SolarWinds NPM Reviews

We have a client who is a global logistics company, and we use NPM to manage their devices globally. These devices are network and network security devices. 

We take configuration backups and have predefined templates that we push. We also use NPM for reporting purposes, network configuration comparisons, firmware upgrades, and more. There are many use cases.

The availability and reachability of the CIs are valuable. Since it works on SNMP, it collects a lot of data from the CIs, meaning the devices. 

It also confirms device availability uptime and provides information on errors, basic configurations, snapshots, CPU and memory utilization, and the overall health of your CI. 

It gives you a picture without needing to directly access the CI. It also maintains historical data, so you can go back and see the performance and health of the device over time.

The alerting system in SolarWinds NPM aids in proactive network management. Once you have the basic data available, you can tweak it based on your standard threshold. 

You can use the standard threshold defined by SolarWinds, which is globally accepted, or you can customize them. Based on these thresholds, you can configure alerts that are triggered when the threshold is hit. 

For example, CPU or memory utilization, or the bandwidth of a particular link. The alerting mechanism continuously monitors and samples data, and based on that, generates alerts for users who can proactively act on them and mitigate the problem.

AI-driven initiatives:

We are planning to switch to SolarWinds' new licensing model called the observability layer, where you only need to buy a single license. We are working on that and looking for stakeholder justification for the cost before implementing it. I am aware of the AI functionality that SolarWinds offers. Recently, we migrated our on-premises SolarWinds solution to the Azure cloud.

Challenges with migration:

It was challenging because it was a ten-year-old system. We had to figure out a different approach when I was onboarded. There was also no firmware upgrade done, so we couldn't just do a simple migration. We had to build a completely new setup and then migrate the database. 

However, it wasn't a big challenge because we planned it well and kept a close eye on the implementation. We completed it in three months with minimal downtime, which the client appreciated.

The resources required for the migration process depend on the approved timelines and workload. For my migration, the timelines were aggressive, and there were multiple modules, so we had to put two resources on each bundle of modules. If the workload is not as heavy and the timelines are flexible, it can also be done with two resources working continuously.

I have worked on the implementation and report generation for our customers with the SolarWinds NPM tool. As a partner for SolarWinds, our customers use NPM for monitoring device status, utilization of interfaces, and CPU memory.

SolarWinds is user-friendly with a manageable console. It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable. Despite not having any special features beyond what a typical NMS offers, it still provides comprehensive network insights.

I use SolarWinds for our end-user performance monitoring. We have integrated it within this infrastructure.

For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network.

We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage.

There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring.

It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine.

So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.

Our company uses the solution to monitor NPM for 100 large accounts that typically have 40,000 interfaces. 

Basic monitoring includes CPU memory, errors, and interfaces. Advanced monitoring includes F5 load balancers, in-depth tunnels, and AP alarms. 

We also monitor CM for backup parts and integrate monitoring with Azure. 

The solution's interface is very user friendly and easy to navigate. We provide customers with access and they have no issues learning and exploring the solution. 

Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization. 

The solution always includes new features in their releases. 

SolarWinds NPM is a tool for monitoring our network, given our extensive network infrastructure with approximately 250 sites nationwide. It provides crucial visibility into each site's health, availability, and performance status. Without this solution, effectively monitoring and managing our network infrastructure would be challenging.

SolarWinds NPM reduces operational costs by providing visibility into network operations. Without such visibility, there's a risk of losing financial transactions or experiencing downtime, which end users can report as service outages. 

Deploying SolarWinds has enabled us to stay proactive; we can quickly identify issues and prevent service impacts. For instance, if a node goes down, we can shift services to another node, significantly reducing service outages. SolarWinds alerts us to network issues promptly, allowing us to manage and resolve them before they affect our services.

An easy-to-use interface for both admins and users is key. Adoption of any product can be constrained by a UI that is neither intuitive nor visually engaging. The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products.

We used a monitoring platform from an enterprise vendor that was so complex to manage that we struggled even to deliver the base infrastructure monitoring services. This is not a unique position as many IT departments manage by the mantra of "Nobody was ever fired for recommending [insert enterprise vendor here]".

In a few short years, SolarWinds has empowered us to provide robust infrastructure monitoring, including a converged view of our servers, both the physical and virtual servers, and the storage and application environments.

SolarWinds NPM is used for monitoring different solutions like database, infrastructure, and network performance. Each of these requires separate solutions, and SolarWinds provides modular options for monitoring.

Based on my experiences, SolarWinds NPM can handle large network infrastructures owing to its scalability offering despite its complexity.

Our installation is on-premises on a virtual machine. When we purchased NPM I was particularly interested in the features of Orion. We were going through a maturation process propagating the monitoring of applications throughout the server policy here at the university. It was more to monitor various applications that are primarily used for individual schools. For example, we have the school public health, and we have the school of nursing and they have different needs. You have all these applications like Banner and Canvas and other web-based applications that get used by particular areas. We are working with one application now for COVID-19. There is an application that has been spawned from that, but mostly our monitoring is for up/downtime, space, memory, availability, and those types of things critical for performance analysis. We are just now getting more into monitoring databases and a broader scope of applications as well.  

What I am mostly referring to is not the whole Network Performance Monitor suite. This is the actual operations monitoring piece of it. We have the network and we are responsible for set up and monitoring of those particular tools.  

We identified the five areas that we wanted to have be our key performers, like memory utilization, CPU utilization, and those core components. Just the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they were physical or virtual.