What is THWACK?

You may have (hopefully) noticed the THWACK link in my author profile on the left there, and wondered what’s that? I mean, sure, everyone knows about email, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub and StackOverflow, but THWACK?

The TL;DR version: THWACK is the user community for Solarwinds (we’ll get to who they are in just a minute.)

A more detailed version from their site is:

Simply put, THWACK connects you with more than 130,000 IT professionals and community members, who’ve contributed to help us make superior products, provide educational IT content, and, most importantly, help IT professionals do their jobs better. Here we put you in direct contact with the people who manage and develop our products. THWACK is a place where you have a say in the direction of those products, and where you get support and answers, on the fly, without having to pick up the phone. Crazy, huh?

Crazy indeed.

Obviously, it’s most useful for those who are (or are planning to be) Solarwinds customers, but it still has value for other IT pros. If nothing else, there are lots of opportunities to collect points to redeem for swag.

So who/what is this “Solarwinds” anyway?

I told you we’d get to them in a minute.

The short version is that they’re a company that develops software products for IT pros. The largest piece of the pie is their Orion suite, which is a group of web-based products that integrate together and provide things like:

• device monitoring (up-time, resource usage, hardware status)
• application/service monitoring
• network device configuration management
• IP address/DNS/DHCP management
• user device mapping
• network traffic analysis (NetFLOW and NBAR)
• Log and Event Management
• VoIP and QoS monitoring
• storage monitoring/management
• virtualization monitoring/management
• database performance management/monitoring
• patch management
• and more!

A more detailed “who we are” is on their website: Link

What’s great about them

I’ve been a user of Solarwinds products since 2009, and a member of Thwack since late that same year. During that time we’ve added several of their products to our environment, and have seen a lot of changes and enhancements to the suite.

I’ve seen first-hand (and in some cases been directly involved in) them making changes/fixes to their products based on user requests and feedback. They have opportunities for those interested to participate in user studies and feedback sessions while new versions/products are still in development.

They also make release candidate versions of new releases available in advance of GA, and most importantly, those release candidates are fully supported in production.

The community (THWACK) is pretty active, and employees (including product managers and engineers) are frequent posters and active. One of the major benefits of this is that there are a lot of community created and contributed templates, reports, SNMP pollers, etc, in addition to all of the out of the box ones.

So to wrap it all up , Solarwinds makes good, solid products, and they know who their target market/audience is (IT pros). This shows in their interactions, and most especially in their community (THWACK). So if you’re in IT pro, especially one interested in or already using Solarwinds tools (even the free ones), come join us and check it out!