SolarWinds NPM Reviews

We've been using SolarWinds for our network monitoring. It's basic advanced network monitoring, up-down of Rogers switches, as well as metrics, latency, wireless metrics, where users are, errors on interfaces, route cables, and things of that nature. We're just pulling as much data from our network devices as possible to present that in an easy pane of glass.

I find the NetPath to be very valuable. It visualizes that traceroute that you can share with anyone in the business. For example, when they say, "Hey, what's going on? The network's slow because my application or my server's having issues" you can show them this nice graph that visualizes where there may be congestion or if there isn't any congestion at all.

Its initial setup is simple. 

So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions.

Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital.

There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.

We've been using the solution for about three years. 

The stability is fantastic. We haven't personally had any issues other than a few gripes about the lack of information. However, as far as it being stable, for me, it's been pretty solid.

It's possible to scale, however, it comes at a cost. You have to go through them and there's a whole nother license piece that costs a large lump sum to grow your polers to start importing more if your initial server is getting towards a limit. It's scalable, with the caveat of it's going to cost you.

We have about ten to 20 users. It's a mix of network analysts, CIS admins, storage administrators, and application administrators.

We do not plan to increase usage at the moment, mainly as we're pretty much utilizing it as much as we need to, however, it is pretty much monitoring our entire environment or maybe couple hundred switches, some routers, couple hundred servers, and applications and things like that. We pretty much monitor our whole environment and our environment's not really growing anymore. We're pretty good right now.

Technical support is pretty good. In the few cases we have reached out for any support, they've been pretty responsive. Also, their online resources and knowledge bases are very extensive as well.

Positive

We actually didn't use anything before this product.

The implementation process is pretty straightforward. They give you an MSI and once you have your servers and databases set up, it's just a couple of clicks and it's set up.

For overall importing of everything may have taken a couple of weeks to have things up and running due to how our organization is structured and how we can gather information to pull into SolarWinds and our implementation strategy. For example,  who set up servers and applications. We start getting with the appropriate aims to get whatever monitor or whatever polling method we need, whether it was S and NP strings or accounts for any server monitoring with administrative access or whatnot. Then we look at the network and do those automatic scans from there. Once we start pulling in that information, we start actually organizing all the nodes in there to properly alert and monitor. It takes maybe a month or so to get it to a baseline.

For deployment and maintenance, honestly, it's just me by myself doing it. It would be easier with a few more people.

The setup was done in-house. We did not use any third party, like an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

As far as assisting in being proactive in our network, it's been a great help in helping us maintain a healthy environment and being proactive and making sure things are up to date and upgraded.

The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing.

There weren't any other options were evaluated. We saw SolarWinds and noted our other sister companies use that. We just went with it to be standardized within our entire conglomerate.

We are a customer and end-user.

I would definitely advise others to do their homework. There are a lot of different modules you can buy with different licensing. You need to understand what you're looking to monitor, and what you're trying to present to your business, and then do the homework on the solution itself and see how that fits your needs before just going and buying it or even talking to a sales representative.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's pretty good at its job. I haven't really delved into too many other things. I've tried to look at other tools recently and in my opinion, solutions like Nagios or Zabbix aren't the best. I haven't really looked into other things like Datadog or LogicMonitor yet, however, I'd say this solution is kind of a leader in the pack for what it's doing. Still, there's definitely room for improvement.

If there's a connectivity issue, the packets have dropped, or the traffic is going through any of the routers, you can see where that is just stuck.

The individual’s bandwidth we do not know. For monitoring purposes, we can find the exact amounts through this NPM, Network Performance Monitor, and Network Traffic Analyzer. We can see who is using how much bandwidth and where the traffic is stuck. It provides visibility to show what the issue is in our network.

The solution is very good. Previously, in the solution, there was no more option for customizing the reports and the alerts. However, they’ve improved. Now, in the last two years, since 2021, they have had a new release, a new version, and there are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports. 

Over the last couple of years, they have introduced features like NetPath and PerfStack. That is very helpful for any of the admins to troubleshoot issues to know precisely what is going on in nodes.

If we go for the NT license, then we have to purchase the NPM, Network Performance Monitor. That is a dependency. In all of the SolarWinds products now, there are only these products. For example, Net Traffic Analyzer is a product. If we go for the licensing, then we have to purchase a Network Performance Monitor. There's dependency there. If they could combine everything into one product, that would be very helpful.

The NT is the enhanced version of the NPM. They have not put a license on the different monitors of the NT. However, they have to include in the same manner in the NPM itself.

For NetPath services, right now, we have to manually install the events in the nodes. If there was something from the console side, we could post the event to the nodes. If there was automation, that would be helpful. Already there's automation for other types of things or in other features, like for communication of the nodes. However, for the NetPath feature, if we could automatically move the event from the console side to the application side, that would be a great feature.

I’ve been using the solution for the last five years.

It’s stable.

In 2020, as most people know, there was an attack on SolarWinds. At that time, there was a problem. However, in 2021, everything was good. If it wasn’t, we would have been looking for another solution. Everything has been stabilized.

We are using one in five total devices connected to that SolarWinds. We are using an AP, Additional Polling engine that will scale the solution. Scalability is there.

Only the licensing part is different. We have to purchase more licenses on that part. Currently, we are monitoring 12,000 nodes. If we want to go to the 13,000 nodes, then we have to purchase one additional license, the Additional Polling license.

We have about 50 people using the solution. They are system admins. In the North, the solution is used vastly. In the South, the solution is used by the different departments. I'm not part of the South. I'm part of the North.

We do have plans to increase usage.

For L2 or L1 problems, we are giving the support. For the L3 level, if the issue is beyond our reach, then we contact the support team from Solarwinds.

We have an online number. We have to call that number, and we’ll get support. They will support you, for example, if the system is down. Otherwise, you can open a support ticket, and they will help.

Overall, the support is good.

Now we are using Tripwire also for some of our customers. It is also good.

I am not using any other products. However, there are some solutions that are free tools.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have to just go to NetPath and just connect to the database. Once the connection is established to the database, then we will be up on both devices. There are a lot of options for onboarding the devices. It is easy. Anyone can do it.

There's an admin guide. There's a very helpful guide that SolarWinds has provided on their customer portal. There are training options too. You are well prepared.

The deployment took two to three hours to install the product and five to six hours for the entire deployment. It’s pretty fast if you have a good strategy.

While one person is enough to deploy or manage the solution, it would depend on how many devices you are dealing with.

If you are going to monitor 2,000 devices, one person is enough. If you're going to monitor a large number of devices, you might need two managers for all devices.

We are the third-party vendor for the bank. We deploy the solution, and we support them. We provide professional services as well.

The basic ROI is the fact that the client is happy, and that’s all that matters.

I’m only a technical person. I don’t have access to the pricing.

Extra costs come under support and maintenance. Obviously, we always consider support and maintenance under the same licensing cost. They'll only provide one year of support and maintenance.

We had to go for the SolarWinds. We are not able to work with any other solution.

Once the solution is implemented, we'll populate whatever the dashboard is. However, some of the things will not populate. There is a need for services there. We can use the NetPath services feature. We can export that feature to the dashboard. However, it will be easy for any of the system admin to troubleshoot the issue.

I’d rate the solution ten out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM is a good tool. It's a strong monitoring tool that we use to monitor our network devices, routers, and switches.

I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is.

There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NPM. One is that their dashboard needs to be friendlier. We want them to take their dashboard to another level. For example: with our databases, we develop services and we want to put those on the dashboard, while making them more visual. This would be good to improve in the tool.

The integration of SolarWinds NPM with other tools is also another area for improvement. For example, we'd like to have the ability to manage the unit with other tools, because we need to have better control to manage the alerts. How can you load that capacity with only that kind of information?

We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure. You have to do a test, find what needs to be improved, then make the corrections on SolarWinds NPM. You have to be very attentive when using the tool, but it's an area to improve not just in SolarWinds NPM, but for any tool.

I've been using SolarWinds NPM for a year and a half.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable tool.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable tool. My team likes working with it because they really like its scalability.

The technical support for SolarWinds NPM is very good. I'm rating their support five out of five.

The initial setup for SolarWinds NPM was easy. I didn't do the configuration, but I watched our installer very closely, and he installed the tool quickly. For example: if you have a new module or a new product, you can do the installation very quickly.

The deployment of SolarWinds NPM was done in-house.

We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices.

We have the SolarWinds NTA (NetFlow Traffic Analyzer), and we also use another solution from SolarWinds: the SolarWinds SAM to monitor some on-premise servers. It also monitors the GPU, memory, the availability status and processes. We are now monitoring databases, particularly Oracle databases, to check their status and also check internal information. We detect all this information and equip our system so that it has the information, and we're doing it manually because that doesn't happen automatically with SolarWinds.

We have 30 people who use SolarWinds NPM and they're part of the operations, network, and infrastructure teams that do the diagnostics when something is wrong. We also have team leaders and some managers that watch the data in real time, plus the configuration and monitoring teams. We have 2 engineers responsible for the deployment and maintenance of the tool.

As for plans of increasing our usage of SolarWinds NPM, we've bought more modules recently, and we keep using the tool to monitor our network and infrastructure, together with other tools. For example: we have some very practical tools that our monitoring team uses to make diagnostic alerts such as McAfee. At the moment, our main tool is SolarWinds NPM, and we keep using it, especially for monitoring cloud devices. This is very important to our organization because we've migrated to the cloud. If you're doing cloud migration, you have to picture how you can monitor devices on the cloud.

I would recommend SolarWinds APM to others looking into using it. We're using a lot of it. We also have the SolarWinds SAM, and I would recommend it for monitoring databases and servers, and you have to do a little development, but it's manageable. I would also recommend SolarWinds NPM because from experience, it's able to do its job.

My rating for SolarWinds NPM is nine out of ten.

We use SolarWinds as a monitoring platform.

It monitors all of our network gears for up-down status, for the most part. We can also see utilization being high at a given location.

The alerting has been the biggest aspect we appreciate. In regards to utilization, it can be proactive in regards to addressing situations before some cases arise before the users even see them.

The initial setup is simple.

It integrates really well with the Cisco platform. We are a Cisco shop. I don't know how well it's going to integrate with us moving to Aruba or going with other vendor hardware, how well it's going to integrate, I guess we'll find out.

It is scalable.

Technical support is helpful.

The stability is good. 

The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation. There's not a way to turn me off from alerts easily.

There really hasn't been anything that we've needed that it hasn't been able to provide. 

I've used the solution for at least 17 years. 

The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We've got about nine different Sys admins that use it on a day-to-day basis, at different locations, to check on different things.

Contact support was great. They're very knowledgeable. They knew what we needed, once we explained our problem. In some cases, they helped us figure out a different solution than what we were looking at. They knew the product pretty well for everybody that we've dealt with.

Positive

We didn't use a different solution. That's what was here when I started 17 years ago and that's what we've stayed with.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We just went through a complete redeployment part of upgrading to the latest and greatest as we upgraded servers and databases and the whole nine yards. We just simply did a fresh install. It was pretty easy.

It probably took us about a couple of days. We had to go back in and once we re-added the location, we had to go back and tweak what we wanted to monitor, and that kind of stuff. We didn't simply just do a migration. It was a little bit of doing the network re-discovery and then going in and tweaking the individual locations. 

The one thing we did migrate over was the alerts. We didn't have to recreate alerts from scratch, however, it took us a while. We've got 400-plus devices that we monitor. It took a little while to get all of the devices back in the way they originally were.

We did everything in-house. We did not use consultants or integrators. 

I don't know anything about pricing. It's not an aspect I deal with.

We deal directly with Solarwinds. 

We have been keeping the solution updated. 

I would recommend the solution. A lot of our colleagues use it and we like the way it works. I'd rate it ten out of ten. 

I'd advise potential new users to give it a good rundown and see if it really fits what they need. Don't just try it with one or two things. Do the 30-day evaluation. I have folks that have used it and try to find some way to break it really. Load it up the way that you want to run it and actually take time to dig down into it. So far, there hasn't been anything that it hasn't been able to do for us. However, it's designed for that Cisco environment and that's what we've always been. I can't really talk about it outside of the box.

We have been making use of the most recent version.

We use it for monitoring our uplink ports on our routers and switches. We also use it to monitor our servers and we utilize its disc space and processor memory. We do the same thing for the routers and switches.

An improvement the solution has brought to our organization is that it enables us to track down what I call brown outs in a multi-host, multi-guest virtual environment. It allows us to see why and when this occurred and to know what else was transpiring at the time that we had received an end-user complaint of the system running slowly. 

As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service. 

The solution should make things easier to set up on a node by node basis. When turning on the network scanning to try to set up nodes, it has a tendency to grab everything in site, every port on a firewall, for example. One should have the option of picking through these before they're automatically added, so that there should be no need to go through them manually and delete them. The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work. Once the nodes have been added, there is a need to go in and delete them manually. 

I cannot think of additional improvements that are worth mentioning. The solution does a pretty good job all around. 

We have been using some version of SolarWinds for 20 years.

The solution is very stable. We don't see many outages of the actual platform. The sole exception would concern us taking a process in which we would be restarting it on a monthly basis. 

The solution is very scalable. I've never seen a problem with this.

I don't have any plans to increase the usage in the future. I would not say that the solution is being extensively used, as we're not necessarily monitoring everything that we could, there being no need for some of this in our environment. I would make use of the performance monitor should I wish to dive deeper into a running system for detailed analysis.

As I have been using the solution for so long, I have not had any need for technical support. 

I have used other products prior to SolarWinds NPM. I switched because the solution provides a consolidated view of everything. 

A moderate level of knowledge of the product's use is required for installation. 

The initial installation occurred a long time ago. While, for me, this process would not take long, somebody who is new and who has never used the solution may take a day or two to do installation and to become fully up to speed of what is being added, the reason for doing so and how the solution should be configured. 

Installation is not easy for a person who lacks the requisite experience. 

I did the integration myself. 

I renewed the licenses around two-and-a-half to three years ago and do not have the relevant numbers off the top of my head. 

I would estimate there are three insfrastructure managers, with myself as the head of the IT department. There is at least one other technician working on the wide area, local area network.

My advice to others is to add their nodes manually, not to let the network discovery and auto ad run.

I rate SolarWinds NPM as an eight out of ten. 

My team uses SolarWinds to do some of the network monitoring. I look at the reports.

One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives.

False positives or positive falses are a concern because you want to be as accurate as possible and get them down to zero, which is what you want on your network. Once a week with the reports there, is always a false positive or vice versa where it's showing that it's up and really it's down.

We are looking at how we can overcome that issue. Is it a work issue, or does it come from the tool itself? It will show that something is down when it's up and every once in a while if something is down it shows that it is still up.

We would like to be able to pull information from the vendor's OEM. It would be helpful to have crosswalks or if it could have a running list that goes out of models, software, and it can pull out the end of life, or end of service life dates. Also to suggest the recommend current version to use, that way you can do the comparisons without having to do a manual search. That would be beneficial.

Similar to other tools, I would also like to see a graphical map of your network that highlight in green, red, or yellow, and if you see a specific device you can click on it and it will help you drill down on the details of that device.

There are other things that it should be able to do, such as when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure and my server, and there are issues developing like the circuits degrading or latency is increasing it should give you a notification to know what is going on, rather waiting for the device to go down which at that point it would be too late. You want to be able to do proactive monitoring and reaction.

We want to get to a monitoring level where if it is monitoring the server, the CPU, or the storage level you could have presets where it will identify and give you warnings to say that you are at 70% or 80% storage capacity. This would allow you to get ahead of it before you run out. 

It would be the same for the CPU utilization and knowing if it is running 20 or 30% premiums normally or is it running at 90 or 100% and you have to add CPUs.

It could let you know if you have other tools or applications that are running too hot or if they need to be changing out that tool or is it something else.

To have something in place where it can help us to do some analysis and be proactive would be helpful.

I don't use this solution, I oversee a team who uses it.

We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM. 

We had one problem, but it wasn't a stability issue, it was a hack that occurred earlier this year that affected everyone using SolarWinds. After that, it took a bit to get it stabilized to where it is now. 

Our team that has worked with technical support hasn't had any complaints. It goes pretty well. 

I am familiar with several tools.

They will be putting NetScout on their network to look at some of the differences and to look at the pluses and minuses of each of the two tools.

I would rate SolarWinds an eight out of ten.

We're using SolarWinds NPM for server monitoring, report monitoring, and application monitoring.

I found a lot of valuable features in SolarWinds NPM, such as the customized application monitoring that allows you to customize any monitoring and script customization, and you also have the option to deploy and upgrade SolarWinds NPM online, which is very useful for my organization.

An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data.

SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed.

Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature.

I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.

I've been working with SolarWinds NPM for almost two years now.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution.

My team contacted technical support for SolarWinds NPM a lot of times. On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate support as seven because one of my cases remained open for a year without the perfect answer or resolution, though the SolarWinds development team has been working on it.

Neutral

I've previously worked with HPE and IBM, but that was for another organization. My current organization uses SolarWinds NPM.

The initial setup for SolarWinds NPM is relatively easy, and anyone can do it.

As I deployed SolarWinds NPM in a huge environment, the deployment took almost six to eight hours for fifteen servers.

We deployed SolarWinds NPM in-house.

Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay.

I'm an end-user of SolarWinds NPM.

In the organization, over a hundred people use SolarWinds NPM, with five to six administrators. The solution requires specific maintenance, mainly because it has a lot of DW issues.

My advice to people looking to start working with SolarWinds NPM is that it's the best solution for a medium-scale environment. For a large-scale environment with many requirements, such as a vast number of nodes, for example, more than twenty-five thousand, SolarWinds NPM may not be as scalable, DW-wise. If you have below fifteen thousand to fifteen thousand nodes, then it's okay to use SolarWinds NPM.

My rating for SolarWinds NPM is eight out of ten.

The SolarWinds product is easy to deploy and the product features are quite granular. We can dig deep into the infrastructure and at the data level, or we can aggregate and come higher up and look at all the trends and analysis of what it provides.

The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It is a highly scalable product. Users can use something like F5 or load balancing. That gives you failover and similar infrastructure for disaster recovery as well. It's very, very scalable and stable product.

Usually, NPM users will be fewer as they're all network engineers. The solution doesn't require hundreds of users. We have about eight to nine. However, we deploy SolarWinds with a lot of clients. If you look at our clientele and our own user base in NPM, we must have had more than 100 users on this product between clients.

Technical support is excellent. 

SolarWinds wants its partners and resellers to succeed. They give you all the support, all the training for free. It's really, really, really good.

One of the competing products for this solution is Cisco SecureX. We have used it in the past.

The setup and deployment are quite simple. 

It's straightforward, however, you need to have networking knowledge. If you have knowledge of the network, then it's straightforward. It's a great product.

On a medium-sized enterprise, for one of our clients, we deployed it in three hours.

We've got our own engineers to handle the setup. However, whether we set IP up or not all depends on the client. If they define everything properly, the delays are not with the product. The product actually answers a lot of the client's questions and helps the client determine what they should be doing.

You've got the annual license, and then you've got a perpetual license as well. The pricing is very affordable.

There is no extra cost beyond the licensing. 

It is the latest version. The latest version comes with observability as part of the package. It's SolarWinds attempt to bring all its products under one platform. We've kind of become quite an expert in the area.

We are a provider of SolarWinds. We are an MSSP and also a reseller. It depends on what the client wants. 

We want to launch it as an MSSP for SMEs, and small companies who can't really afford a full install. We just doing a SaaS model so they can deploy it at cost to SMEs.

I'd advise potential users to use the one-month free trial and get a company like us to do a proof of concept and then do the NPM, application monitoring, log monitoring, et cetera. One by one, pick up all the products and integrate them.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.