"Ode to SolarWinds" is what happens when product love goes unrestrained

Jason “Jed” Krisch, a SolarWinds customer, felt so strongly about SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM), that he decided to write a poem about it. The poem was posted on thwack, SolarWinds community for IT professionals.

The poem:

Nodes a-plenty, some up, and some down
Directors, managers, all with a frown.
We needed help, we needed a tool
We needed less complexity and didn’t have time for school.

We had tried homegrown, Tivoli® , SCOM® , and NetIQ®
then from our Network Engineers, we discovered you!
Within three weeks and at 1/4 of the cost,
All 983 servers were green and SCOM® had LOST.

No more host-based agents eating up our procs,
no more false positives, zombies, or mystery locks.
Just green (sometimes yellow) balls of joy
and more time and resources to upgrade and deploy.

We dove in deep with a little SQL, perl, and PHP
and our patches, EPO, and HPSIM status we now can see…
…all in one tool, a “single pane of glass”
we are finally proactive and ahead of the class.

We went deeper and scripted for Service Manager (by HP®)
now those nodes are registered in our CMDB.
Alerts are now tickets in our service desk app
then we moved on to real-time Google® Maps!

A node detail will show you location – and street view (!)
one small click will create driving directions for you.
The servers are all happy and so are the staff
so now we can move on and talk about APPS!

Within minutes we were monitoring Exchange and AD
Add in Citrix® , SQL, IIS, and TMG!
Monitors that took days in SCOM to create
are ready in minutes and reporting state.

Custom monitors and pollers are truly a snap -
click three more times and share them on thwack!
2,796 applications monitored and healthy
again we are proactive, now quiet and stealthy.

When other teams say “our app is slow at three each day”
We hand them a 6 month performance report and send them on their way.
With APM we truly (and finally!) have moved ahead of the game
our view into systems will never be the same.

We are now spoiled and privileged and perhaps even brag
of the power of the tools in our IT bag.
A happy customer, yes, I most certainly am
and will be even more so when we upgrade to SAM!