pfSense vs. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

pfSense is incredibly budget friendly and capable for organizations of all sizes. My specific scenario, working for a non-profit organization, requires budget consciences decisions without compromising security and function. pfSense has helped tremendously in accomplishing this. It specifically tackles advanced routing, static routing, remote access, intrusion prevention, in a single platform, mostly available for free.

Incentivized

For a network admin or security team, NCM can be very useful in keeping config parameters standardized, this can mean anything from ensuring the timezone setting is standard to ensuring SNMP or logging is set up as you want it. The alerting is good if you want a record of findings for audit purposes so that you can show that you are monitoring configurations, you are alerting when a config goes out of compliance, and a ticket is created to drive remediation. Alternatively one can choose to automate remediation by running a configuration change script but that scares me so we never used it, this is a me-problem and not a tool problem. Where it falls down is in the data storage architecture as we had constant problems with our server running out of disk, this seems to be because it does a lot of basic monitoring of the devices along with storing many, many copies of the configurations. This may have been a user-side issue, though NCM runs under the Orion app which is where the storage issues come from I think.

Incentivized

• Easy to use. Good user interface design! Easy to understand and easy to set up.
• Lower hardware requirement. 3 years ago, we used an old PC to run it. Now, we have changed to a router device with Celeron CPU and 8GB RAM. It runs smoothly with a 1000G commercial broadband.

Incentivized

• Exceptionally good in Network devices performance and availability monitoring like CPU, Memory, Interfaces throughput, bandwidth utilization, etc...
• Broad network devices like Routers, Switches, Firewalls, Load Balancers, and vendors coverage like Cisco, Juniper, Avaya, Broadcom, EMC, Fortinet, etc...
• Good diagnostic and logging method

Incentivized

• There is no API for making changes. This can be a hindrance in environments where auto-deploying something needs firewall rules or HAProxy configs updated. Since all settings are stored in an XML file and then configs are generated from that, even manually updating config files cannot be done.
• Beware that some network cards can have issues. pfSense is based on FreeBSD, so it's best to look on their compatibility list before deploying.

Incentivized

• More security put into the product, the Orion hack was not good news.
• More frequent releases to address small bugs rather than big releases that are rare.
• More IPv6 related features to make it easier for people familiar with IPv4 to learn IPv6.
• Ability to edit dashboards using JSON or another similar language.

Incentivized

pfSense can be a very elementary firewall but can also be as comples as you want, according your needs. I'd always reccomend a HA solution when used in a company and, for bigger companies, commercial license is recommended. It's also very adptable to everyone's needs.

Incentivized

pfSense+ basic provides "As Available" email support. pfSense+ Pro offers 24 hr turn around email support. pfSense+ Enterprise offers 24/7 phone support.

Incentivized

PFSense is not a fully featured and supported enterprise-grade solution; however, it does offer a lot of similar functionality at a fraction of the cost for more minor requirements.

For the purposes we use SolarwWnds, we get the functionality we need at a favorable price point. Additionally, we have easy adoption by our staff and any consultants we work with due to existing familiarity and/or experience with the product which brings some added efficiency to our onboarding process or project engagements.

Incentivized

• pfSense has only had positive impacts on our company. We are not a huge company so not having to buy licenses to get all these features have been excellent.
• I was not around when our current sysadmin decided to use pfSense, but I am assuming from day one it was probably a 100% return on investment since it does everything we need it to and it was open source software.

Incentivized

• Reduced site visits and recurring issues by 25 to 35%
• Enables proactive warning, thereby reducing downtime caused by unforeseen issues
• Provides a central panel for monitoring the entire network at a glance
• Allows for SLA management thereby increasing accountability by 50%
• Reduced time to repair by 35% as techs are more informed of root cause

Incentivized