Question : Solarwinds Orion vs. Netreo OmniCenter

I am looking at both of these programs for network and performance monitoring and they both look great, they both do the same things, but what I am concerned with is how easy it is to setup and administer over time.  These types of applications seem to get very complex and expensive and often times with very little useful information.

If you have experience with one or both, please share.  All the input I can get is greatly appreciated.

Greg

Answer : Solarwinds Orion vs. Netreo OmniCenter

I cannot vouch for Netreo since I have never used it before but Solarwinds I have. Solarwinds is great and flashy for uptime monitoring, basic performance statistics, and an excellent web portal for monitoring. Besides that, it's expensive, can only use SNMP, and severly lacks real performance monitoring capabilities. This is because it depends on SNMP traps which is limited. I have used Solarwind to monitor about 100 servers ranging from SQL, IIS, Exchange, and various member servers. It's alright at best. Also, if you want to monitor services, you better cough up some extra dough for the application add-on, it's not free!

Recently I have moved to What'sup Gold Professional and it's proven to be much more flexible and powerful than Solarwinds. It can counter both SNMP and WMI and pretty much has all the bells and whistles as Solarwinds. In addition, it's cheaper, can monitor services, and ecan ven run custom scripts (that's the key difference here!). Also, you can manage whatsupgold completely from the webbasec client in addition to the installed client.

Those are my 2 cents.