I recently carried out a review of network monitoring tools before deciding to purchase Orion along with the application monitor and netflow modules. I can forsee purchasing the wireless module in the future too.
My organisation has decided that it is going to outsource its IT and Networking functions, I am not convinced this is a good idea for us however it has been decided. What I was able to do was show the value of getting our monitoring system up to a high standard so that as parts of our network and systems are taken over we will retain under the contract the ability to monitor the network and the servers using orion this meas we will be able to independantly verify if the outsourcers meet their SLAs on availability performance etc.
We have been using the engineers toolsets for some years now and I am looking forward to getting Orion installed early next month. For interest here are the other products I considered with why I did not use them.
NAGIOS this is what we currently use it is excellent and free however it is complex to set up and support and we have limited LINUX skills in house so its use is not sustainable. Getting Netflow into NAGIOS is a bit of a pain at present too. I will be sad to see it go it has been an excellent tool. Anyone struggling or waiting to get funding for Orion should seriously look at NAGIOS
CISCOWORX expensive and only does the network stuff
CRANOG recently bought by Fluke Networks very expensive and only network focussed very in depth protocol analysis possible with this tool a very techie choice.
SPICEWORKS another free tool very interesting business model but it looked to much like allowing adware/spyware into my network and caused me some security concerns
PAESSLERPRTG another good product but more difficlut to use than ORION and similarly priced again main network focus but good netflow integration.
Finally we buy our software through a third party Trustmarque Solutions and I was able to introduce them to Solarwinds which may in turn drum up some more business for Solarwinds but in my opinion the product offers a unique suite of modules covering both network and applications in a simple way that is hard to beat.
Ian