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

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.

Covid-19 - reduction of services applied after 5 years during a pandemic.

Over all they are very good at taking your money and over the years have been hard to communicate with. It’s all sales sales sales.

Pros

Over the years this software has been hit and miss, we would spend a lot of time trying to get errors fixed. It was getting better, they also keep changing the sales rep that deals with me. When they call they talk about a different business and advise the customers name and customer to me. It’s happened twice!

Cons

The biggest thing I didn’t like was when they removed remote control from my essential Licence’s. To make it worse it was done over the covid-19 pandemic. they are asking me to buy Licence’s and I have refused. We are social distancing and this has made it stressful for myself and my customers.

Great platform, but not good for smaller MSPs

From a technical standpoint, this platform can't be beat. From a business standpoint, they are a nightmare. Whether or not it is a good fit for you will depend upon your business model and how you structure your contracts and billing.

Pros

It does everything you can think of. Probably the premiere RMM solution on the market.

Cons

The pricing and licensing model is terrible. Every added option has a cost. This makes it very difficult to cost price for taking on new customers. If you dynamically bill your clients, you will get a lot of calls about the volatility in billing due to Solarwinds billing you for so many options. It was way better when they were just N-Able and not owned by Solarwinds.

N-central is very useful for managing a large amount of Customer PCs

For the most part N-central helps me greatly in managing, backing up, and remotely logging into client PCs. if a few little kinks were ironed out of the system and previously mentioned patch management issue were resolved I would have no complaints at all. The on-boarding and setup process could possibly be made a little simpler with a default setup / template but that may be something that other users would not want depending on their configuration.

Pros

N-central makes it easy to deploy a "probe" to one server on a domain and then with the correct credintials deploy the client to all of the rest of the domain connected PCs automatically(scary virus like automatically).

Cons

I hate that every time I get all of the patches approved and working in the n-central patch management it seems i come back a week-month later and they have made an update that breaks the patch management and i am getting warnings that patches are not installing. If the patch management had default patch all / patch important things only profiles that worked 100% of the time i would be very satisfied with N-Central.