SolarWinds ipMonitor vs. ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds ipMonitor is very easy to set-up and use, but can be quite slow to execute. Therefore, I don't think it will work in a medium-to-large organisation. Also, the interface is not suited for 100s of devices. The customisibility could also be better, so enterprises that require strict branding rules need to look elsewhere.

Incentivized

Appropriate if you are setting up a monitoring suite in new Infrastructure Environment. Definitely NOT suited for Migration Projects. ScienceLogic SL1 cannot cater to a lot of monitoring requirements which already would have been configured in old monitoring suite. Plus, limited support for customizations and having to go to "Feature Requests" route makes in extremely complicated.

Incentivized

• Both network devices and servers may be easily located on the network.
• It notifies the user whenever any network device undergoes a change in status.
• Powerful reporting capabilities that provide vital data about your network's devices (uptime, space, utilization of resources on your devices)

Incentivized

• Best overall coverage of montioring different technologies.
• Easy to use in any environment
• Customizable being able to generate your own reports, dashboards, DA's, RBA's, etc.
• Have very good out of the box integrations with other monitoring solutions such as ServiceNow
• Always improving and regularly releasing new versions and upgrades to the system/DA's.
• Interactive community

Incentivized

• It is a very complete and versatile software, but its price can be somewhat high for small companies.
• During the analysis of the collected data the process can be somewhat slow, so it takes more time than expected.
• Its configuration process can be somewhat complex since it requires several configurations so having prior knowledge is helpful.

Incentivized

• Creating powerpacks from scratch for new devices may be straightforward but will rarely be easy. Rewarding when completed, but not easy.
• Developer documentation needs a rethink. While the information may be there (it isn't always) it is not easy to find. This is not helped by using different terms for the same things.
• A developer console/dashboard for monitoring data collection from powerpacks instances without having to switch webpages or have to monitor multiple webpages.

Incentivized

I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products

Incentivized

We migrated away from our 20-year-old homegrown solution and have no back-tracking capability. ScienceLogic is demonstrating new capabilities that we would not have been able to do on our own using our legacy system.
We understand the capabilities of competitors based on our bake-off selection where ScienceLogic won on capabilities and future near-term potential (expandability, platform growth). We know that those competitors are not really close to where we have been able to push ScienceLogic (as a partner).

Incentivized

Although SolarWinds ipMonitor is great tool to start the SaaS based monitoring journey with SolarWinds products but it still requires a lot of enhancement and its user base which is primarily using on-premises products of SolarWinds needs to be shifted on SaaS based platform strategically and need to motivate. ipMonitor needs to be interated with infra monitoring products such as On-Premises NAM bundle, SAM, DPA etc

Incentivized

We use ScienceLogic SL1 in our organization to serve effective monitoring solutions to our external customers. Our customers depend upon us for critical events/alerts related to their IT infrastructure gears and using SL1, we're able to provide them with a proactive monitoring solution that resolves an issue before an impact is noticed by the customer. There are very few monitoring solutions that can cater to a variety of Cloud platforms like Public Cloud (AWS, Azure) and private cloud simultaneously and SL1 addresses this business problem very well

Incentivized

Science Logic SL1 provides the option of Distributed deployment where multiple instances of each appliance can be deployed to manage the load and availability. SL1 provides a High Availability feature for Database Servers and Data Collection. If one of the Data Collectors in the collector group fails, it will automatically redistribute the devices from the failed Data Collector among the other Data Collectors in the Collector Group. The high availability feature for the Database server ensures that SL1 performs failover automatically to another server without causing the outage to the application.

Incentivized

The performance is entirely dependent on the complexity of the environment/network being used to host the platform. Outside of those factors, the platform runs very efficiently and quickly out of the box. We have integrations with other platforms and neither seem to take a hit from our moderate API usage. Any issues with performance would be experienced by choices made in infrastructure or complexity of things built by the customer to display in the GUI (overly complicated and cluttered dashboards for example)

Incentivized

Overall experience with SolarWinds support team is good. We never faced any delays or issues with the support team, they are knowledgeable or at least documentation is available to them I guess . Direct phone support is also nice and better than opening a support ticket in the system. Sometimes logs analysis take a lot of time and it seems support team is buying some time to fix the issue or to do more research on the issues but that is fine.

Incentivized

So far, it's good as part of my overall experience, except for a couple of use cases. The support team is well knowledgeable, has technical sound, and is efficient. When support escalates to engineering, the issue gets stuck and takes months to resolve.

Incentivized

When I joined our company, I did not know about the in person training at firts. Logging onto the SL University, I realised that there were different sessions being held at different times throughout the year. The training itself was good, but being in a different time zone, made it difficult to attend, but the sessions that I attended was great!

Incentivized

There are a lot of educational materials and courses on the SL1 training site (Litmos university). However the recording quality is sometimes not very good - screen resolution is low. There is a lack of professional rather than user-oriented documents and there are mistakes in documentation and education is not well structured.

Incentivized

Along with the purchase of the solution, we purchased a statement of work with their Professional Services organization to meet our outcomes and fill our critical gaps. The PS team was outstanding, very professional and allowed us to screen share while they built our integrations. In many cases they would teach us how they did certain things within the platform.

Incentivized

The way SolarWinds has clubbed the features and capabilities in SolarWinds ipMonitor is not available in other 3rd party or native tools. Even if they are available then they are very costly. I think SolarWinds is positioning ipMonitor so as to test their footprint on SaaS world with these small scale monitoring tools such as Loggly, ipmonitor, AppOptics which is a good sign to enter the SaaS based monitoring solution.

Incentivized

We evaluated a couple of other competitive products in the IT infrastructure observability domain; however, we found that ScienceLogic has a slight edge over the others for us. We encountered a cost barrier, as managing too many customers with an MSP setup was a costly affair, and several solutions did not offer an MSP solution at that time.

Incentivized

Our deployment model is vastly different from product expectations. Our global / internal monitoring foot print is 8 production stacks in dual data centers with 50% collection capacity allocated to each data center with minimal numbers of collection groups. General Collection is our default collection group. Special Collection is for monitoring our ASA and other hardware that cannot be polled by a large number of IP addresses, so this collection group is usually 2 collectors). Because most of our stacks are in different physical data centers, we cannot use the provided HA solution. We have to use the DR solution (DRBD + CNAMEs). We routinely test power in our data centers (yearly). Because we have to use DR, we have a hand-touch to flip nodes and change the DNS CNAME half of the times when there is an outage (by design). When the outage is planned, we do this ahead of the outage so that we don't care that the Secondary has dropped away from the Primary. Hopefully, we'll be able to find a way to meet our constraints and improve our resiliency and reduce our hand-touch in future releases. For now, this works for us and our complexity. (I hear that the HA option is sweet. I just can't consume that.)

Incentivized

• Cost was much higher than the services
• ipMonitor was well suited but the costing factor wasn't justified as there are tons of open-source tools available in the market with more functionalities
• Alerts response was very good and ipMonitor served well with health checks.

Incentivized

• Identified Major Incidents at least 50% of times when it happens
• Prevented Major Incidents due to alerting for basic IT Infra level issues at least more than 60% scenarios
• Provides ability to monitor large variety of IT Infra level devices and services