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Why SolarWinds wins against the network management giants
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By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research
Published: 28th September 2007
Copyright Bloor Research © 2007
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One of the most complex and specialised jobs must be to keep a business's networks up and running and performing at the optimum, while constantly having to add new devices and swap others around. The apparent simplification of an IT infrastructure through, for instance, virtualisation actually adds extra underlying complexity while hiding it from view.
So network specialists need all the help they can get when trying to trace faults. The biggest players—IBM, HP and CA for instance—provide a bewildering array of tools for network managers. However, they tend to focus primarily on the largest enterprises who are willing to pay a premium price for network management and for training their professionals to use the rich but complex array of functionality.
So what about the rest of us, the medium-sized enterprises and down?
SolarWinds is not a company on everyone's lips, but it has a huge following among the network engineering community. As is often the way, it has products built by the engineers themselves to provide the information they want and, equally importantly, in the way they want it—which they were not getting previously. An indicator that SolarWinds is on the right track is that very few such low-profile IT vendors can boast 45,000 customers in 140 countries and on track to generate in excess of $50M turnover this year.
How was this done? Although not SolarWinds' biggest individual earner, the Engineers' Toolset is the one with the most influence on the engineering community. Described to me as "a Swiss army knife for networks" with "no strong competitors" by the company's chief product strategist Kenny Van Zant, the desktop-controlled Toolset consists of about 50 individual products. It costs less than $1,400 and currently has about 30,000 users, rising by about 2,000 every quarter.
More importantly, there is an engineering community built around this Engineers' Toolset, causing Van Zant to comment: "We have an unfair advantage because in a room full of engineers all will know SolarWinds." With this community providing rapid feedback on what needs improvement and in what way, there is an almost rock-solid guarantee of a high quality set of tools and a high regard for SolarWinds among the user-base.
While the network diagnostic Engineer's Toolset contributes around 20% of company revenues, SolarWinds biggest earner is actually a complementary product, Orion. This is a web-based network performance management product best-suited to enterprises which are highly distributed. Van Zant said that SolarWinds was not competing for the very largest enterprises; Orion scales to fit companies ranging from 200 to 10,000 employee users and here SolarWinds competes with CA and HP in particular. Orion can always win hands down on cost against them if not on breadth of functionality.
I have often commented on the need to keep functionality simple, but enterprise networks are complex. In this case, what the company is offering is straightforward to understand for those who are the real professionals. More than that, the company concentrates on out-of-the box default functionality with users picking from a list of what to monitor. The dashboard is already there with dashes, gauges and charts—and the inevitable customisation is simple to do. This makes the ROI very quick with no special training needed, generating value and reducing the price of maintenance. So this is uncomfortable for the biggest vendors who make much of their revenue from support and maintenance.
In fact, the engineers themselves effectively self-select and then sell to their colleagues. SolarWinds further encourages this by providing a free 28-day download of a fully functioning product so they can prove it before buying, something that the big players are again reluctant to offer. This is a very low-risk model as far as potential customers are concerned.
Two more products complete SolarWinds' portfolio. Network compliance is heavily connected with configuration management. Cirrus (maintaining the astronomical naming theme), provides configuration and change management and so competes with the likes of Opsware and ZenSource. The rather more down-to-earth LanSurveyor is SolarWinds' real-time network discovery product; this can be set to continuously scan and so pick up changes as they occur, showing the configuration differences—a useful feature to assist compliance policy needs for tracking and auditing changes.
However, according to Van Zant, the market for compliance in networking is not yet taking off. "It is more talk than a market right now." He suspected this was because network managers had enough on their plate dealing with fault and performance problems—covered by SolarWinds' two biggest sellers.
So where will SolarWinds go now? It is now actively seeking increased company awareness but will not renege on continuing to serve the needs of the engineers who are their bread and butter: "You will never see us turn our back on network engineers," Van Zant told me.
The company does not believe in partnering to increase functionality but rather to develop internally or acquire. The solutions will be broadened, especially the Orion product functions, and, hence, who SolarWinds sells them to. This includes a wireless add-on, application traffic for Cisco Netflow, and a VoIP module just announced.
Perhaps more concerning for the big players longer term is SolarWinds' intention to move up to larger and larger customers (although this may mean some design changes are needed to increase scalability and functionality). However, it already has its market which was won by keeping it simple, doing what the customer wanted in the way he wanted it—a good lesson for all IT software vendors to take on board.
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21st October 2007: 'Masood Alam' said:
Although Orion is one of the best tools for network management, I must add that it lacks correlation function that can help even a low level user to get to the root of a complex problem. This feature is a requirement of todays network engineer. Solarwinds Develpoment team must think about it. In addition to that Solarwinds has been a bit slow in taking decisions to add new tools or feature to its products which is leading to low sales as in EMEA region as compared to HP Openview and CA, the largest competitors. I have seen many people using the cracked copy of solarwinds that shows security vulnerability in Liocense key for solarwinds products. Solarwinds must attend to thse issues.
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23rd October 2007: 'Engineer on Call' said:
Agreed!! ORION is an outstanding solution for the Enterprise looking for an alternative to the over-stated NMS products that we’ve all paid far too much for in years past. I don’t know that I agree with Masood as it relates to the comment that “SolarWinds has been slow in taking decision to add new tools”. I’m looking at their website and they released v8.0 in Dec '06 & v8.5 in July ’07 which means that a major release has been announced every 6-7 months. I certainly don’t want to upgrade my environment more than this on any given calendar year. How many releases has HPOV NNM or CA had in the last 12-24 months? I’ve heard that HPOV NNM is being EOL’d in favor of moving folks to Mercury Topaz/Opsware solution. Does anyone have any additional insight to this? Lastly – I can't help but wonder - who are these people that make common practice of stealing software and cracking licenses?
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24th October 2007: 'Network Engineer Asia.' said:
Hi,
I have used both NNM and Solarwinds. Yes Solarwinds is easy to install and configure. But When I tried to search the network and create a map it was a nightmare. You have to do it manually and it is does not dinamically change when you add and take out devices. Other issue is the basic interface IP addresses. NNM discovers the network and you can easily find the IP of any interface, where as Solarwinds shows only one IP per device. If you have a router with 8 serials then you see only one IP, where as NNM shows all 8 IPs and you can ping it and telnet into it.
I totally agree about previous comment about co-rellation, Solarwinds has in build co-relation engin or intelligence, when a interface is down it will show all router on the path as down. If you need Solarwinds not to show those routers as down then for each possible scenario you need to configure it manually. Also alerts can only be acknowledged from the console not from web interface.
Solarwinds is good for very low cost, basic monitoring. NNM is too complicated for this, you need professional resources to configure NNM. NMM is weak in its graphics, though you can configure it manually to graph what you want.
No clear winner here, each has its market segment.
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8th November 2007: 'Rosco' said:
Has anyone compared Orion to Fluke's NetVoyant appliance based monitoring system?
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9th November 2007: 'Gareth' said:
While many people might decry the lack of advanced funtionality in Orion, often these modules are the least used, and the most complex to administer. Orion has a chunky product, with most functions that an SME would need.I recently evaluated 6 different NW mgmnt products, and in terms of bang-for-buck, Orion beat all the others hands down. I've just deployed & am very content with it.
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2nd January 2008: 'Alan' said:
Gareth, you said you evaulated 6 different solutions. What were they? Did it include Smarts?
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14th January 2008: 'Gareth' said:
Alan,
Solutions I looked included:
OSI-Soft IT+Monitor,
PA server monitor pro,
Paessler,
Plus a couple of freeware items.
I didn't evaluate the big packages (OpenView etc) as I only have 200-odd nodes.
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9th November 2007: 'Networks Unlimited' said:
I would agree that Solarwinds is a great solution for infrastructure monitoring with SNMP and is unsurpassed in its customisable web front end. However, it lacks the facilities needed by the majority of heterogeneous networks today. Products such as Adventnet's ManageEngine OpManager offer a far more comprehensive monitoring solution with support for not just SNMP management but WMI, Telnet/SSH and URL monitoring at comparable price points.
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4th January 2008: 'Matt Crane' said:
I'm not sure how you can claim that Orion lacks features required. The Orion has modules that extend the monitoring capabilities and very soon will include the service monitoring you mention. I'm not at all surprised that you plug competitive solutions here given your exclusive ties to that particular vendor,however it wasn't long ago that your company was offering SolarWinds solutions to your own customers.
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10th November 2007: 'Johnson Liu' said:
The first SNMP package of Gigamedia is the SolarWinds tools pack at Jan, 2000.
I recommended my supervisor to purchase the solarwinds because it is cost-effective than others platform like HP OpenView, CiscoWorks...
Until now, Gigamedia's NOC still use SolarWinds as the primary SNMP tools to help to monitor CPU loading and device's information collection.
--
Johnson Liu
CCIE#11440
http://ccie11440.blogspot.com/
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13th November 2007: 'Angela Pace' said:
Orion is great but their network engineer toolsuite doesn't work for us. We think SolarWinds provides a rather simple monitoring capability with rather remedial level correlation. We've been beta-testing Packettrap and its a lot more elegant than SW. I think they're releasing it to the public soon.
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16th November 2007: 'Chad Sage' said:
Totally Agreed! Within 30 min I had Orion up and running with alerts and traffic analysis of what was going on in my network. Hands down best Network PerformanceMonitor out there!
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27th November 2007: 'CallMeBigGuy' said:
If you are serious about monitoring your network you should evaluate the suite of products from NetQoS in Austin, TX. WOW!!!
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11th December 2007: 'Michel Kamp' said:
What about Microsoft System Center Operation manager (SCOM) 2007 ? Orion does a good job on Network ISO layer 3 but above is a lot more. SCOM takes it all to the top level. Distributes application monitoring , dianostic probes , remote task excution , realtime configuration changes , complex diagrams flowcards for drill down to the root cause. etc... Ok for ISO layer 3 and below you need a extra Managementpack but this isn't so hard to do it your self. I've been there , I've seen it , Ive done it. Now i'm monitoring over 300 servers over the internet with almost no extra administration.
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13th December 2007: 'Balaji S' said:
I have recently testes a powerful Network Management solution from Sphere networks, it is named as Arena Network Manager....Guys you have to try ....one of the best mapping and auto discovery of networks and lot of other functionality.
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2nd January 2008: 'Alan' said:
Has anyone ever evaluated Smarts head to head against what they're currently using? Looking for experiences/comments etc. Thank you! & Happy New Year.
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21st January 2008: 'DallasAdmin' said:
Has anyone looked at Orion verses IpSwitch's Whatsup product? We currently have Whatsup v11 deployed, and I am feeling the need to look elsewhere. Whatsup has alot of feautures, but often, we get notifications of outages where there isnt one, and the backend database needs some serious love. Thoughts?
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13th February 2008: 'Marc' said:
check out Argent.com
Great support, products have best features from all the other guys, and it gives you end to end monitoring. SolarWinds is only network, node up-down/
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13th February 2008: 'Marc' said:
Compliance talk? Obviously you haven't been to Wall St. in a while....everything is compliance, from staples to power adapters to switches to .......
While SolarWinds is the product for network monitoring, consolidation is the latest word from above. Management needs to be able to provide SLA reports and this is where you see new players making headwind. Argent, BMC, GFI, Netpro will be making huge headway here since SolarWinds is made to play just with the Network folks.
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19th February 2008: 'shirkan' said:
Orion is a great out of the box quick setup product. While it lacks some more detailed and enhanced functionality, one thing i hae to have which most others lack - multi user enviroment with web login - i cant allow my users to log into a server where they are able to see the whole network - so for multi sites it works great, where the admin is not sitting in front of the server - but as said, stuff like network auto mapping - web configuration, especially things like HD SMART monitoring which i havent seen anywhere yet, or in general temperatur monitoring on servers for CPU etc etc, among what others said
But overall, its a great solution for network monitoring, and it handles better then most of what i seen out there - and java programmed apps are just lousy due to system requirements , stabilty and shouldnt be used to monitor
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