It is with a heavy heart that I announce the End of Life of SolarWinds Alert Central. Alert Central was an attempt to build on something that you, our users and customers, knew us well for, free tools. The idea was to expand on the free tools concept and build something much bigger, an entirely free product.
When we were building Alert Central, cloud based applications were still few and far between, more marketing than reality. So we built Alert Central as a virtual appliance. This was great if you were familiar with that technology or worked closely with your virtual administrator. The experience was very similar to what you would get with SaaS; no need to worry about dependencies or install failures, just start it up and go. Obviously there has been a lot of change in this market over the last 3-5 years. Both in the underlying cloud services available to build applications, but also general acceptance from the market on cloud based applications.
If we were building this product today, we wouldn’t be asking your thoughts on virtual appliances as a deployment mechanism, we would be asking you about cloud or on-prem. We believe this use case is best fulfilled by a cloud based solution. This is a large factor in our decision to both stop development of Alert Central and also where the silver lining is. When we surveyed the market and worked with our IT Operations team, we quickly realized that there was company that stood above the rest, OpsGenie.
So I’m pleased to announce, SolarWinds and OpsGenie are partnering!
OpsGenie is a cloud based alert and incident management solutions for dev and operations teams. We believe OpsGenie has done a great job at solving these problems. In fact, they’ve done such a great job that our internal IT Ops team has already moved to them. Our free product was good and had a lot of fans, but we want to make sure our customers have the right long term solution, and that’s OpsGenie.
If you are using Alert Central today, what does this all mean for you? Well, for starters, nobody is going to come in and take away Alert Central from you. Since it’s a free product, there is no licensing or code that will turn off or stop working. However, OpsGenie has gone to great lengths to make sure that existing Alert Central customers will be taken care of, so we recommend switching sooner rather than later. They are aware that many of our customers are using a free product today so don’t necessarily have budget to buy a replacement solution. To that end, they have agreed to offer a special free tier for existing SolarWinds Alert Central users.
SolarWinds Lite Plan (Free)
- Up to five (5) users
- Email and SolarWinds NPM integrations
- Email, mobile push notifications
- 10 SMS notifications per user per month
- Heartbeat monitoring
There will certainly be some customers that are larger shops or see the value in the advanced functionality that comes with the full OpsGenie platform. For those users, OpsGenie has created special pricing as well.
SolarWinds Pro Plan ($120/user/year or $12/user/month)
- Email, SolarWinds NPM and chat integrations
- On-call schedules, teams and escalations
- Email, mobile push notifications
- 100 SMS and phone notifications per user per month (U.S. only)
- 25 SMS and phone notifications per user per month (International)
I’m guessing you can see why we were so happy to partner with OpsGenie. Not only do they have a great product, a product that our internal team loves, but they also understand what it means to take care of our customers.
We will be hosting a webinar on January 18, 2017 at 2:00pm EST where our Director of IT Operations will show you how our internal team migrated from Alert Central to OpsGenie. We will show you how things were done in Alert Central, and how you will do them with OpsGenie. We will also be providing documentation that should help with this transition at https://www.opsgenie.com/solarwinds-alert-central
Saying goodbye is always hard so we hope saying hello at the same time will make it easier. Ultimately, we believe you will be much happier and more productive with this solution so let us know how we can help with this transition.
Register for webinar here: http://opsgenie.com/webinars/solarwinds-alert-central-transition-to-opsgenie