APM or IPMonitor

I think we'll be staying with IPMonitor as I've just talked to our Solarwinds supplier and fell off my chair when I found out how much it would cost for us to move to APM with the number of monitors we require, we were just about to upgrade to 5000 monitor license which would of cost us £2500 but to do the equivalent in APM it would cost £8000 for the SLX edition.

What are Solarwinds up to with there licensing of their modules first it was Netflow (Got Orion SLX so had to have Netflow SLX even though we only have 5 Netflow aware devices) now APM at the rate Solarwinds are going they're going to price themselves out of the market.

I'm particularly annoyed as I have an e-mail from a Solarwinds Sales person from last year when we were looking at either IPMonitor or Apps module and he said

While I cant speak to the long-term plans for integrating the products, I can say that we will always have a stand-alone ipMonitor product available to SolarWinds customers. We are working on an upgrade path that enables you to go from one solution to the next. No pricing has been finalized as this acquisition was just made. We should know more in the upcoming months. Rest assured we will always take care of our customers and make sure that they are leveraging the right solution.

Which is why we went down the path of IPMonitor and not apps module and have now been told by our supplier there is no upgrade path between the two products so not only will it cost us 3 times more to go with APM we would also have to throw out our investment in IPMonitor.

So I'm not a happy camper at the moment.

Amen, brother.  Pricing model for SLX packages defies logic.  We'd have jumped on every module available if they didn't insist that we get the SLX version, since we are running Orion SLX.  Orion is a base management tool, so it makes sense that you'd have it licensed to cover every node in your environment.  The add-on modules are specific to application support, network traffic, voip, etc...Their are only two logical explanations for the add-on module pricing:

 1.  Someone who knows nothing about the technical side of network monitoring has assumed that every device being monitored runs a monitored application, spits out Netflow, and routes voice traffic.  Thus, since every device on your network does everyhting you need on your network, you need the SLX license. 

 2. Pure greed. 

I vote #2.

I've talked to sales but nothings happened, I've discussed with them the problems as we see it with the way licensing is priced for Orion modules and that only having 5 netflow devices and also only wanting 500 monitors for applications didn't get me very far with the price it still came out way over the cost that were currently paying for Scrutinizer and IPMonitor. At the moment were happy with Scrutinizer (More so since they've brought out a behaviour analysis module) and IPMonitor (Although I think IPMonitor will have its technology stripped and put into Orion and then gradually dropped) but it would of been better to have everything under one roof. We were looking at the VOIP module recently but for the same reason as the other two have decided to go with th Scrutinizer add-on that is for IP SLA.

What I still don't understand is if it isn't a money grabbing exercise then why haven't Solarwinds changed there licensing structure so that we can buy any level of module license even if we have SLX Orion?

There must be plenty of other users of 3rd party Netflow, APM and VOIP products that own Orion and would love to have it under a single frontend but can't justify the cost.

 Andy

To me that seems crazy, we've are currently monitoring 13,000 elements so require the SLX version of Orion but only have 5 Cisco 6509 Chassis (Our WAN is switched using 3750's) that can run Netflow so 3.8% of our monitored elements are actually spitting out Netflow and this is never likely to increase.

A Solarwinds reseller actually suggested to us that if we bought Orion 100 and then the modules we were looking for then it would work out cheaper than getting the modules for our existing install, we didn't do this because its no different to buying a third party product to do the job and the websites wouldn't be integrated.

Why can't Solarwinds bring in some intermediate pricing for for customers that only have a few netflow devices, we can't be the only customers in this situation.

We currently use Scrutinizer because of the cost and they do a license for just 5 Netflow based devices.

 Jon

mcbridea:

So selling by device leaves no measure for what scale you need.

Andy, I understand your reasoning surrounding NTA licensing, but I'm in a similar situation with the VoIP Monitor. I recently purchased a very small Cisco Call Manager to run up to 20 phones. I'm presently an Orion SLX2000 customer and I'd love to purchase the VoIP Monitor to integrate this Call Manager into Orion, but after pricing out the Solarwinds solution, even with educational discounts, the cost of the monitoring turned out to be more expensive then the Call Manager itself. It just didn't make financial sense. Management has zero interest in bringing up another Orion SL100, but just for giggles I went through the exercise anyway. Once we factored in the hardware cost, the SL100 license, the matching VoIP Monitor costs, as well as backup software, we once again exceeded the cost of the Call Manager itself. Now using the same logic you used to justify the expense of NTA, please explain to me how this licensing scheme works for the VoIP module?

At best I can convince management to spend the money on the VoIP Monitor for an SL100, which is five times more then we have phones for, and twice as many as the Call Manager can support anyway. What I can't do is justify spending more on a monitoring solution then the thing we're monitoring.

mcbridea:

It's a matter of how NetFow operates. Although you only have NetFlow turned on on 0.03% of your infrastructure you could have flows from every endpoint on you network being recorded by those devices. So selling by device leaves no measure for what scale you need.

I do however think Solarwinds are cutting out a fair proportion of there customers from being able to keep a pure Solarwinds infrastructure. 

I don't think we will ever agree on this form of pricing enough to say that we'll stick with Scrutinizer for Netflow and Denika for IPSLA.

Praps you should run a poll and get peoples opinion on this and see how many customers would like Netflow and Voice modules but its not financial viable because of the pricing structure and customer implementation.