Hellish Application Sprawl and being Nickel and Dimed

Also concerned but I also see how they get pulled into other product lines simply by adding customer feature requests.  For the features it's still many many times cheaper up front and with maintenance.

Sometimes I think they should stop the feature sprawl and clean up long nagging issues.  Customers using SW because of budget constraints really don't have to many other choices at the same pricing without the same issue.  Have you seen the ManageEngine Sprawl lately?

The nickel and diming is still a huge savings over the alternatives.  More bang is eventually gonna cost more buck.

Also concerned but I also see how they get pulled into other product lines simply by adding customer feature requests.  For the features it's still many many times cheaper up front and with maintenance. Sometimes I think they should stop the feature sprawl and clean up long nagging issues.  Customers using SW because of budget constraints really don't have to many other choices at the same pricing without the same issue.  Have you seen the ManageEngine Sprawl lately? The nickel and diming is still a huge savings over the alternatives.  More bang is eventually gonna cost more buck.

Yeah, thinking about it, it's a bit of a catch-22.  If you continue to add more features to a product you eventually need to start charging more to cover your development and support costs (more bang costs more buck).  The only way to overcome this is by breaking the features up into less expensive pieces or "modules" as SolarWinds has done with Orion; however, then you get people upset because they feel they are being "nickle and dimed to death" when they have to pay more for modules for more functionality.  Ultimately this is a very thin and difficult line to walk.

I think SolarWinds has done a good job walking this fine line with the Orion product line.  In comparison with the ManageEngine product line (which we compared against SolarWinds when we were evaluating products) the SolarWinds line is much more focused, better product for your money, and a million times better support.

Also concerned but I also see how they get pulled into other product lines simply by adding customer feature requests.  For the features it's still many many times cheaper up front and with maintenance. Sometimes I think they should stop the feature sprawl and clean up long nagging issues.  Customers using SW because of budget constraints really don't have to many other choices at the same pricing without the same issue.  Have you seen the ManageEngine Sprawl lately? The nickel and diming is still a huge savings over the alternatives.  More bang is eventually gonna cost more buck.

Yeah, thinking about it, it's a bit of a catch-22.  If you continue to add more features to a product you eventually need to start charging more to cover your development and support costs (more bang costs more buck).  The only way to overcome this is by breaking the features up into less expensive pieces or "modules" as SolarWinds has done with Orion; however, then you get people upset because they feel they are being "nickle and dimed to death" when they have to pay more for modules for more functionality.  Ultimately this is a very thin and difficult line to walk.

I think SolarWinds has done a good job walking this fine line with the Orion product line.  In comparison with the ManageEngine product line (which we compared against SolarWinds when we were evaluating products) the SolarWinds line is much more focused, better product for your money, and a million times better support.

I can't argue with that.  I confess to only having significant experience with What'sUp Gold prior to Orion so I can't speak to other competitive models, only what I see from my desk.  WUG could do most of what NPM+APM would do since it spoke WMI without having to pay extra, but it basically has no built-in alerts or reports, so it requires a large investment of admin time and skill to mold it to your org needs.  And their support was not in the same class as SW, at least a couple of years back.

I think though part of the problem is they already have a huge amount of bang at SW, and they've got different teams maintaining similar feature sets in different products, so it can result in less bang for the buck.  The trick, I suppose, is to maintain a great product efficiently.  I'd love to see some product consolidation.  If they have four or five product categories now, why not have one product per category?

The part I am not liking is the integration.

NPM+APM = great integration.

Now add NCM... yuck!  Separate users.  Separate web consoles, but you can install the integration piece, although to get it to work, you need to store your password and if you change your password... if you refresh a web page the domain might lock your account out (if you use domain auth for NCM).  When you add Nodes to NPM, there is no check box to add to NCM, or policy you can set that is "if vendor = cisco, add to NCM", that would be awesome!

IP SLA looks like a good integration.  NTA looks like a really good integration.  The IPAM looks ok, but I still don't understand the use case for it.

demo website: http://oriondemo.solarwinds.com/Orion/

I think Profiler it is a completely stand alone thing (I don't like that).  It was when I demo'd it right when Solarwinds acquired it.  I fear Hyper9 will be too, hopefully only in the beginning.  I don't understand Kiwi, I didn't see anything change in syslog.

Also, port mapper!!!! I understand the stand alone tool and Admin tool kit, but NPM has some of the information from discovery, and so does NCM from inventory, why don't you just give us a page that has the SQL query and logic to display it.  And if it is missing a couple of things, add some discovery or inventory table.

But let me say - I would die if I didn't have NPM, APM, or NCM!  They are such life savers!  Support is awesome!  The PMs too, and they listen!  We are getting so many new features!  Things are looking great!  Working great!  I would tell anyone that they are getting a good product with Orion.

Keep up the great work!

Now add NCM... yuck!  Separate users.  Separate web consoles, but you can install the integration piece, although to get it to work, you need to store your password and if you change your password... if you refresh a web page the domain might lock your account out (if you use domain auth for NCM).  When you add Nodes to NPM, there is no check box to add to NCM, or policy you can set that is "if vendor = cisco, add to NCM", that would be awesome!

NCM integration is almost pointless if you have domain Auth and a password policy where you have to change your password every 45 days.  I changed my password early this week and today was locked out 5 times trying to ge everything set back to how it should be. VERY IRRITATING.

Understood, this is something we have logged to fix with the intro of 10.1 AD support

Another competitive point I should add: WhatsUp Gold does NOT do any database maintenance for you, you're expected to be your own DBA, leading to all sorts of problems.  I love that Orion automatically shrinks it's database and removes expired items.  I doubt that feature gets much attention normally, but kudos are in order.

Orion does not actually shrink its own database... the maintenance task it does is moving data from detail table to hourly table and from hourly to daily. you would still have to shrink the database if you want to. not sure if orion does automatic re-indexing but as far as I know our dba's do this as well on a regular basis

Are you sure about this?  I know NTA does automatic database maintenance of expired endpoints and database shrinking, see below:

2/17/2011 1:30 AM

NetFlow Database Maintenance : Deleted 471 expired endpoints in 0.16 seconds.

2/10/2011 1:31 AM

Scheduled shrink performed. DB size before shrink 4885.4375MB, DB size after shrink 3739.3125MB, released space 1146.125MB.

I don't know for sure that NPM does the same thing but I will look into it.

what file was that out of?  standard maintenance log is "C:\Program Files (x86)\SolarWinds\Orion\swdebugMaintenance.log" and mine doesn't have that line (but I don't have NTA).  I also checked for my local logs for "shrink" or "shrunk" and I don't have it in any text log.

I pulled that out of "Last 25 events" in my NTA web interface dashboard, I normally never need to actually go and look at the log files on disk.  Not sure where that would be stored.  Also I'm running the latest GA builds on NPM and NTA so you may have a different version.

I checked [NetPerfMon].[dbo].[Events] and didn't find anything with shrink or shrunk either, so I guess if you have NTA, then your DB will shrink after the maintenance job, but with NPM it won't.

(I have Orion Core 2011.1.0, APM 4.0.1, NCM 6.1, NPM 10.1.2, IVIM 1.1.0)

10.1.2 is the current RC of NPM.