SolarWinds Review

1. What industry is your company in? I work for the largest hospitality company in the world, Marriott INTL.
2. How large is your IT shop? (Small (1-250 elements); Medium (251 – 2000 elements); Large (2001 to 10000 elements); Extra-large (greater than 10,000 elements) Our local IT shop is small but we have a large group globally.
3. Which SolarWinds product are you writing this review for? Orion Network Performance Monitoring
4. What problem were you trying to solve when you purchased?  We were looking at our network in small pieces, not as a whole.  We were reacting to failures instead of being proactive and identifying failures before they start to have an impact on users.  We needed to find a way to get in front of network issues to provide better service to our customers and end users.
5. Did you consider options other than SolarWinds? Who?  Initial research pointed us directly at SolarWinds and there was no other network monitoring software that seemed worth looking into.
6. How are you using the product and what benefits have you seen? We are using this product to monitor all of our contact sites as a broad as the entire network as a whole globally to ensure users have a solid connection to the applications they need to service the customers.  Additionally, we are monitoring down to granular info such as local port groups and nodes. A big benefit is that we are catching network failures before they become an issue that impacts end users.  Before SolarWinds we were reacting to reports of failures from end users, now we are being alerted to issues and fixing them before they cause problems for our users and impact the level of service they provide to our customers.