SolarWinds N-central

Kommentare: SolarWinds is turning into a VERY large company. This is great as they get the cash flow to perform R&D and bring some interesting products and tools to the table, HOWEVER, this means they are reaching the point where one hand is not talking to another, products are becoming "designed by committee" and other issues that can be resolved with improved internal communication.

Vorteile: Working for an MSP this is a very feature-rich product for remote control, remote monitoring, deploying and monitoring Anti-Virus, and some backup features (However I DO NOT recommenced the ArcServe-based product.)

Nachteile: -Support has been very hit or miss and lately they have fallen into the "Miss" category
-We had an issue where monitored services of a device were disappearing. After opening a ticket with SolarWinds support they informed me that the software cannot properly track how/why these services were disappearing from devices. This lead to at least 2 events where monitored hard drives were not longer being monitored, we were not made aware of it, the drives filled up, and services crashed
-Product names keep being changed and we are not immediately made aware of it.

Kommentare: For the most part N-central helps me greatly in managing, backing up, and remotely logging into client PCs. if a few little kinks were ironed out of the system and previously mentioned patch management issue were resolved I would have no complaints at all. The on-boarding and setup process could possibly be made a little simpler with a default setup / template but that may be something that other users would not want depending on their configuration.

Vorteile: N-central makes it easy to deploy a "probe" to one server on a domain and then with the correct credintials deploy the client to all of the rest of the domain connected PCs automatically(scary virus like automatically).

Nachteile: I hate that every time I get all of the patches approved and working in the n-central patch management it seems i come back a week-month later and they have made an update that breaks the patch management and i am getting warnings that patches are not installing. If the patch management had default patch all / patch important things only profiles that worked 100% of the time i would be very satisfied with N-Central.

Kommentare: Getting Solarwinds N-central setup can take some time if you want more than just out of the box. I recommend learning about all the features and functionality before engineering your N-central setup. Overall, another great product from Solarwinds!

Vorteile: We switched over to Solarwinds N-central several year ago now and could not be happier. The web interface is filled with tons of features. It has helped us streamline our managed services processes. Their custom automation manager allows for us to create custom monitors and custom auto-heal actions for our monitors. The patch management feature is far superior compared to any other platform I have used. They are partnered with BitDefender offering an integrated AV solution providing a true complete RMM solution. Their remote connect tool called MSP Connect has been the best and smoothest tool I have used for remote access. The possibilities are endless with how you can configure and setup N-central.

Nachteile: I have no complaints about Solarwinds N-central!

Kommentare: Overall I would recommend the product as it has been very beneficial for our company. To get the full use of the product, you'll need to dedicate a resource to managing the platform so that they can learn the various ins/outs of the product.

Vorteile: It's a good product once you get through the learning curve. The product admins are eager to make the product more effective and efficient at helping you manage your client's networks.

Nachteile: Support is frustrating to deal with at the initial levels. If you can get past the L1 technicians in your support case, it is usually pretty good but it will take some work to get the case escalated. Product development is pretty slow as it often takes several releases that are 'coming' to make it into the product. And then the first iteration of the new feature usually isn't fully developed and will take another release or two to be fully functional.

Vorteile: Solarwinds has made their N-Central product one of our greatest tools as an MSP, the remote support, AV, and backup solutions being rolled into the central product make it a no-brainer for us to deploy the product to all of our managed devices, and for monitoring various hardware points via SNMP. One of the greatest strengths of the product is the ability for the monitoring API to get integrated with our ticketing solution to automatically generate tickets when monitored items flip from Good to Bad...

Nachteile: While their API isn't bad, there's a number of features I would like to see added to it, mainly the ability to pull some information about clients, sites, maintenance windows and rules... Being able to manage/manipulate and otherwise work with those things would be of an even greater benefit.