I thought I would chime in on this as I work for a large MSP and we just recently went through the comparison of these two. A little background on myself I currently manage all tools used by our Managed Services group and have been in the infrastructure monitoring game for 6 years. Before that I ran a SOC for a large retail company, same approach just less tinfoil in infrastructure monitoring. J It is important to also say I am loyal to my customers first and not vendors. This is a statement I say to every vendor “If another tool comes around that is better for my customers, I will not hesitate to rip you out”. As harsh as that may sound to the sales guy sitting on the other end of the table it sets a clear understanding of where my loyalty resides. Currently we use CA Nimsoft as our main monitoring tool but we do use supplemental tools from other vendors SolarWinds being one of them. We use Kiwi Cattools, Kiwi syslog and are investigating Storage Manager for deep dive storage reporting.
One of my biggest complaints with SolarWinds was the lack of multi-tenant capabilities and the lack of caring from SolarWinds. They almost have a snobbish attitude about it “If you don’t like it to bad, we will find someone else to buy it”. SolarWinds is so close and it’s frustrating that they could do it if they wanted. They would have a really compelling offer if they did. CA Nimsoft on the other hand is 100% designed for multi-tenant environments, which is crucial for a MSP or large Enterprise with multiple divisions.
One thing sneakernet hit on that I wanted to elaborate on. Is the HUB and SPOKE design of the infrastructure, this is a HUGE advantage. Nimsoft has two parts to this design a “HUB” and a “Robot”. Both HUBs and Robots collect information but robots are dumb and push that information to their HUB. There is one main HUB for the entire environment but you can have unlimited child HUBs. These child HUBs can act independently from the main HUB. For us we use this buy putting a HUB in each customer’s datacenter. This means that datacenter is fully monitored (alerting included) regardless of the state of our main HUB. This means I do not have to sweat bullets when our environment needs maintenance done to it. These child HUBs still report back in to the main hub so it is centrally managed from one console on our end.
The point that “Nimsoft = Agent and SolarWinds = Agentless” is incorrect. Nimsoft can be Agent or agentless which is crucial as both have their pros and cons. From a deployment standpoint both are easy to deploy with Nimsoft. You put in the networks or IPs to scan, credentials to use and it builds an inventory and reports back what it was able to log in to (Windows, SSH and SNMP devices). With a few clicks you can tell it to deploy agents or add it to agentless monitoring.
As far as ease of use this is my next big complaint with SolarWinds as I cannot stand the portal. SolarWinds buys a bunch of really cool products and “integrates” them together. The issue is you can tell when using the portal that you are moving from one product to the other. This is not always an issue but more an annoyance. It does worry me on where you might run into limitation with this “Jammed together” approach. With CA owning Nimsoft they are slowly adding CA tools to Nimsoft and it will be interesting to see how this goes. When they introduced NetFlow it had the same issues but they have now made it more integrated.
I found it interesting reading sneakernet’s thoughts on the licensing model as I always felt like I was getting nickeled and dimed with SolarWinds. I am not sure if we have a broader scope of device types, but I felt like I needed to attend a class just to understand it. For us with Nimsoft we ask our customer “How many Servers, Application Servers (Exchange, AD, DBs), Network devices, Advance Network devices (Cisco Nexus) and Storage do you have?” That is five device types they need to count and we price out monitoring on it. Most leaders in IT should be able to get that number easily.
The last big advantage we have found with Nimsoft is monitoring is truly limitless. I know that sounds very sales guy like, but it is the truth. Nimsoft is built to be a sandbox and allows you to not be constrained by what a developer thought you wanted. This is a huge plus for us as we have customers that have legacy applications that have no output method, we simply built a synthetic transaction that logs in and scraps the screen for errors. There are backend commands that you can run against an ESX cluster to get the health of the environment that we are able to have Nimsoft execute and dump to a log which it scrapes and alerts on.
Don’t get me wrong SolarWinds is a great tool and I know a lot of people are happy with it. Both tools ar in the top of their class compared to others in the market. I think it does a great job for single environments when you only need to monitor a single part of the infrastructure stack. It has some really nice management tools which we have customers use in conjunction with Nimsoft. I understand my use case may not be the same as everyone as my use case is centralized monitoring for multi-tenant, large scale environments and full stack monitoring. I know not everyone has these same needs but with our managed monitoring service I have replaced many SolarWinds implementations and heard nothing but good things from those customers. I do hope that SolarWinds address some of these issue as it has so much potential.
Hope this is helpful!