Due to management styles of our previous IT Director, we, the IT guys responsable for the Network were routinely saddled with project management tasks, while outsourced contractors came in to do configurations. What a great paradigm! Well, along the way we went from Frame Relay to our regional offices to MPLS. The routers were installed and configured by others and all seemed relatively good. Network traffic between the regions and our main office in Albany NY was already somewhat low to begin with, mostly to NDS replication and nightly backups. Because of this, seeing 25% utililization through the routers wasn't concerning. BUT... then Orion came along! Soon after installing the program and getting it configured to see our stuff, we realized why they were showing only 25%. Our Buffalo router was set up "correctly" for 25% reserved for VOIP and 75% for data. Our Rochester and Long Island routers were set up exactly backwards! We were showing 25% on them because that's all they could do. This sillyness was compounded by the fact that we don't use VOIP any way, so we took all QOS off and now... the backups take less time. The bandwith utilization is upwards of 90% when back ups run.
Orion is a wonderfully configurable product. The sales and technical support teams have been a joy to work with. Being the one who researched and decided on Orion, I'm pleased to say I did the right thing givign Solarwinds our business.