this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Honestly, both suck. Patch Manager also requires WSUS and that relationship is...rocky at best. Their (Solarwinds') support also just likes to blame everything on WSUS so if you have issues good luck getting them resolved.
Look into a real RMM. We used NinjaOne at my last job and it was solid and fairly inexpensive. Action1 may also be a good fit if you are smaller as their free tier is pretty generous.
Side note, if you are new to Solarwinds anything they will hound the ever-living fuck out of you if you so much as look at them. Even if you use a burner email they are somehow pros at tracking people down. Don't say I didn't warn you.
We are relatively small, with about 400 workstations and 40 servers or so on the network. I will check out Ninja One and Action1. I hadn't heard of either of those.
Sadly as for that other bit of advice, Solarwinds sales staff already have our info and it's true they are quite persistent. It wasn't Solarwinds, but I once contacted another vendor using a generic email account we created for that purpose and they used the domain to track down info on myself and other senior IT staff in the department and message us directly. I asked him straight up how he got our info and he told me about a service they subscribe to that specializes in providing private email addresses of staff in organizations like ours. It was pretty off putting and made me want to never do business with the company. Some sales people are really too much.
Check out Ivanti Security Controls (née Shavlik Patch Manager) as well. Or PDQ Inventory/Deploy. Both are better options.
Ivanti Security Controls is another I hadn't heard of, but we are actually using PDQ Deploy and it has proven to be a great value for us. I didn't realize Inventory included a patch management component. I will definitely check that out! Thanks.
I don't have to manage Ivanti, but using it is great! The GUI is a bit all over the place but you get used to it.
We consolidated our patch management into Qualys and dropped Ivanti Security Controls (Shavlik). I regret it. It was stupid slow but it worked so well.
I've had sales folks call me on my personal phone and one of them told me they found me on zoominfo.com. I promptly went to their site and requested a deletion.
I'm using the free Action1 plan for our servers and really like it.