So ten years ago I was helping a small to mid size company evaluate some remote management and ticketing software. We looked at several things including SolarWinds, SMS, SpiceWorks and a few others. Because of the size of the company, budget nad required features we went with SpiceWorks. (yes they wanted cheap!)
A few year later I was working for the Commissary and they were using TIVOLI NetCool to monitor their equipment. It worked really well because they had a technical admin who really knew his UNIX and custom scripting. It did a lot of cool stuff if you were willing to take the man-hours to configure what you needed. Their online support left something to be desired.
Last year I changed over to another federal agency that was using SolarWinds for remote monitoring. I was nervous at first a large 20,000 device network can be unwieldy. Ah SolarWinds again, I really hoped it had been improved from 10 years ago I thought. Holy Cow, had it! It does all the really cool monitoring with polls, traps, logging , config management and other great features that are completely intuitive and work inside an easy to understand GUI. We use NCM (network Config monitor) and NPM (network performance monitor) to track devices on the network. You do not need a small team of dedicated UNIX engineers to make it work. It seems to do a wonderful job with its modules right out of the box. I have been using for it again now nine months and love the interface and information I have access to. The only reason I cannot monitor something is usually because I fat fingered an IP or credential. We use the IPAM module to keep us honest in that regard, if IPAM can find it, I just have to make sure I can poll it!
Unlike some other venders they have a great support community called Thwack. Find em at: thwack.solarwinds.com You can download the software or modules you want to try out. The updated manuals are online as well as really good geeky tutorials, labs and tuning videos. Way to go SolarWinds, you have made this easy for our network engineers to keep an eye on the network and me as an auditor to collect the information I need. I am looking forward to getting my SCP cert while I continue to learn about the software!
Passed my SCP certification exam last month. It would not call it easy or difficult. A well done test with the right mix of stuff to make it generic enough and also specific questions about the interfaces as you would expect. I would call it a an associate level cert in comparison to others I have taken.
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