SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset vs. Variphy

[SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset is] a great tool for monitoring database servers, highly recommended. The very good thing is that it keeps the history for two weeks, and you can see the time slice for all the server activities. Helps a lot to identify the memory and CPU bottlenecks, research blocking issues and kill the sessions, if necessary.

Incentivized

It has been most helpful to our customer service (we call it patient advocates) department in evaluating complaints. It assisted us in finding issues where perhaps our service didn't live up to the customer's expectations. Letting our patients know they are cared for is our number one goal! I believe it also helped with employee satisfaction because managers and directors were able to see when staff was overwhelmed by calls. I use it to know when 911 calls are made, as well as when we need to add trunks to our phone system.

• Debugging Tools
• Saves Time for basic checks
• Ping, Telnet, SSH right from the console and hence easy user management from console itself

Incentivized

• Our most used function is the Cradle to Grave function in Reporting. We get the full and exact path that any call takes.
• Monthly scheduled reporting is automatically sent to the correct Directors and Managers.
• Dashboards give a quick look at the status of your calls.
• The ability to use "Friendly Names" for fields for ease of user use.

• The unifying component that is intended to be the initial interface to the tools seems clunky. I prefer to start the tools individually rather than using it.
• The port scanner could use some improvements to make it easier to use.

Incentivized

• The ability to connect to systems that have a hybrid cloud solution so receive statistics from both sides

Very easy to use and intuitive. Just be careful with the WAN Killer...it does what it says.

Incentivized

Our organization uses it regularly. It is reliable, and we keep finding new uses for it

Incentivized

Because we did experience some non-vendor-related issues during and after implementation, Dre and the team were terrific at working with us to solve the problems and get us up and running.

These tools complement the Engineer's Toolset. They are excellent at detecting most issues and at keeping the network monitored and protected. However, when it comes time to dig into an issue, especially a hard to fix intermittent issue, these products lack the granularity of monitoring needed for these types of issues. Having said that the toolset is not made to do full time enterprise level monitoring. With these tools and the toolset I am able to have a more complete view of the network and deliver higher levels of service and quicker responses to issues.

Incentivized

Variphy is a great enhancement

• Spend less time downloading free buggy tools
• All the tools in one spot, so you don't have to look around for tools
• Get to the solution sooner

Incentivized

• No negative impact
• Positive impact because it let's measure circuit usage on an hourly basis to determine busy times