I'm just getting my budget together for next year and interested in what you guys are using for NPM. We use Solarwinds Orion now but I'm curious to see how you guys would rank it and if there's a better option with comparable costs.
Realistically you probably won't get too many people active on the NPM forum who don't like it. Generally people who dislike a tool don't check it's forum except when they absolutely need to.
With that said, when I was a consultant I always found that SolarWinds strikes a relatively unique niche in terms of ease of use, advanced capabilities, and cost. Some tools are cheaper, but do less or require more admin expertise. SW is generally something you can hand over to a relatively unskilled admin and get pretty decent results from without a long learning curve, but it's deep enough that power users and enterprises with advanced use cases can get a lot of really impressive value from it. An of course you can always pay more, but i haven't found more expensive tools that gave me enough added value to justify their cost.
I've always felt NPM (via NAM) is the best tool for any sized organization. It can be automated or customized as much or as little as necessary, for a single person to operate it and still get awesome stats & reports & backups. Or for a small team to really leverage more and more of the power of SW tools through SWQL. Or for a large organization to make it a commercial enterprise solution for reducing down time and improving COO.
My SysAdmin partners across the building focus hard on support contracts & upgrade costs, so they prefer the freeware version of Nagios. IMHO it's not nearly as beautiful or admin-friendly as NAM. But it also doesn't cost $30K/year for licensing/upgrades; that's what they like.
For me, NPM has far more worth than a .3 or .4 or .5 employee, and it does it 7x24x365 without any additional costs for PTO or training.
I've used HP OpenView NNM; the right product version in the right environment is pretty good--but VERY expensive. And using the HPOV in a larger and more complex environment, with many brands of devices being monitored, was a failure. It required three FTE's to keep it going, and there's no way that would happen in my organization when Solarwinds was out-performing HPOV with me only doing work on it a few hours a day--or less.
Swift packets!
Rick Schroeder
