I think care and management of the tools is critical, though it can be difficult to do with the workload involved. At my previous company, when we brought monitoring in-house in 2011, I was involved in the implementation, and had sole responsibility for administration after go-live. I never had Solarwinds training of any sort, and had to get up to speed quickly. About a half year after implementing, I wanted to install NCM, but the newest version at the time required an upgrade of NPM as well as each additional poller (we had 2). I was really worried about this, because we relied on our monitoring environment a great deal. I worked with Solarwinds support, who were fantastic, and got the environment upgraded without a hitch. However, it was a fairly daunting task and took quite a bit of planning and change control. After that upgrade, there came times that I wanted to upgrade, but never really had the time to do so, though I was planning it when I left the company a few weeks ago.
What compounded my efforts were the fact that I managed the Solarwinds environment which consisted of 3 actual products (Solarwinds, Attention for alert escalations and structure, and CDyne for SMS and Phone delivery) as well as the Symantec Endpoint Protection environment, two mobile disk encryption solutions (Symantec and Sophos), the WSUS patching environment, and barcode scanning devices, for a company that consisted of about 4000 computers (about a 1500/2500 laptop/desktop ratio) and about 500 servers in 40+ sites in all major regions of the world. Most days (and many nights) I felt like I was just spinning my wheels and jumping from fire to fire. Keeping everything upgraded was nearly impossible, though I definitely saw the need.
Where I am at now, it seems that will not be the case. Yes, I will be busy, but nowhere near what I was. Solarwinds reponsibility will be broken up amongst team members with overlap, and I do have the endpoint environment to maintain, but nothing else as yet. I have already been using newer versions of Solarwinds than I was accustomed to, and see that I was missing out on improvements.