new features vs. old problems

I agree 1000%.

I have recently deployed a brand new environment and I have 10+ issues that older customers think are a result of having old code. Nope, same old issues - app crashes, windows agent crashes, instability, slowness.

SolarWinds is a gigantic massive unrelenting chunk of spaghetti code these days but its all we have for a total package. As I have said before, if only someone could marry SCOM and SolarWinds we would have a winner.

AppStack? Don't need it. Its a joke. Takes up an entire page of big green and red dots. Don't need it.

AppInsight? Can't copy templates, can't customize it.

Automated disk discovery? Nope. Creating a custom discovery for 1000 nodes just to find new disks is atrocious for a huge shop with 50 different clients and 50 different credentials.

PerfStack? Looks like another bell and whistle.

You are so correct to bring this up. Many people see me as a hater here, but if that was true I would not have brought them $200,000 in revenue in 2016.

So many bugs still exist. Same old, same old.

My new client is flabbergasted that they cannot send alerts on an SNMP trap.

I am with you brother.

Last year I happened across a cool "How-to" thread that detailed how to create a Business Hours network uptime report.  Check it out here:

How to create custom SLA reports

I read it, stepped through the example carefully, and built a sweet report in less than twenty minutes that my boss loves.  Now I have it scheduled to create a new version every month and e-mail it to him automatically.  He looks great to his boss, plus they both now know the state of the network uptime during business hours.  If you're keeping up with the blogs & examples and missed this one, it's a winner.

I love that I can customize it to whatever hours I want.  8 a.m. to 5 p.m.  Bankers hours (9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.).  Night shift hours (10 p.m. to 6 a.m.).  Easy as pie.

I agree 100%

"Bread and butter" like snmp trap and syslog run parallel to the main alert engine

Shame...to call that SNMP TRAP /SYSLOG support when it's run as it does...

Bugs that are not getting fix in "timely fashion"  FR for bugs fix?

/SJA

THIS, "My new client is flabbergasted that they cannot send alerts on an SNMP trap." One Thousand times THIS!!!

Also totally agree on your other points... I have yet to find a use for AppStack, especially since NPM nodes don't even show up...What gives!?

Automated discovery is a joke...

Regarding AppInsight.... totally with you there.  Lots of trouble to get it setup with minimal return on the time invested.  Application owner teams are very hesitant to even think about AppInsight especially for exchange due to the powershell 2.0 requirement which also needs an older .net dependency!  Oh and the fact that appinsight for exchange only does the mailbox role? Come on guys...  And its ridiculous you can't delete components from there but it's like the old days where you bought an entire album just because you liked ONE song - I know why they do it.  We have a client where all we're doing for them is 14 exchange servers.  They needed SAM AL2500 JUST for 14 Exchange servers, no other devices are being monitored!

Totally looking forward to PerfStack!  NOT...

Yeah. There is a lot to love and hate with Solar.

I just now had a meeting with our Director and entire team and he skewered me on several of these limitations.

With all of the great things Solar gives us there is a lot of missing basic features which is troubling.

I think the greatest indication of how Solar is an unwieldy beast for large shops is to go to the SolarWinds demo site and look at all of the bleeding red. I don't know a single company that has a totally clean SolarWinds SAM or NPM status page. The Demo link below TRULY illustrates my frustration. SolarWinds morphs into these horrible red status pages with grays and yellows and reds that you can barely control. AppInsight is a mess. IIS and SQL monitoring lacketh much control. I challenge someone to get the Demo pages green.

oriondemo.solarwinds.com/.../Login.aspx

How can we REALLY cut down on noise if even SolarWinds' own demo site is filled with noise. See the challenge folks? Anyhoo, I'm with you too. Love & Hate all the way. Someday a tool will come along that gives us pure monitoring perfection. Right now, Solar is closest but still so far from perfect. But it's really all we have at this point for covering all types of devices.

thwack.solarwinds.com/.../cutting-down-on-alerting-noise-guest-post-from-support

Why can we still not do things like, delete an interface or add an application when on a node?  Why must we go back to manage all nodes, find that node again and delete that old interface from a server?  Why can't we just add an app monitor to a node when we are on it?  You can with AppStack, but as others have pointed out, AppStack is not really that useful since there are no customizations.  I don't want to monitor all the bindings on a web server, but it does anyway and if one of them is SSL offloaded, then the whole app turns red.  Totally useless in our environment and I know we are the norm.

We need better usability instead of features we didn't ask for.

IIS AppInsight is a pita to manage.

Still need granular overrides. And auto-magical certificate monitoring, reporting and alerting.

...great

You can easily create alerts based on SNMP traps using Trap Viewer:

I agree it's not optimal but you can write a custom SQL/SWQL query to specify business hours.

SolarWinds has its flaws but the good news is that there is a lot of room (not all modules) for customization.