ScienceLogic SL1 vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)

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

I would suggest this tool to any user that has to monitor multiple sites and locations where bandwidth monitoring can be a labor. This software works really well for central monitoring of multiple sites and services where having a technician onsite isn't feasible. I really like the reporting, though, and would recommend this for someone wanting to keep an eye on bandwidth usage for replication of data across sites.

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

• The level of customization possible with Network Bandwidth Analyzer is very valuable. Rather than being stuck with a "one-size-fits-all" presentation, an administrator can easily create customized views, reports, and alerts so that users can have a more tailored view of the data provided by Network Bandwidth Analyzer. This has the effect of making the tool more attractive to the end user.
• The NetFlow Traffic Analyzer piece of Network Bandwidth Analyzer provides the details on bandwidth usage on the network. More than knowing how much bandwidth is being used, one is provided with detailed information on how that bandwidth is being used. This provides invaluable information for capacity planning and even certain forensic tasks faced by the network engineer.
• The ability to produce network maps provides an easy way to create an attractive and functional NOC/SOC view of the entire network. Both technician and the occasional passerby can quickly determine if there are issues to be addressed. The ability to customize a map with background images and custom icons and stencils can make these maps really pop.

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

• The ability to intuitively and quickly serve up specified information up to a dashboard for general “public” consumption, that cycles through several pages of information.
• The ability to intuitively set up alerting on bandwidth levels, instead of having to dig through all types of alerts available to find the one needed.
• Provide a pricing model based on different support levels: if I want only available update installations, don’t make me pay the same amount as those wanting full support.

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

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

As far as rating for usability is concerned I would give 10/10 as NTA is very easy to use. All you need to do is install that module and ask network Team to configure the Netflow towards Server IP. [The] rest is pre-configured and reports are pre-built. Moment you receive the flows from Network all you will have is information about traffic.

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

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

It is useful for our Infrastructure team and also provides valuable insights to our application team regarding the traffic being sent from various endpoints. They can monitor their applications and ensure there are no network issues that may impact their application.

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

The training offered by SolarWinds is some of the best out there. They have several different videos that go into great detail from initial setup to advanced configurations. In addition to the view at your own pace video, they also have live training for customers that focus on a single product and you can ask questions with the folks who develop the software. I have had good success with their live sessions and getting questions answered.

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

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

SolarWinds NTA is hands down a superior product compared to Wireshark. However, when doing smaller isolated projects the affordability of Wireshark can not be overlooked. Wireshark does a great job of collecting data on ports and circuits. The advantage of SolarWinds NTA is the all encompassing collection of data and management of the multitude of devices. It is designed to do that, and does it very well.

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

• 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

• Be prepared to answer lots of questions. When people see the data in NTA they are going to want to know why App A is talking to App B. Be ready to explain!
• Hand the keys to the NTA kingdom to the network team. They will thank you. Everyone wants to have friends on the network team, right?
• Be prepared to invest in some significant compute and storage performance to keep up with your NTA monitoring
• Running the latest firmware for your network gear is (often) required to take advantage of all the flow-monitoring. You upgrade regularly, right??

Incentivized