SolarWinds N-central Software

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.

Overall we are very happy with this solution.

Pros

This solution does everything we need and more. We haven't even made it too deep into its feature and already are glad we purchased.

Cons

It is very time consuming to get it working the way you want but once you do it is great.

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.

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

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!

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.

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).

monitoring

Pros

when it works it does the job. agent communicate ok, prob does rest of work. 90% of the values in thresholds are correct

Cons

Support pushed us into an upgrade, we followed full documentation and also confirmed functionality with them, then after failure they admitted that what they told us was incorrect and worst of all didn't help resolve. 2 weeks later and still not resolved.

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.

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.

N-Central is a great managed services tool to monitor devices when they go down, push down patching, remote into devices and run reports. Since system is web-based it is a great way for an IT person to work remotely without being logged into a VPN client of some sort.

We have used N-Able's N-Central product for over 10 years and it has become the central application in our service delivery and support model. As we have continued to grow in clients and supported network devices, N-Able has continued to improve and add features to N-Central.
Over the years we have evaluated other RMM tools, but have found that N-Central is a competitive product and in most cases is setting the standard for RMM tools. Now since N-Able is part of SolarWinds, N-Central has remained a valuable tool that has seen some very cool enhancements.

As a novice to the MSP world N-able gave me the tools to make a successful start. We have been using the system for a year and just renewed our licensing tripling our original license levels. I could have used some help on the business side marketing these new services to my existing client base which might have made the transition happen more quickly and smoothly. I found the on-boarding schedule of 5 1hr. sessions helpful in exposing me to the extent of N-Central's capabilities. Support has been probably the weakest attribute of this organization and we hope that N-able follows through on their promise to improve this part of their business. I recommended any consultant or organization still doing break fix to look at this software.

I have used this product for over a year. Not what I had hoped it to be. We just moved from the cloud option to on premise, and over 2 weeks and we still can't get the report manager installed and working. It takes 6-8hrs before they get back with us. Looking for other RMM now to replace N-Central.
Karl Backs

Nable (now backed by solarwinds) understands the manage it services business. They understand the business side as well as the technical side. As a user who came from 2 other platforms, we think we found a home.
Asset management, AV, patch management has greatly improved, and they are only dumping more research and development into the product. in 2015, they grew and support did suffer, but they have made a tremendous effort in improving it.

They listen to their partners and do the best to accommodate everything they can. I would recommend this product to other MSPs.