. My experience with Pulseway is limited to using it in situations where there are fewer than a dozen or so computers/servers being monitored. I'm not really sure how well it scales up, so I can't say if it is a good solution for a large corporation with hundreds or thousands of machines that need to be monitored.

Incentivized

• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at scanning for devices and adding them for monitoring is almost effortless.
• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at detecting most HP hardware and integrating with local management software.

Incentivized

• Running windows updates: Pulseway really helps us keep our end-user devices up to date, without the need to handle each device individually.
• Sending notifications on our servers really helps with taking care of issues before they cause downtime.
• Pulseway's remote desktop client works very well, even over slower internet connections.

Incentivized

• I think some of the areas that HP Systems Insight Manager can improve is non HP hardware.
• This software also sometimes struggles handling larger environments.
• This software also has issues managing environments that aren't set up perfectly.

Incentivized

• File transfer
• There are a couple of computers that I keep ScreenConnect around for - as I lose connection with Pulseway and have to reestablish with ScreenConnect. I can't seem to get tech support interested in resolving this issue and it cost's me many $$ just to keep ScreenConnect running.
• There is an issue with Webroot, their new endpoint solution. I can't get it to work - again, no help from Pulseway - they ignore my emails.

Incentivized

For basic functions it's very easy to set up and use. However, for more advanced functions it takes a lot of time to figure out its quirks

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use however it is can be daunting with the amount of features available in it. Last I checked, their knowledge base was not very expansive and they relied a lot on the changelog for how to do some stuff. This can make it hard to learn how to do some more advanced things like the automation.

Incentivized

I have never had to use the support for Pulseway. However, when initially starting out, we would receive emails every so often asking how we are doing and if there is any support that they can provide. I would imagine that any request would be supplied with the same great support!

Incentivized

It's good for small organizations that use HP branded equipment

Incentivized

Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.

Incentivized

The 2 major factors were: 1. The fact there was no contract, we believe vendors should have to validate the usefulness of their product and their support to their customers every day, not just 1 or 2 months every few years. This is the same reason we allow our clients to leave at any time if we fail to meet their standards. 2. The ease of managing the product, we demoed other products that would have almost required a full time employee just to manage the RMM tool itself. The ease of use of Pulseway meant a tech could manage it as part of their other duties much improving the ROI. Note: We also felt NinjaOne met these same conditions but we evaluated it after having used Pulseway for a few years and while we found it a great product, possibly even superior, we didn't find enough reason to go through all the work and retraining to change over.

Incentivized

• Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
• This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
• I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.

Incentivized

• Problems can be dealt with more rapidly because I have access to systems from anywhere. I don't have to carry a computer with me nor do I have to find a location with potentially non-secure wifi to gain access to my systems.
• I can handle 99% of my system admin tasks using Pulseway and never have to touch a system or connect to the console.
• Pulseway gives so much control over a system that I don't need to spend extra money on other software to perform management tasks.

Incentivized