New enforced licensing model

I'm surprised nobody is talking about this, but we've just received our yearly renewal and the price more than doubled from last year (new is 225% of previous) not only completely ignoring an agreement for limited increase we had, but also completely ignoring our usage of the platform, in fact the renewal proposed license will cover just about a 1/4th of the nodes we currently monitor!!

So more than double the price, for a fourth of the capability... this means an increase of more than EIGHT TIMES the previous prices. (which in reality is even more, since we currently have unlimited licensing so nodes number was not a topic of concern at all even for the future).

1) this should be illegal

2) the direct consequences will be pretty clear, no enterprise will accept money extortion (see vmware and broadcom)

3) the indirect consequences is that specialists, like me, that worked on the platform (and loved it) since 13+ years, will find themselves using other platforms soon, with everything that comes from that.

so, to resume everything in the most polite way ever: what did solarwinds smoke over there?? This is worse than the 2020 security breach.. I can imagine we're not the only one that received this surprise this year, any other feedback / voice to be heard?

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HerrDoktor

You do not have to move to „HCO“ licensing. You can stay on Module based licensing. The only enforcement is „subscription“ and 3year commitment. Go back to the sales rep and ask for module based licensing.

chad.every

@LDave , I've love to look into this request more. If you're willing, can you post (or DM me) your SolarWinds ID (SWID)?

LDave

That's not what the sales rep made us understand, so really interesting to know, thanks.

LDave

I've sent you a DM, thanks

HerrDoktor

If you like, we can try this through us as a reseller if you do lot get a module based quote. Send me a DM if you still have issues

shuth

The module based licensing has had a massive increase as well where in a lot of cases it is more economical to move to HCO/SWOSH which I believe is the intent. The HCO/SWOSH conversion is still an insane increase over existing renewals though.

LDave

yep we saw, we kinda have to "force" the sales rep to say that modules were still available, to the point that I had to go to the website to make evident that the modules quotes can still be requested.

That said they built a new quote with the modules that is identical to HCO one, but they discounted more non-orion-platform products on the HCO one, to make the quote with HCO slightly more inviting than the one with modules, truly a bad and shady practice in my opinion.

I am very saddened by the path SolarWinds has chosen to take.

crazyitguy

Yes, thank you very much Turn River for ruining an 18 year relationship with SW.

ashley.heilbronn

This is very disappointing news to see; I've been using and advocating the SW products range in the different roles held I've had for the last 15 years.

I recently joined a company in a new role, they have a SolarWinds install that needs a bit of TLC to get it back up to my expectable standard, but after reading the email recently from renewals. I'm thinking why bother with the effort now and just cashout my thwack points and move on to another product.

petergwilson

Agreed. I just asked for a quote for an additional 25 licenses so we could monitor a small VMWare environment. Over £40,000. Apparently we need to buy a 250 license bundle. Not going to happen. The lunatics have taken over the asylum. I fear management will go with another vendor and Solarwinds will be dropped. We are already looking to move from VMWare to Nutanix thanks to Broadcom's brain fart.

bmrad

For OSH, you can activate nodes across multiple instances. If you already have a OSH license with available nodes, you can activate 25 nodes on the new OSH instance.

petergwilson

Unfortunately the requirement for an additional 25 licenses was because we didn't have 25 free licenses available.

ecklerwr1

I've been around a while... most technology companies are changing to subscription models. I will say the drastic increase in price is a little rough but I am enjoying modules I never had before now. Has it really doubled my monitoring success... probably not. So everyone has to take this and decide what you're going to do. I hope to not lose a lot of friends I've known for 20+ years over this. If we're honest, not all of you, but many people bought the tools and ran them unsupported for years... seems those days are over. I've always been a "monitoring" guy. One of the reason's Solarwinds was successful was because, when new, Orion was a lot better value than say HP Openview and easier to use as well. I'm happy to say many of you, I've known a long time, and I helped to shape what the product is today with UX sessions and feature requests. I hope like VMware and Broadcom maybe this is just a bump in the road. We were going to dump VMware totally for ProxMox and then all of sudden the quotes came down some.

ecklerwr1

I can't stand Nutanix... ProxMox much much better Peter.

jeff.stewart

Look forward to your feedback on the upcoming improvements for ProxMox @ecklerwr1

antony614

We moved to HCO last December and waiting to get our renewal quote hopefully it's not 8x previous price.

petergwilson

In the market sector we operate in the words "Open Source" are really frowned on and don't even think of mentioning AI. Yet they are happy with Microsoft.

ecklerwr1

Funny you say that @petergwilson . Our upper management wasn't really excited about ProxMox either for same reason but we still stood up some pretty large clusters... although we also have some Nutanix too anyhow. It's really the same hypervisor mostly underneath built on open source code but ProxMox has better management interface. We have our own AI LLM's running both in the cloud and inside air gapped networks. I have to admit, it's pretty handy for sure but it's got protection all around it. It's pretty hard to build anything these days without any open source.

ecklerwr1

4sure @jeff.stewart !

ecklerwr1

Don't worry it's not like that if you've already made the switch. It's the initial switch that people have a hard time with... I get it. It's a big change at first.

jeffreyc

We just requested a quote for next years budget and it was nearly 4 times our current spend. Ala Cart was worse. So we decided to move server monitoring to a different platform and purchase a smaller license from SW to do network gear only. They refused to offer the smaller license we requested even though it is a level that can be purchased by a new customer.

crazyitguy

Unfortunately it looks like we got our last quote and it is still a 100% increase for first year but the next two years are also significant increases. We will most likely be moving on. We are evaluating other solutions right now.

jniemiec

Yep, it's been a massive increase. I can't see SolarWinds surviving this. The increase for even a 3 year subscription is outrageous. It'll take a couple years but I'm sure there will be an exodus. All this and somehow the support has gotten even worse. Pretty sure they are just bots at this point. I can't imagine what their sale reps have to deal with on a daily basis. Yikes!

chucho060

In my company they proposed the HCO subscription model with a 40% increase, when they only authorized a maximum of 5% annual increase, this is a joke. Now they ask me to look at other options. After I said that last thing to my executive, I ended up bidding on modules, it still went up 15% but I had already converted to the subscription model.

msites

Yep, the price increases were wild, but the bigger insult was the amount they increased them with zero new features or better support. Assuming the VC just wants to get their money back as quickly as possible before they sell the company off again.

jniemiec

You're probably right. Make all their money back as quickly as they can, then sell it off in a few years.

MMinion24

ouch ours is next year - time to build a fort?

but yes as the other user highlighted subscription models are the way forward..............

silverbacksays

Same, @ecklerwr1 . While many disagreed with the changes to node-based licensing, the switch to subscription as the first option (and often only option given to prospective/renewing customers by most resellers/distributors, unfortunately) is almost universally unpopular. But, given the ownership, and the trend across the industry, this was always going to happen, if SolarWinds wanted to remain financially competitive in today's market.

The price increases are difficult for Partners, Resellers, and Distributors to defend, and frankly I don't try to, despite being both a Partner and Reseller myself. I just focus on the technology and tools that come with the licenses, and they are just as good as they were 10+ years ago.

For new customers who aren't aware of the price changes it still does sell itself, and I think that is what Turn/River is counting on, if I'm being brutally honest. Remember, they are a business and businesses exist to make money, that's their primary output, after all.

SolarWinds Orion/HCO/Observability Self-Hosted, whatever you refer to it as, is still the best, multi-vendor, full stack, broad featured, monitoring solution out there, and once universal #DarkTheme has been implemented, and I don't mean just the modern dashboards, it'll be even better!

=B']

silverbacksays

Features are being worked on, constantly. What we are suffering from is the fact that SWI now have two distinct monitoring solutions to feed in terms of development time, and it's fair to say that most of the focus for the last 5 years has been on rewriting the SolarWinds Cloud tools into what is now SolarWinds Observability SaaS.

Loggly, Pingdom, et al, as acquisitions, were great and I would have preferred if they left them as is. But, somebody at SolarWinds decided to make this new SaaS solution based on these tools, and that took a whole lot of time to complete. Add in the current flavour of the month to include "AI", and you have the platform integration piece, which further muddies the water on what SolarWinds actually is now. The messaging isn't clear enough, and there's only so much myself and my fellow MVPs can do to help them with it, unfortunately.

We can only hope that they'll be able to switch focus back to the on-prem tool, as I'm fairly confident over 90% of the THWACK userbase only use these, and hence are only interested in improvements to them.

tinmann0715

Similar to what the host of a provocative HBO news show likes to say, "I didn't leave the SolarWinds party. The SolarWinds party left me."

Yet, I still hang around Thwack from time-to-time.

ashley.heilbronn

We got our renewal quote today, 300x increase on last year's renewal costs. it's so disappointing, but sometimes you need to leave an abusive relationship. sorry SolarWinds it's not me, it's you. lamo

martian_monster

So we are stuck with 3 year. And if we decide to not go with Solarwinds in year 2 or 3 we still have to pay for those years right?

martian_monster

We just received our 'early renewal' quote if we decided to upgrade to Observability now instead of waiting until March - 173% increase over last year for Orion and 75% increase for DPA SQL Sentry.

SeizureGman

I think this will be the last year my workplace will be using SW. I have tried to defend the platform even simply cause been autistic I hate changing but these price increases which I knew would happen once SW got brought by the investment company now we are actively looking at other options even less powerful.

I understand prices go up but with reports of people getting 200 to 400% increases we would rather just look elsewhere for solutions

SeizureGman

It may be the best but if my workplace and it's UK higher education is going to get gorged we would rather have second best. SW if they dont figure this out and quickly a lot of customers will feel the same

Vinx

Same thing here > moving out from Solarwinds

huge deception