AUSTIN, TX--(Marketwire - Mar 6, 2013) - SolarWinds (NYSE: [ SWI ]), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced the company's first full-featured free product, [ SolarWinds Alert Central ]. Designed to help simplify IT alert management, SolarWinds Alert Central helps alleviate a pain felt by the majority of IT professionals.

According to a recent SolarWinds [ survey ]* of over 150 IT professionals, IT pros need an easy-to-use, reliable alert management solution:

• Over 73 percent of survey respondents said alert management was a real pain in their organization.
• 65 percent said the methods they are currently using to manage on-call scheduling were "somewhat" or "not at all" effective.
• 75 percent of respondents said they get alerts that are not their problem to deal with at least once a month, while 50 percent of respondents said this happens at least once a week.
• Getting alerts to the right people in a timely manner was listed as a major concern by many respondents.

"For most IT teams, alert management is a manual and tedious process involving spreadsheets, shared calendars, pagers and phones to manage alerts," said Sanjay Castelino, VP and market leader, SolarWinds. "These methods ultimately rely on individuals to escalate issues in a timely fashion, which gives way to human error and takes up unnecessary time. Nobody likes being woken up in the middle of the night for a problem that's not theirs, or finding out that a problem that should have been escalated never got the attention it needed."

With SolarWinds Alert Central, IT pros can now centralize multi-system IT alerts in a single, consolidated view, give team members access to a scheduling calendar, escalate alerts automatically and enable IT personnel to respond from their computers or mobile devices with or without VPN access all for free.

"We currently use a SharePoint calendar to keep track of who is on-call for our various teams. While this works okay, the calendar really serves no other purpose than a reference point for people that need to get in touch with the on-call person," said Randy Brown, network administrator, Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. "Having the ability to automatically route alerts to the appropriate on-call person and escalate as necessary is a huge step in the right direction for us. SolarWinds Alert Central will give us a streamlined on-call management system combined with advanced alert routing and escalation."

SolarWinds Alert Central highlights

• Offers IT alert management access to unlimited users, teams
• Consolidates alerts from multiple IT systems
• Manages on-call scheduling for multiple teams
• Escalates alerts automatically according to customizable rules
• Integrates with virtually any IT management product that sends alerts
• Sends alerts by email or text, user may respond with or without VPN access
• Provides a weekly statistical and performance data report for each user or team, including open and closed alerts, time to close, and more
• Completely free with no registration required

IT pros looking for information focused on IT alert management can visit the SolarWinds IT professional community's thwack space, Alert Central, to collaborate with peers and industry experts, ask questions, troubleshoot issues and request future features.

Additional Resources
Video: [ Alert Central Overview: Multi-system IT Alert Management ]
Video: [ IT Alert Management can be a Real Pain: Fix it Free with Alert Central ]
Whiteboard blog: [ Alert Management - A Pain for Many Organizations ]

Pricing and Availability
SolarWinds Alert Central is available now for free with no registration required on the SolarWinds website.

*The SolarWinds survey was conducted from December 18 through December 31, 2012 via an online survey service, resulting in over 150 survey responses. SolarWinds awarded one (1) winner a $100 Amazon® gift card with an approximate retail value of $100.

About SolarWinds
SolarWinds (NYSE: [ SWI ]) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses. In all of our market areas, our approach is consistent. We focus exclusively on IT Pros and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. SolarWinds delivers on this commitment with unexpected simplicity through products that are easy to find, buy, use and maintain while providing the power to address any IT management problem on any scale. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our online community, [ thwack ], to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at [ http://www.solarwinds.com/ ].

SolarWinds, SolarWinds.com and thwack are registered trademarks of SolarWinds. All other company and product names mentioned are used only for identification purposes and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.