HPE Systems Insight Manager (SIM) vs. SolarWinds Pingdom

This software is suited for a smaller organization with a small datacenter that uses mainly HP hardware. Once the environment gets larger it would pay to move to some of their paid for products

Incentivized

Pingdom is well suited to monitor any of your public facing IPs, so you receive an alert by text message or email when the IP you are monitoring does not respond for a given length of time, from an impressive 10ms to 30s. This allows you to be pretty granular with the alerting. It's less appropriate for monitoring IPs on your LAN, unless you NAT these through your firewall.

Incentivized

• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at scanning for devices and adding them for monitoring is almost effortless.
• HP Systems Insight Manager is very good at detecting most HP hardware and integrating with local management software.

Incentivized

• Alerting, particularly the integration with PagerDuty.
• Reporting: the ability to go back and view the history of each status check (including details about every failure) as well as graphs and reports over a longer time period.
• Weekly uptime report emails are very convenient.
• Programmatic configuration is possible with a third-party Terraform plugin.

Incentivized

• I think some of the areas that HP Systems Insight Manager can improve is non HP hardware.
• This software also sometimes struggles handling larger environments.
• This software also has issues managing environments that aren't set up perfectly.

Incentivized

• sometimes sends false alerts
• there should be some threshold value for when an application is not reachable, it should alert after 30 seconds and keep sending hello packets for those 30 seconds and if still there is no response, then it should send the alert.
• too many unwanted metrics.

Incentivized

Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.

For basic functions it's very easy to set up and use. However, for more advanced functions it takes a lot of time to figure out its quirks

Incentivized

Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.

Incentivized

Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.

Customer service from Solarwinds has always been stellar. We've never gone unnoticed, even though we're currently within their tail segment. They're a great partner to us and indeed an important one. When we've had to submit a ticket, we've always received a response within 24 hours. I'd highly recommend SolarWinds to any organization with a server network

Incentivized

It's good for small organizations that use HP branded equipment

Incentivized

Some of the other products I use for system management are HP SiteScope and SolarWinds Orion NPM and APM. SiteScope is another good HP product but it isn't very cost effective to use for general system management. It's good for performing complex alerting and monitoring. SolarWinds makes a great product but it is better geared for gathering statistics and performance data real-time and historically. Again the cost of this product makes it ineffective for general system monitoring.

Incentivized

We have only used Pingdom for these needs, so I can't speak directly to competitors. That being said, for the reasons we used Pingdom it was fantastic value and the fact we never bothered to look for a competitor speaks volumes about our satisfaction with the product.

Incentivized

• Since this software is free if you buy HP hardware the cost is nothing which is nice for cash strapped businesses.
• This software has a somewhat difficult time handling large environments where systems are not configured perfectly for this software.
• I would always recommend having multiples of this software installed for redundancy because generally unless it and the environment is properly configured it can require maintenance.

Incentivized

• Our client has continued to use our services
• It has helped our organisation keep up to date about any site traffic fluctuations and help us make educated decisions on appropriate server resources for the site
• The service is relatively inexpensive making it easy to cost into our maintenance charges

Incentivized