It works well most of the time, however...

SolarWinds is turning into a VERY large company. This is great as they get the cash flow to perform R&D and bring some interesting products and tools to the table, HOWEVER, this means they are reaching the point where one hand is not talking to another, products are becoming "designed by committee" and other issues that can be resolved with improved internal communication.

Pros

Working for an MSP this is a very feature-rich product for remote control, remote monitoring, deploying and monitoring Anti-Virus, and some backup features (However I DO NOT recommenced the ArcServe-based product.)

Cons

-Support has been very hit or miss and lately they have fallen into the "Miss" category
-We had an issue where monitored services of a device were disappearing. After opening a ticket with SolarWinds support they informed me that the software cannot properly track how/why these services were disappearing from devices. This lead to at least 2 events where monitored hard drives were not longer being monitored, we were not made aware of it, the drives filled up, and services crashed
-Product names keep being changed and we are not immediately made aware of it.

Best RMM Tool for MSP's!

Getting Solarwinds N-central setup can take some time if you want more than just out of the box. I recommend learning about all the features and functionality before engineering your N-central setup. Overall, another great product from Solarwinds!

Pros

We switched over to Solarwinds N-central several year ago now and could not be happier. The web interface is filled with tons of features. It has helped us streamline our managed services processes. Their custom automation manager allows for us to create custom monitors and custom auto-heal actions for our monitors. The patch management feature is far superior compared to any other platform I have used. They are partnered with BitDefender offering an integrated AV solution providing a true complete RMM solution. Their remote connect tool called MSP Connect has been the best and smoothest tool I have used for remote access. The possibilities are endless with how you can configure and setup N-central.

Cons

I have no complaints about Solarwinds N-central!

N-Central is a great tool in a bad package

Love that I can drop a probe on a clients network and scan and find all devices in that network. The remote agent is great, allows me to remote into any device easily if it has the agent on it. Monitoring is fine, but no real dashboards, and it is about 10 to 20 minutes behind. If you are watching the dashboard and see a device is offline, you are already 20 minutes late. It's not the prettiest, but it does a good job.

Pros

Remote agent feature is great. Software inventory and license monitoring is great. Once you learn it, it works great.

Cons

Dashboard for monitoring is not real time. Steep learning curve. Very counter-intuitive on instructions. Figuring out thresholds for alerting can be difficult.

IT engineer review

Has helped me immensly as an IT engineer and allowed me to maintain and improve my environment

Pros

Great control of an entire network. easy RDP tools and detailed stats. Great customised reports.big fan of the product as a whole and many functions to use within an IT industry

Cons

difficult to implement at first. the support is good but i would like a more interactive support like calling in as the IM is abit tedious. the patch management needs to be simplified abit more. license compliance report is extremely confusing. Just an overall easier UI. Would be nice if you could integrate live graph monitoring to drill down into devices and IPs over a firewall etc. essentially you do have the NPM but that needs to be intergrated in nCentral then i would procure it. thus we can have a monitoring team and throw it on the screen. right now the alerts from SNMP is great but is difficult to drill into and shut down rogue devices etc

A solid RMM tool that represents a great value option

NCentral slots well into its place as our RMM and allows us to manage and monitor most of what we need for customers.

Pros

Having come from one of the more expensive competitors in the RMM space, not only was I sold on NCentral's features and automation capabilities, but the pricing for perpetual licencing was quite attractive.

Cons

Custom reporting requires expertise and may not be accessible to everyone. We also do need to use additional tools outside NCentral to get a full picture of Networks.

After using it for 3 years, N-Able was a frustrating experience

Easier control of our client's PCs, and easy management of thousands of devices. Increased efficiency in the office.

Pros

N-Able/N-Central gives you the ability to remote control devices and perform scripts and tasks without disrupting the end user. Additionally, you can deploy antivirus, schedule installations for off-hours, and many other useful tools.

Cons

They claim Mac monitoring support, yet it isn't updated to stay compatible with newer Mac OS's. Also, scripts on Macs were unreliable, and many features that applied to PCs are missing. Not just a couple, but most. It seems like you can only do SMTP monitoring on the mac, at least in the version I used which was 9.5.

Also, the support was really poor. It took days to get to resolution on critical alerts or monitoring issues.

Also, I want to warn any potential buyer that when N_able performs agent updates, it's possible to lose all of the connectivity of your agents. This happened to us, and it took 3 days for support to help us with it. We had a backup, thankfully, and eventually they pushed out a hotfix to allow that update to work.

I also had the on-premise server, but we had no way to log into the server or monitor it in any way. It was a Linux server. But, it was our server - we owned it. The risk of failure seemed much too large for a system built on an OS that we don't know very well.

Finally, the sales tactics are incredibly strong. Every time you talk to your account manager, which feels like it's weekly, you get pushed into watching a demo, and they don't really leave you alone.

Great product, but some limitations

I have used many RMM tools over the years, and found that N-Central is a great product, but it has some limitations in that the remote control happens through a cloud service and not directly to the server, and configuring monitors to monitor logs doesnt work as expected or is not available. Support is great and responsive and the staff know the product well.

Pros

Nice interface with LOTS of features. Fast remote access with lots of control options.

Cons

Sometimes the Take Control access intermittently doesnt work for no reason. Event logs and log parsing is difficult to configure and doesnt quite work as expected.

Better front-end then back-end

Used on a daily basis for monitoring, very useful.

Pros

Great tool for network monitoring, good at what it's built for.

Cons

The back-end structure is horrible, adding indexes barely helps because new tables are added on a per-day basis instead of being merged all together with a date field for filtering (Looks like a bad case of textfile port to SQL, ridiculous and not so great for performance).

N-central is a great software for MSPs

Pros

I like how quickly we get alerted if there is a server or a workstation issue. Also gives us good visibility into what is on the network.

Cons

Thresholds can be hyper-sensitive however. Most of this is controlled by what is configured so it's doing what it is supposed to, but if you don't set it up correctly you could be inundated with all sorts of emails.

Product is feature-rich, but documentation and support are both very poor.

Pros

The product has a ton of features, and contains hooks into a number of other products. To borrow from Gartner's magic quadrant, the vision for the product is excellent (but the execution is highly flawed).

Cons

1. Documentation is poor.
2. Support is poor.
3. Product is not remotely intuitive.
4. Many features are poorly implemented.

Very Powerful

At first we mainly signed up for anti-virus deployment and monitoring (so users could not turn it off). We have slowly started to use some of the other features, but again, just starting to scratch the surface.

Pros

This software does quite a bit for an IT Department. Inventory, patch management, application deployment, help desk, etc. We have used it for a couple of years now and really have just scratched the surface of what it can do.

Cons

Can be a little intimidating. There is a lot going on in this package. Make sure you have some time to learn.

N-central makes it easy to manage your IT environment

Pros

It does great showing the status of your servers and network devices.

Cons

It can be noisy with alert email and adding SNMP OID can be a chore.