Having Alert Central as a virtual appliance distribution makes debugging issues more difficult. I am having an issue importing AD users and groups. I am able to use AD with Solarwinds / Orion with no trouble.
If Alert Central was a Windows distro, I could use the many tools I have available to confirm that I can get to AD properly. I could easily import a certificate to use secure LDAP / TLS. I could more easily look at logs instead of creating a log bundle, downloading it, unzipping and untarring it.
All of my other Solarwinds stuff is Windows-based. Why go a different direction now?
I have some *nix skills. I'm not terribly comfortable with an appliance that locks me out of root access. It makes me less likely to implement AC as a prod tool and some day be willing to *pay* for it.