It's priceless, because I had senior engineers at the telco crawl around for upwards of a year-and-a-half, at their expense. I can't even imagine the hundreds and hundreds of hours that they spent, whereas we put tools in place and it was instant.

The only thing I asked was that the telco get trained up simultaneously, because they didn't have this toolset in their purview. I said, "We'll get this thing done, but I need you with your multiple CCIE capabilities to pay attention, because this is really such a sophisticated tool that it's not for just a standard network admin." We have Pro Services to get us through any gaps that we may have, but I needed the telco to understand it so my CSO wouldn't come back and say, "Well, I understand SolarWinds, but I don't know if I believe this. Why do we have it?" I said, "You don't understand. Our telco just gifted us $50,000 worth of equipment, and it wasn't because they're into giving things for free. I pointed out, without a shadow of a doubt, that their equipment didn't have enough horsepower to run what we needed to run." It starts there and it continues.

This solution has helped to improve the interaction between our network, datacenter, and application teams. I have used other tools, but this tool can pinpoint the root cause of my application or network issue in the majority of the cases. So, it helps different divisions or groups in the IT department to troubleshoot together and get an issue resolved. This tool helps a lot in our day-to-day networking application and IT operations.

This solution has helped to optimize productivity or minimize downtime. It helps me do my job as a network engineer. I need it to troubleshoot. Every time people say, "Oh, my applications not working," usually people will start complaining about the network first. Now, I have a tool to show them whether it's a network issue or not. It is a very important tool to improve the efficiency of the entire IT team. 

In the past, when we didn't have this tool, people would start looking at all sort of things. After half day, they don't even know what's really causing the issue. They can be guessing all day long. Now, with this tool, the first thing that I do would be to go into it. I take a look whether my circuit had an issue within the last five minutes. Then, I look at the PVX, and whether it's the application that has any issues. It will tell me, because if there's an issue, e.g., you will see a spike on the latency or timeouts. Therefore, it will tell me which components or data flow is causing the issue, e.g., which data flow is showing abnormal activity. It's tremendous, because previously supporting an issue would take hours, where now it'll take minutes. That's the difference.

Mostly, the solution pays for itself. The active monitoring monitors service provide circuits. In many cases, a service provider has an SLA associated with each circuit they sell you. For example, if for my circuit is down for a day, I can be refunded for 50 percent of the cost of the month. Therefore, if you have a circuit that is frequently having an issue with this tool, you can show the service provider and they can refund you. Though, your goal is not to get a monthly refund. 

It's not that expensive of a solution and produces tremendous value. It has a great value proposition and will save you time. Same with the IT team's time, and time is money. It's a great investment.

Our organization has saved money by using Skylight. While I can't say how much, it has probably saved us a few servers that we would have bought simply because we wouldn't have known of some badly configured procedures. 

We've seen ROI in terms of time. Time is money.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to solving network issues and problems quickly. So, it comes down to engineering time and return on the investment.

The solution is for quality, not to reduce money.

We have yet to develop a business case, so ROI is not a primary consideration.

It has clearly saved us money. For example, when we have a problem with an external application and we meet with the distributor of the application, they will say, "Okay, the problem is the performance of the server." The distributor will suggest we get a new server with more capacity, more disk, more memory, more everything. We can prove, with Skylight, that the problem is not on the server. We can prove that the problem is not on the network. We can prove that the problem is due to the database's structure. When we put the diagram in front of the distributor he says, "Ahh. Okay." And the database administrator can say, "Okay. Just add an index here, an index here," and after that, the product is good to go. So we have saved a lot of money there.

Before we had Skylight's analysis, the people who use the application would spend a lot of time in the application and would lose a lot of time waiting for it. After we proved that the problem is the application, and after fixing the problem, its speed improved a lot.

It's difficult to quantify the money we have saved with it, because it's money for a server, it's money for the time of the people involved with the application, it's money for the time of our networker equipment, etc.

It may have saved us money but it's difficult to quantify. But if we are able to demonstrate that we can identify where a problem is, that's already something positive. Before, we struggled a lot to say, "Okay, the problem is on the database or the problem is with the application server." But thanks to Skylight, we can say, "Okay, the problem is there," and we can investigate more within that specific block.

The solution is worst the money. We have received a good ROI. If did not receive a good ROI we would not have been using it for 10 years.

It is difficult to evaluate, but what is certain is that the solution saves precious time in analyzing our slowness problems.

I didn’t really know about that, but I think it is an essential tool, it enables us to know what is going on our network at anytime, and it saves us several men/days spent on analyzing what is happening when faced with some apps slowing down for instance…For that reason alone, I really think it’s cost-effective.

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