Test/Development Licenses

90 days free trail will help...

90 days free trail will help...

I'm going to argue on the side of SolarWinds for a minute on this "longer free trial" thing:

What would you be able to do in 90 days that you can't do in 30?

Really, if you are seriously evaluating a monitoring solution then set up your test bed, set up your test server, install it, run your tests, take snapshots, print screens/reports, fill out the evaluation form (http://thwack.solarwinds.com/docs/DOC-170959), and get 'er done.

And IF, by some weird coincidence of events, your world explodes on day 2 of the test, you re-image the server with a new name, download the software, and install it for another 30 days. In fact, you can keep doing that - scrub, rename, reinstall, run for 30 days - for as long as you can invent new email addresses and dodge SolarWinds sales calls.

AND IF, for some reason, that's not enough, buy the smallest license they have (NPM SL100 - which gives you 100 elements - lists for $2600 purchase and $500 maintenance). Then you can run your proof-of-concept, do the development to link it to your ticketing system, document processes for onboarding, device management, custom properties, build views etc and THEN buy the license level that suits your environment.

But if you are saying that all of the above is not good enough for a trial test of Solarwinds, then what I'm hearing is that a "90-day trial for an UNLIMITED copy of SolarWinds" is really just a euphamism for "let's monitor our environment for 3 months for free"

I second that Leon, 90 days is definitely bit too long in my books

I’m thinking you guys are a little off base on the intent of this discussion. What most of are looking for is a permanent development setup that allows us to test upgrades and patches on production versions we already own. This has nothing to do with trialing new software that we don’t own. I for one have thousands of devices running on a production system running Orion NPM and various modules. I hold my breath every time an upgrade/patch comes out simply because I don’t have a parallel development system to test it on. Why because the cost of even a small parallel development/test system is too expensive

I think that intention of dev license was to have covered what you just described Jeff. Even I hold breath when it comes to proposing such solution even though knowing that certain issue is fixed. But on another side, just purely for the upgrade validation and having such advanced VM infrastructure it takes no time to bring Windows Server up and have installed current version and follow on with upgrade.

Not exactly on point. Physically it really takes very little time to bring up a VMware environment. HOWEVER, from a workflow process, it does take time to bring up those servers. As well as do you really want to put it up and take it down. I know I want a dev environment up all the time so I can experiment with it and not the live environment. Personally I want my dev environment up on parallel with the production environment 7x24. That doesn’t mean I want dev polling anything, it just means I want to be able to have access to a dev environment that closely matches the installed prod environment all the time