New Relic vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

It is perfect for observing our energy platforms during high-load situations, such as grid demand spikes, or our real-time ingest of sensor data, allowing us to respond in real time to anomalies. And it’s a good way to monitor API performance in client dashboards, too. But it’s not as conducive for low-budget/low-code work or deep customization that doesn’t get ample development support given its complexity and expense.

Incentivized

[It is well suited for] full integration with the virtual environment (VMware vcenter in our case). [It is also useful] when updating [the] host to a new version, including [a] new version of VM Tools. Messages are automatically created in SolarWinds VMAN to notice which VM's still need to be updated with [the] newer version of VM tools. This [makes] management [easy].

Incentivized

• Capturing Front end Metrics specially web vitals and setting up alerts for violations really helps.
• NRQL is great tool to fetch the data you need. With queries you can pull the data and put the data by table or by chart. You can even trend graphs and create dashboards.
• Synthetic Monitoring is very helpful for proactive monitoring. You can use it for user journeys by using scripted browser monitor type or just check availability using PING type.
• ASk AI is great addition that can fetch details you need with natuaral language

Incentivized

• I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
• I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
• Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
• Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.

Incentivized

• Support for SQL like query with more functional features of analysis while viewing distributed tracing.
• support for very low level specific integration from APIs to classes to functions to piece of code
• More detailed documentation, as we faced issues while integrating for the first time.

Incentivized

• Server trending could be stronger. A server which sits at the same resource usage day in and day out can be normal operation while Virtualization manager may report it as an issue.
• Orion in general can be painful to change a node page with the desired screens and widgets

Incentivized

I have not yet found any similar product that offers me this range of features to help us keep our online service fast and reliable. Besides this, New Relic is constantly evolving by adding new plugins to emerging technologies and platforms. Server performance measuring features are a key point as our user database grows.

Critical component for companies ability to maintain services both customer facing as well as internal systems. Without insight into our VM estate provided by VMAN outage duration as well as frequency would increase to unacceptable levels. VMAN has allowed us to consolidate multiple monitoring mechanisms into one, as part of the Orion suite providing us with 1 solution. This has the added benefit of enabling our engineers to focus on learning 1 solution oppose to multiple solutions, meaning we're able to handle administration and support of our monitoring across the whole company alot more efficiently from a time spent resource as well as savings on costings.

Incentivized

New Relic helps in observability setup for the critical environments and getting known about the issues and troubleshoot the applications and services. Alerts helps in knowing the abnormal state of the system and services, Dashboards are used for visualizing the key metrics and muting the unwanted notifications and dropping the extra data from the source.

Incentivized

SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.

Incentivized

Never observed an outage

Incentivized

We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.

Incentivized

Always responsive. Never observed slow page loads

Incentivized

We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.

Incentivized

The support team has been really helpful and resolved most of the issues on time. However, for a couple of issues, several follow-ups were needed to elicit a reasonable response. The issue was deeply technical and could have been investigated only by their Architects, and bringing them into the ticket took longer than needed

Incentivized

SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.

Incentivized

The documentation was clear and concise; the only issue we ran into was custom application naming. Due to HTTPD mod_fcgid and the need for the application name to be set in php.ini (not in .htaccess or the virtual host directive) ... we had issues setting this up.

Pretty straighforward, as long as you check Solarwinds site for recommended installation path. KEY ITEM - be sure that you know which versions of all SolarWinds products you are using, because there are incompatability issues between versions for many products. It took me about 2 hours with a spreadsheet to figure out an upgrade path. Don't assume that the version you downloaded is the right/most current version without checking first!

Incentivized

Its covers all the observability aspects as well as giving us more competitive pricing models compared to other providers that's why I like to use New Relic in place of other tools. And also it introduces new Agentic AI features as well as it adopts AI in its RCA. As an observability tool it should reduce the RCA of any problem and New Relic is continuously focusing on that that's why I am preferring New Relic in place of other tools.

Incentivized

To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to offer as well as having it integrate into our already existing SolarWinds SAM environment.

Incentivized

Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless

Incentivized

Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.

Incentivized

• We were able to quickly identify our most time consuming APIs. In some cases we were able to bring down times for some apis from 4s to 200ms.
• We were able to identify our slowest database queries and optimize them for quicker response times.

Incentivized

• VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
• VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
• VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.

Incentivized