Solarwinds tools any good?

[nickmaiolo]

Currently looking into alternative NMS tools. Have been looking at the solarwinds suite for a while. How does it compare with cisco/HP products?

(Mainly CiscoWorks LMS 2.5 / HP Openview Network Node manager / HP Openview Performance Insight (OVPI) ).

It looks like a well put together suite but how does it work in reality?

Thanks

Nick

[bhedlund]

I have used Solarwinds and I would not consider it as a replacement or alternative to CiscoWorks or HP Openview. Solarwinds, at its heart, is a basic Network Performance Monitoring solution, not a Network Management solution. Sure, they throw in a few one-off tools to try and spice it up for Network Managment but it pales in comparison to the big boys (Openview & Ciscoworks).

Solarwinds as a basic performance monitoring tool is very easy to use and will be up and running in no time. Ciscoworks can be very combersome to set up alerting for fault and performance monitoring. Therefore, I like to use Solarwinds for performance monitoring and altering, and leave the configuration & software management up to Ciscoworks LMS.

Use Solarwinds to compliment your Network Managment tools, not replace them. Otherwise, you will be dissapointed.

Please rate all helpful posts.

Regards,

Brad

[akemp]

Solarwinds is a good tool set for the individual user but suffers from a pretty big security hole: No snmp V3 support.