ScienceLogic is a system and application monitoring and performance management platform. ScienceLogic collects and aggregates data across and IT ecosystems and contextualizes it for actionable insights with the SL1 product offering.
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager is network diagnostics and troubleshooting technology, from Austin-based SolarWinds.
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Pricing
ScienceLogic SL1
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Editions & Modules
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No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
ScienceLogic SL1
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Optional
Additional Details
ScienceLogic SL1 offers four tiers:
SL1 Advanced – Application Health, Automated Troubleshooting and Remediation Workflows
SL1 Base – Infrastructure Monitoring, Topology & Event Correlation
SL1 Premium – AI/ML-driven Analytics, Low-Code Automated Workflow Authoring
SL1 Standard – Infrastructure Monitoring – with Agents, Business Services, Incident Automation, CMDB Synchronization, Behavioral Correlation
To get pricing for each tier, please contact the vendor.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
ScienceLogic SL1
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Considered Both Products
ScienceLogic SL1
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose ScienceLogic SL1
ScienceLogic SL1 supports large scale of IT Infrastructure devices and vendors. Was the single tool providing multiple functionalities at same time and allowed to remove additional legacy tools used for monitoring. Allowed integration with incident management and CMDB. Allowed …
From a capability perspective they stack up very similar but from a look and feel, ScienceLogic SL1 one is miles behind the curve on all three. We chose SL because we already had elements of the service in place on our infrastructure from our previous MSP so they were a …
I see great potential and infact i do strongly beleive it offers even beter capabilities than the traditional tools out there but again it comes down to how well you have trained us on how to unlock these capabilities. I suggest incentives for techs for providing feedback for …
Geneos is more complicated and 'heavy' to setup. It requires a lot of expertise in setting up. Also the dashboards are not great. ScienceLogic SL1 works well for customer facing dashboards.
Entuity was lacking a lot of custom reporting and also the out of the box automation and RBA was also less. Our customers were mainly looking for devices which are next gen like sdwan which Entuity doesn't support. When it come to ScienceLogic SL1 it will support all sets of …
Galileo analyzes storage arrays and backups more thoroughly, but SL1 is much better for host and network monitoring. SL1 has some storage monitoring features for some storage arrays, but they are not as detailed.
I was not part of the team selecting ScienceLogic SL1. Our goal was to increase event visibility in our server environment. We were using scripting which created many false events. SolarWinds is primarily used in the Network space to monitor network gear.
Agentless product that can integrate easily with other product and also allow us to automate tasks, example closing tickets when events are cleared automatically which user interactions.
Just because Science logic provides much more better enhancement and getting improved everyday. The autonomous integration and overall customization provided by the SL1 Platform is outstanding. In every sections be it in Monitoring or checking system logs and provide the best …
Science logic SL1 is so user friendly and it's really easy to navigate between function. I would recommend Sciene logic SL1 to all of them who are looking for really useful monitoring tool and expecting easy way of managing it.
ScienceLogic SL1 has a greater understanding and maturity on what Infrastructure monitoring needs to be and has to include at a decent price point for what it offers compared to its competitors.
ScienceLogic SL1 comparing with ITM/Netcool monitoring has better price. It's more easy to implement and mange ScienceLogic SL1 then other monitoring tools.
We evaluated PRTG Network Monitor which was similar to SolarWinds but was very resource-intensive and the server kept crashing when we got close to 100 devices
whereas on SolarWinds we were able to add several thousand devices. We
also evaluated Nagios Core as a free …
Solarwinds Network Configuration Manager is extremely powerful in allowing our organization to automate specific tasks. It is extremely simple to use and offers a Graphical User Interface for performing tasks. I am a very curious person, which has led me to use Ansible simply …
All of the SolarWinds solutions stack up against their competition. The customer support is excellent, KB articles are details, and the community (Thwack) is the best when it comes to working through complex configurations/monitors. These are the things that make them the right …
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 …
The product is easy to use, has great support, and is more cost-effective than the other products on the market. I would recommend this to anyone who asked for my opinion.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is a great tool and matches much of the functionality of SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager. Nothing about Ansible will likely be overwhelming to an engineer with a little time to spare, but that spare time combined with SolarWinds …
I actually prefer the ManageEngine Network Configuration Management engine product but switched to SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager to standardize to our Orion deployment.
We had previously used cattools and rancid for configuration management. Cattools is another Solarwinds product but one that we outgrew and doesn't integrate with the Orion platform like SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) does. Rancid it seems a lot of engineers are …
The SolarWinds NCM product stacks up well compared to just about any other product on the market. The NCM tool is super easy to use and will complement every Cisco or Aruba product that you may have.
If it has been used and it has been functional since it reduces the work time by more than half, making the process faster, safer, and more precise, carrying out not so complex and functional processes referring to configurations of multiple devices at the same time in an agile …
SolarWinds NCM solution is more flexible and GUI is from my point of view more intuitive, from the other hand Manage Engine solution is [a] cheaper solution which has almost [the] same functionality but suffers of luck of deeper integration with other Manage Engine modules.
LogicMonitor is very basic when it comes to config management, with support for a limited number of devices (though sufficient for us) and minimal frills/features. While we could have used it for the BC/DR portion of our solution, we wanted the better config diffs, compliance …
I have not had the opportunity to evaluate any of them, NCM has been the only software that has been used in recent years, and due to its good design, I have not had the need to look for additional software it meets my expectations and those of the manager.
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM) was by far the easiest to implement and it just started working right out of the box. Within a few hours were we populating our config backup repository and soon after that, we were writing scripts to audit our configurations. …
We are looking at puppet just to keep our options open. This is more my area because I don't have to rely on windows. Sure there's some learning you need to do, but it runs on a solid system. Not much else we are looking at for comparison. Now if NCM moves to another OS, well …
We did not evaluate any other similar products. When the need for a config manager arose, we already had a heavy investment in SolarWinds, so using another SolarWinds module made the most sense for us.
We have a very diverse IT environment (Cisco/Palo Alto, VMWare, Cisco UC, SD-WAN, Windows Servers) and we wanted to have one suite of software that we could manage as many of our different areas in one single pane of glass. SolarWinds allows the network team, VOIP team, Storage …
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.
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
