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SOHO Monitoring Love vs Cost

So after roughly 15 years in the IT field, I have broken free and decided to go into business for myself. At my previous job, I worked with NPM and NTA daily and was responsible for setting up, maintaining, and monitoring. I love the products and still take part in the Thwack community when I can. I am involved in starting two different businesses right now; one is technology-related and one is a brick-and-mortar retail store. If all goes well, I will expand.

My home office is headquarters for everything and my data is important, obviously, so I want to monitor but have to watch spending. I am looking for ideas for monitoring my home office network from the SolarWinds products.

I want to monitor the network as well as performance from my computers. I am looking to catch problems before they happen. I need to:

- Monitor network traffic, bandwidth utilization.

- troubleshoot network problems inside and outside the network.

- Monitor memory, hard-disk space, CPU, network interface.

- Get alerts via email when certain thresholds are hit or if there is a failure.

- Get daily email reports showing last 24 hours, week, month of performance and network data.

This is what I have on my network:

- A Windows Domain with one Domain Controller (Server 2008 Standard 32-bit). Also hosts Apache web server and MySQL for web design and testing and is also storage for backups (1 TB mirror).

- A Windows 10 Pro desktop domain member.

- A Dell network all-in-one laser printer.

- A Windows 10 Pro laptop not connected to domain.

- A MACbook Pro laptop not connected to domain.

- Two Windows 10 smart phones.

- Two IP security cameras.

- Two SOHO wireless access points. One is also the border router/firewall for the whole network.

So what would be the most cost effective solution(s) you guys could suggest from the SolarWinds catalog? I will be adding a Server 2012 R2 Dell server as a second DC sometime in the next few months and will eventually retire the current DC. I will also be adding a third security camera.

Thank you for any suggestions.

Nowell

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ecklerwr1

I'd think of possibly starting with the base NPM/SAM combo with smallest license available and see if that covers most of what you need to monitor.

tallyrich

I'd say a small install of NPM should do most of what you need. Unless you are running a lot of apps SAM may not be worth the additional cost. And you can probably get by with no IP management or the free IP manager tool.

nowell

Thanks for the suggestions. I forgot all about the free tools. I am going to see what I can come up with between NPM, SAM, and the free stuff.