Is NTM dead like Alert Central?
LOL, seems like it.
I do like the product, although it hasn't been fully adopted in our environment. The discovery is excellent, but exporting the information out is difficult. I can manually create a network diagram for an office, and it will fit in a 8x11 sheet without issue. I have a problem with exporting them into Visio without having to do alot of manipulation to make it work for what I need. Another issue I have is how it appends the domain name to the device name. I know Orion does that and I went through and manually removed it from Orion. The domain name is a waste of space in a network diagram,
I personally have given up on Solarwinds. I have supported them financially (purchasing their products) and provided product development input for years. Only to see zero (ZERO) effort on their behalf. I will never spend another dime, nor will I ever support or recommend their products. They are driven by one thing only and it has nothing to do with product offering, development, or support. It's called investors ROI. PERIOD!!!
I hear you gberry. The licensing makes no sense at all either. The artificial limits on number of elements that can be polled per poller is maddening to say the least. Every other product I have tried, I can poll the same number of devices and apps with one box with every competitor's product I have tried. With Solarwinds, I have to have 6 boxes and 8 poller licenses. And don't get me started on trying to keep the polling balanced when you add nodes. I am spending more and more time monitoring my monitoring solution than the value I get.
And you are correct. It is sales, sales, sales. That's all they bombard you with anymore. If you trial something, you get bombarded with sales calls and what kind of specials and deals they have instead of help with the product.
And the fact they won't answer this question speaks volumes. Like they knew alert central was dead for 2 years before anyone even answered that in fact is was.
I submitted this request to technical support to see if we can't find out what is going on with NTM. This is an excerpt from their reasons for keeping your maintenance active.
I asked when the stream of product updates would begin to flow again. I requested a copy of the product development timeline so that I could share it here.
It Pays to Keep Your Maintenance Active!
Active maintenance provides you with access to:
A steady stream of product updates (new features, bug fixes and even major enhancements!
Per SolarWinds statement above on why to maintain product maintenance.
The performance and dedication to this product over the past two years by far does not meet this statement.
Let's see the facts of the development timeline for the NTM product for the next six months. I am sure it's packed full of new features and advancements.
Here's what I got from a Solarwinds salesperson via email on 2/7/2017 when pressed about a roadmap:
"I discussed NTM with my engineer and I definitely don't want to misguide you by any means so let me try to explain as he informed me. The most recent roadmap is the link through Thwack in 2015. We have seen an overall growth around the product with our expansion since 2016 so there is a possibility investments will be made at some point this year into the product, but as of this moment, it is currently under maintenance not necessarily abandoned. There is no current roadmap for the product as of this moment."
gberry, I am still curious to hear how support responds to you - if at all.
NO CLUE ***** They reply as if they are assisting you with a technical problem. Tier 1 support no doubt.
I AM SO DUMB, YES EVEN STUPID FOR PAYING FOR MAINTENANCE ON THIS PRODUCT. AS USUAL THEY WON’T HAVE A CLUE AND COME JULY I’M SURE THE SALES PERSON WILL REACH OUT IN JULY.
Update for Case #1120225 - "Let's see what level of reply this inquiry brings. The NTM community would like to know when the steady stream of product updates will begin to flow again?"
Hi Sir Gregory,
Good day! I hope you are doing fine.
I called in and left a voicemail message at this no.(207) 883-6259
I have not heard from you for several days regarding your issue. I hope everything is running well and you are not having any further issues.
Please be aware that it is our policy to close any cases that have not received any correspondence within 5 business days.
If you do find that you continue to have problems and I have closed the case, please email me back and I will be more than happy to reopen it and continue to help you.
Important Links:
<http://www.solarwinds.com/> http://www.solarwinds.com/
<www.solarwinds.com/.../ticket> www.solarwinds.com/.../ticket
<www.solarwinds.com/.../documentation.aspx> www.solarwinds.com/.../documentation.aspx
<http://thwack.com/> http://thwack.com/
Best Regards,
George Clavo
SolarWinds Technical Support
What did they say in the voicemail they referred to leaving?
No current roadmap sounds like no future to me. I'm not interested in investing time in a product if you (Solarwinds) are also not intersted in investing time into the product.
I'm just going to stick with their core products. Outside of that, meh. I really don't think this would be a huge problem if they didn't keep it to themselves. If they were upfront with it, "hey we were hoping to see bigger growth in this, but it didn't necessarily pan out. It doesn't make financial sense to pour money into this product as the return isn't worth it.", i think it would go over better. I saw someone mention they only care about ROI, but as a company that's about all you do care about (any company). A product that you put money into that doesn't return the investment with profit (the whole point of it) isn't worth investing in. That makes sense. Not telling us, the customers who bought it, that you're not developing it anymore is kinda silly. That or taking 2-4 years to make a decision on whether you want to support it also doesn't make sense. If you're not, you're not. Sack up and say it.
End of the day, if I need to look for new mapping software (which I already did), i need to know sooner than later.
No, NTM is not dead. That's why you see hot fixes coming out and Support is always a phone call away. NTM does a lot of things well today, but there is always room for improvements. Are there specific things you're interested in?
There's plenty of new logic that could be added to NTM. How about making it, or a version server-based instead of desktop-based. Maybe what I want isn't what this product was destined to be from the outset. If that's the case then that's on me I guess. I think the layout is quite bad. When you get a large number of nodes it stacks and doesn't layout properly. I assume it's struggling to try to "fit it to paper" when i just want to to be scrollable and viewable. If it was server based, then it could be linked to network atlas and automatically keep maps up to date in Orion. That'd be pretty killer. But again, the layout would have to work well and be reliable.
I guess the point of this question is what does Solarwinds see as the future. Do you think you're good and there's no further that could be added to this (new feature addition vs maintenance and support)? I think the reference to "dead" was that development wasn't being done outside of maintenance. I am a current Alert Central user so I apologize for feeling burned once already.
I agree the auto-layout tools don't do as well once you get too many nodes. You can use the manual layout shortcuts to help. I actually love those, but obviously they take more time. I'm curious, how many nodes you're trying to place on your maps? I've noticed that since NTM makes it fantastically simple to add nodes to map, we're prone to adding far more nodes than can be reasonable consumed. When engineers build a map manually, they tend to have between 8 and 20 nodes, sometimes a couple dozen on bigger paper. With NTM, it's easy to add a hundred or two. Even after organizing everything though, it's not something others or even the original author can functionally use during troubleshooting or explaining the network.
>I guess the point of this question is what does Solarwinds see as the future. Do you think you're good and there's no further that could be added to this (new feature addition vs maintenance and support)? I think the reference to "dead" was that development wasn't being done outside of maintenance. I am a current Alert Central user so I apologize for feeling burned once already.
Oh I think there's a ton more to do with NTM. I believe in network diagrams, and I believe the biggest thing that gets in the way of them being more useful is how long it takes to make and update them. This is the problem NTM is designed to solve. Unfortunately I'm not prepared to share more at the moment. As you know, SolarWinds doesn't provide a lot in the way of forward looking roadmap. We prefer to talk about what our tools do today rather than try to sell you on what they might do tomorrow. I think NTM is a solid tool today, regardless of what it will do tomorrow, and amazing at its price point.
Meanwhile, I totally understand your point about being an Alert Central user. We invested a lot of effort into AC and provided it for years for free to our customers, but we just couldn't make it work in the long run. NTM is in much better shape exactly because it's not free.
Hope that helps.
We would like to see full integration with Orion and Network Atlas (DB and GUI). We are shifting to SNMP v3 all across our network and passwords are having to be changed more regularly at the request of our friends in audit. Not being able to load already-stored credentials from Orion/NPM is a deal-breaker for us. We came to Solarwinds pretty late in the game, so the one-off tools that aren't integrated seem unfinished to us.
I just looked i the NTM thwack forum and the last "what we're working on" is from 2015. I think it's reasonable to understand that we are concerned about the future in that it's now 2017 and we don't know what is coming, if anything. I think that makes the issue worse that we don't hear from you (Solarwinds), we ask "is this dead and buried", and you say "nope it's got potential". I do like the product and I had to twist an arm to get it. I have tried other products out there that offer a great number of things beyond what i've mentioned here (for more money of course), but my point is that you seem to think there's room to improve, we think there's room to improve....will we see improvements? I get it. Solarwinds doesn't like to tell customers things it might not be able to deliver...but I felt like the "What We're Working On" features were great in that it didn't commit to anything, but at least showed us that there was development happening.
Not to compare this to Alert Central too much but...this is the exact thing that happened in that forum. I actually authored one of this "is this dead" threads. lol So I hope you can see where my concern comes from.
Going back to the auto-layout not being the best, I have to draw out data flow reports for PCI. I have devices on a number of switches. I'd like to graph them out by VLAN. I know it's more than 20, and yeah it is so messy just drawing it myself in Visio was easier. I would like to say I appreciate your replies and you engaging us here. That's quite helpful.
While I don't have much to say about your concern about licensing, I'm also disappointed that NTM does appear to be somewhat dead (at least feature-wise). My reasons are more that they haven't a: looked for an alternative (we'd love one), or b: at least said that it's EOL or something. The application works decently for the idea of what it is but there are so many million things to fix that I am not sure if I feel it has staying power or not.
I have to disagree, I've seen a lot of improvements, just look at perfstack, netpath, appstack. These are great steps forwards. Whilst they may not be focused on your module of choice, maybe they are deciding they have cast the net too wide.
As for ensuring investors get their return on investment, I would suggest that almost every business primary focus is on making money, all that changes is how that's done. Why would Solarwinds be any different.
+ 1 ,.. "full integration with Orion and Network Atlas".. importing from NTM to Atlas, Green dots... bah.. give me the option to say if its this Machine type, you get this icon,.. Comment of "When engineers build a map manually, they tend to have between 8 and 20 nodes" ... that is a bad assumption,.. "it's not something others or even the original author can functionally use during troubleshooting or explaining the network." is another bad assumption.. my comment is: you did it wrong.. I've had Topology Diagrams of Data Centers with hundreds of nodes, depicting, L1, Layer 2 domain, Trunks, pruning,.. Layer 3, along with individual application traffic flows.. (Not all on one Diagram) Took plotters to print.. .... " You are only good as the documentation " .... its a necessary evil.. that has saved my butt in the past... "to functionally use during troubleshooting and or to explain the network".. and would recommend this practice to any practitioner of Networking..
Anyways not to digress,.. The reason why I bent arms,.. pleaded to management,.. was to have a functional product that would be useful during troubleshooting and or explaining the network.. Or discovery there of.. using NTM to discover is useful,.. but compared to the cost,, there are open sourced apps that can do that,..
if its 8 or 20 nodes,.. I'll hand jam it in visio, anything more than NTM just has a hard time..
"I think NTM is a solid tool today,",.. I'll agree to disagree,..theirs always room for improvements, the integration into the flag ship NPM/Atlas, is something to be desired; if you want to hear,. I'll be more than happy to list "feature requests",..
for example the opening statement,.. Maps imported into Atlas, = Green Dots. Bah..
Another Feature request, is related to how NTM maps are actually imported into Atlas,.. I don't think they are until I open Atlas, and then it prompts.. "hey do you want to import"
Another Feature request, would be to allow us to manually bend/Adjust Automagic connections... So I can place more than 20 nodes.. especially if its a star topology,
Another Feature request, would be to combine the physical l1 connects into a Single connection,.. as I know its a trunk, you told me the physical ports,.. but I just want to see one line, not 8.
Another Feature request, allow me to manually alter ether-channels if they are not recognized.
Another Feature request, would be to allow us to add Text, or Subnet info, or Locally connected Routes,
Anywho,.. in my opinion this product has been left to die..
how about ANYTHING?
here are a couple:
