ManageEngine Site24x7 vs. N-able N-central

I have tried other tools (PRTG etc) in the past, and switched from US monitor to [Site24x7 All-in-One Monitoring], for all the built-in features and ability to implement by using with or without the agents deployed (ip discovery LAN). This is one tool that encompasses the entire organization and allows that single pane of glass feel (NOC screen view) for an accurate virtual snapshot of your entire organization, either cloud and/or LAN.

Incentivized

In my opinion, N-able N-central is a good "learn your lesson and move onto something better" tool. I've used many RMM tools over the years and I feel that this one is slow, does a terrible job with reporting, alerting, monitoring, software deployments, etc. The ability to turn on services like AV, backup, etc easily is cute, but you're not going to be able to use your own tools with this easily. In my experience, if you do turn those tools on for testing during the trial, you'll be charged later (despite it being a trial). They also turn off your ability to monitor these increased costs or to turn them off yourself. As a company, I found that they were impossible to work with. The sales team is right there if you want to buy something - but if you need anything other than to buy something, in my experience, they take days or weeks to navigate. I found that they are not a terribly ethical company and are more concerned with making a few dollars than creating a partnerships with MSPs. I can see value is in the advertised price of $99 for a hundred endpoints. However, you need to remember to not trial any other tools (like AV, backup, etc).

• Alerts: Site24x7 can be configured to send alerts in all sorts of ways, from email, to text messages, to even direct automated phone calls.
• Internal monitoring: An agent installed on one or more machines can monitor internal connectivity to other network devices. This means if connectivity to a server goes down, we often know about it before users alert us.
• External monitoring: Site24x7 also watched our websites and sends alerts if they're unreachable. It uses multiple locations to do so, which means if there's a partial network outage in some part of the country, we know who is affected.

Incentivized

• Robust patch management: it is easy to set up patching groups via tags, and configures patch management profiles and maintenance windows.
• Remote Control: as long as the agent checks in, it is very quick and easy to take control of an endpoint, either in a separate session (RDP, kick the current user out), or to join the existing session of the current user, to provide desktop support or collaborate remotely.

Incentivized

• I wish the advanced monitors were not so expensive.
• It is a cloud solution, so it is necessary to open up outbound ports in all security zones.
• If you lose outbound internet service, all your internal servers will throw alarms and life gets extremely noisy.

Incentivized

• Expensive software
• The support team are terrible
• Sales team will promise the world to get you over the line
• Subscription management is tedious
• Old software with very little development and the support team will not provide any further information on this - no roadmap
• Integrations galore - but none of them are effective

Overall we have liked our solar winds experience, however, as our company has grown to support larger enterprises, this product does not have the functionality that our teams need in order to fully support them. The lack of granularity with backups and lack of ability to support nutanix environments is slowly drawing us into the use of other tools.

Incentivized

The user interface is fairly straight forward, with logic groupings for objects. I did not deploy this software, but am one of the daily administrators. Once you get the correct agent package (Which can be a challenge) the integration into AD is not bad. The UI could be more customized, but that may have been a design choice.

Incentivized

I have only had to use support once, so I can't go into much detail about their support team. The one time I did use it the response was fast but the resolution took some time.

Incentivized

Every time we have reached out to SolarWinds they are quick to respond, even offering support chat 24/7. Their support team is great and works with you to find solutions to issues. They have taken items we had issues with before and used those to create updates so that the issue is handled better in the future.

Incentivized

Make sure if you your using a vm you follow the instructions for provisioning to the letter or it will be starting from square one

Incentivized

Site24x7 [All-in-One Monitoring] has some similarities to ThousandEyes. Especially in the troubleshooting aspect where both offer Web performance waterfall charts to analyze the issue better. Both have cloud-based servers globally that allow to determine performance on the Internet. Site24x7 has more features available so we selected it instead.

Incentivized

Most advanced, and other technicians in the business already used it before. NinjaOne was a close competitor, but lacked some features that we ideally need. ITarian was too basic but was MUCH cheaper. For a startup MSP, it would be much more attractive. Splashtop was just for remote connections, which we used for some time before realizing full RMMs were a better fit for our requirements.

Incentivized

• Positivity wise, we're spending a third of what we were on our website monitoring, this has allowed us to focus funding elsewhere (namely SolarWinds).
• We have enhanced our core monitoring by now also being able to provide better coverage, whereas we were handicapped with our previous supplier due to the scaling costs of multi-step transactions.
• The general feeling from our IT staff is that the platform is not great, which obviously reduces confidence in the ability for the platform to provide accurate monitoring data for our websites.

Incentivized

• The product definitely increases productivity. Technicians can spend a few seconds to take care of remote tasks with a few clicks as opposed to minutes to get a user to start a remote control session, or worse, going on site to work on a piece of equipment.
• The packaging of the features makes selling and pricing the product fairly straight-forward and convenient. This saves our sales team time from trying to work with add-ons when pricing our services - the product makes it easy to just have an "all you can eat" package at a set price.
• When something goes wrong with the product, our business and our customers suffer. If for example, a bug causes all managed computers to reboot, our customers call in, resulting in our technicians being booked solid doing damage control. This also causes loss of trust with our customers - we can't simply blame the product, the customer trusts us to provide them a service and if the product fails, we fail.