I wanted to open a discussion and engage the community. I was wanting to gauge and see if this is possibly something that others could agree with or maybe contribute ideas that could be helpful not just for us but everyone else.
At least to me it seems like with SolarWinds you never have a full suit but rather one or the other. What I mean is either you have the best monitoring possible and lackluster features. Or you have great features and lackluster monitoring. From what I can remember it was version 10.4.2 that offered a great combination of both for it's time. And Instead of offering upgrades along the same lines. It seems at least to me that development sped up releases and that's when more problems where introduced.
We currently have just brought up a brand new deployment. It's in testing mode for a month so all kinks could be ironed out and everything works as expected. I must say I'm loving the new features on service back 1 and enhancements made. But since I believe version 10.7 the alerting engine hasn't really changed in drastic ways. Same goes with reporting. The only major change was when everything went online instead of having to login to the server to get things done. But then again these features have been improved but largely have stayed the same in terms of look and feel an ability. Point I'm getting to is that limitations that where there before are still there today. And it seems like SolarWinds has put all efforts behind monitoring and not the much into anything else.
But then I started to think. What is Monitoring without alerts or reports? And the answer is.. To us, Useless. One would argue that the current alerting engine gets the job done. And I can agree with that. It gets the job done. But then again when you are a highly respected software in the business, there are very high expectations of it. And then it leaves one wondering why did we invest so much monitoring into a monitoring solution when we need to spend more for monitoring, etc?
There are other things in question to for example. AIX (Unix) systems, why do we need to go through all the added steps of perl scripting and building SAM templates? Wouldn't it be better if AIX native to NPM monitoring? The key is to reduce steps to monitor, not increase them.
To me I firmly believe that if the suit was packaged in a way that it offered superior monitoring, with strong management features such as alert and reporting, it would make the software even more valuable then what it currently is. I know we all have different opinions, but for me I would much rather wait for an upgrade that's carefully thought out and built correctly then small upgrades that don't really provide much value to us.
I'll leave it up to you guys for thoughts, opinions, comments, anything you want to say.