ipMonitor vs. Orion Application Module

We currently run IPMonitor alongside Orion SLX and decided on IPMonitor over AM for the following reasons

DNS montioring

AD monitoring

Exchange monitoring - realtime mail rtt and also internal subsystems

SQL monitoring - realtime SQL transaction monitor and also internal subsystems (although I haven't got a full handle on this yet)

Much better and more flexible alerting and reporting

Custom MIBS interface is easier to use and supports tables

Network speed tests from IPMonitor to any number of other servers

RADIUS montioring

Cleaner interface - I don't know why I just prefer looking at the IPMonitor interface as opposed to the Orion interface

I know Solarwinds are going to take some of the IPMonitor technology and put it in AM but how much and exactly what I don't know, I did ask the question when they first bought IPMonitor if there would be a preferential upgrade for users of IPMonitor and Orion if and when they got AM up to a similar level of funtionality and the answer was yes, but it would have to be almost all IPMonitor functionality in AM as we are now looking at moving our servers wholesale from Orion to IPMonitor.

HTH

Jon

Just to help provide some additional context for your decision....we are coming out with the new Application Performance Monitor (APM) module for Orion in the next couple of weeks that will provide the following capabilities:

• Process monitoring (same as existing AM module)
• Network service monitoring (e.g. FTP, HTTP, DNS, SMTP, etc.)
  
• Generic TCP port monitoring
• Web user experience monitoring (ability to do an HTTP or HTTPS get, login using NTLM/Digest/Basic auth, and search for specific HTML content) 

As Jon noted, APM v1.0 won't match all of the monitoring capabilities of ipMonitor, but that is certainly our direction with that module and much MORE.   In the next version of APM, we will be aggressively working to add additional monitors.


 

I downloaded the demo of ipMonitor today, and I'm trying it out. Really, I think I'm pretty happy with how Orion is running right now. I'd like to be able to do database monitoring, but in my organization, my big database server is MySQL, not MSSQL, so I don't think ipMonitor will help me much there. The critical things for me are the network services, as you mentioned in your post.

Just as a though, consider adding the database support to APM, if you're not already - MySQL support would be great! Also the Exchange monitoring in ipMonitor looked interesting. I'll keep running my demo for awhile, but I think I'm staying with Orion and the APM.

Thanks again, I appreciate everyone's thoughts on this, it's been helpful. 

If we buy now, we'll be eligible for a new version should it come out within the first year, correct?

Just as a though, consider adding the database support to APM, if you're not already - MySQL support would be great!

We can monitor the database port and the running database services/processes (uptime, CPU, memory) today.  Access to WMI performance counters are planned for the next release. 

If we buy now, we'll be eligible for a new version should it come out within the first year, correct?

You'll need to contact your SolarWinds sales rep or reseller to get more details on your eligibility.