OpManager offers a set of advantages that allow it to adapt to the needs of the company, guaranteeing effective monitoring of the application networks used in our organization. It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. The initial setup went smoothly and in a decent amount of time.
There was a need to find an old configuration of a network switch that was accidentally wiped clean. Fortunately, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) kept and archived a backup copy of the switch device in question! We were easily able to upload the configuration file to the switch and restore the device back on the network in a matter of minutes!
We changed our RDP port to a non-standard port and monitor servers by that instead of a simple ping. Systems that are busted will still respond to pings.
The dashboard shows us any drives that are almost full. We check this when we do our monthly maintenance.
Monitoring Windows services and event log events and sending notifications when things don't behave as expected.
Adding devices to existing groups and applying a group-wide parameter.
Email alerts can be a bit challenging depending on how email is managed within a company, sometimes adding ManageEngine OpManager to the allowed relay list for Exchange is necessary to receive any alerts
For our use case, it does everything great and some of the features we underutilize but I would like to be able to set a configuration baseline when initially adding a node instead of after the configuration is pulled but it's not a particularly big deal to let it pull the configuration then set it as the baseline.
Medium complexity to set up in the beginning if using any non-standard devices or configurations, else fairly easy (e.g. Cisco Nexus or IOS-based devices). Reports are fairly straightforward to set up. Updates to the platform are fairly straightforward and don't take a major effort. Easy to add or remove devices.
The rating I provided is based on the product quality, experience (I have been using OpManager for almost the last 4 years), and relevance of the information/response I generated through Manage Engine OpManager. I have also received good support from OpManager.
The user interface is lacking. It is difficult to navigate at times and things can be done multiple ways. Quite often I am confused by how their notification structure works. It is not very intuitive. They do offer a free Academy. They also offer a community of other technical folks. I have enjoyed both.
At first, we were not able to add our Avaya switches to the configuration backup module, our partner tried to help, but they did not find the solution, we had one remote session with tech support of ME and they solve the problem.
To be fair, I have not had to involve Support in a number of years, but when I did, I was greeted with enthusiastic engineers who wanted to understand and solve the issue. It was a fairly complex scenario and I have discovered in my most recent implementation that engineering included that option as a standard now.
Solarwinds has actually produced new training since I last used it that is available on their site at any time. Their previous training was more than enough to get us started but now there is significantly more content. Since I'm comfortable with the Orion platform and the products we use I haven't checked the new training out yet but we have new staff go through portions of that training and they always come away with an understanding of the platform and ready to use it
We have an existing relationship with Manage Engine. Manage engine was a better product in comparison with the other products. It has as option to have addons like network configuration Manager, Firewall log analyzer, switch port mapper, Ip address manager and packet analyzer. Manage engine has an excellent customer support who are always available and response is quick
At the time SolarWinds was the biggest player in the space and their whole portfolio was very comprehensive. As time progressed and newer technologies came about (i.e. SDWAN) their products couldn't keep up with the consumer demands and changing market. Security became such a big focus that once Solarwinds got hacked we had to remove all their products from our environment
Saves 100s of hours a year in man hours over manual configuration.
Saved easily 50k in lost revenue when a switch rebooted with months old unsaved configuration. NCM let us quickly restore a snapshot of the running config from the previous day.
Saves us several man hours per week of config auditing by reducing all changes to a summary email.
