SolarWinds NPM Reviews

My primary use case for this is for monitoring router switches, and using the solution to support the collection of this information for us.

It can even support Windows or monitor a Windows server, even on the application level, because they have this module called Server Application Monitor. You have WMI support. You can even monitor performance centers. You can also look at the process monitors, if it is processing or not. It's quite powerful. 

Also it supports IP SLAs, so you can have even more information from a remote site. You
can monitor something like the performance, like mid-latency and other stuff.

When you buy the product, there's a lot of things. You can configure a lot. There's some variable in the report so you can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL. 

Of course, if you have a small team and you have so many sites to monitor, then the
alerts will help you already. Let's say you're monitoring MPRs out there, you know
that the neighbor route could go down, so you know the site is already on a secondary
link instead of primary. You are aware of what's going on, or if things go down, then you
can react quickly.

I think it's a great product. It has ease of use. Just add the IP with the correct credentials or SAS and multistring, and you can already collect all that information including you have NTA, then you're going to have NetFlow. Anything that has an IP that you want to monitor up or down, they can monitor it. If you have SNMP support, they can also collect the information for you.

Also it supports IP SLAs, so you can have even more information from a remote site. You can monitor something like the performance, like mid-latency and the like. You can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible, a flexible solution. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL if you need to.

Also' maybe if SolarWinds would have something you may subscribe to that would be like a polling engine on your site, so all the reporting would go directly to SolarWinds, They could then manage the database and everything else. That would be a nice asset to have.

The only other issue I have is that sometimes when upgrading, it becomes complicated to manage the upgrade.

You sometimes lose some statistics, but if you have HA, then you have a backup that will pick up the monitoring. I think it's going in the right direction.

I only use a single instance at the moment, but I see there are some things there like HA that is quite interesting. Of course, it will cost more to support, but if the company wants it, then maybe yes.

Very seldom. I will contact them directly. Usually, the thing I notice in SolarWinds is you go to the community, it is called THWACK. I never personally contacted tech support.

It's simple. I installed it. You just look at documentation, install a database, install the server and add the NTA. They have some recommendations, a separate database, but we didn't follow them. We just set up with the same server. Yes, it's easy. It's only the upgrade from the older version to the newer version where things start to get complicated.

It's a bit tricky when you go to the cloud already. I don't know what's the right metric myself, what should you be monitoring. Then, the newer trend right now is they don't even have the concept of a virtual machine. Some deployments, they will just have containers, and a container can be on any machine that they can shoot up anytime and deploy the apps there. But, my question is: How do you monitor the performance? What metric are you going to use?

Overall, when considering a new solution, I always consider:

• Ease of use
• Ability for data collection
• Generation of alerts.

Our primary use case for this solution is for default of the stability of the network track.

If we need to plan the network, or measure our network utilization, SolarWinds enables us to do so. 

One of the best features is the reports feature. We can get an editor's report for the last five minutes, fifteen minutes, hour, month, or more. And, the correlation data that we can get from the different resources of data from routing, routers, swtitches and samples is really a benefit.

It would be nice to manage all network devces from just one single platform, instead of going to different platforms.

The solution is very stable. 

It is very scalable. For years we have not had a problem with scalability.

I am looking at other solutions, to compare. For example, I am currently looking at ManageEngine OpManager. We also looked at Zabbix

I would like to see this product becoming more flexible in the future. In addition, integration with other solutions would be helpful.

We're using it for monitoring network uptime. We were testing it out for applications and for servers, but that didn't work for us. We wanted a different solution, an end-to-end type of monitoring. We wanted to see the end-user experience.

It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network.

The ability to be able to control the network equipment.

It would be helpful if they were tied up with one of the hardware vendors so we wouldn't have so much to set up. Another feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows.

The stability is good. 

I'm part of the THWAK, a community that uses SolarWinds. They're okay. There are so many configurations there, although they didn't really apply to us.

We didn't have any network monitoring when I started with the company, and SolarWinds was already there.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor is support, onsite.

It was straightforward. You just install the application.

You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work.

SolarWinds is pretty straightforward. If you're a startup, you want to stand up a solution quickly, then SolarWinds would be good for you because it doesn't have a big learning curve to implement it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. They're pretty good but we really have pretty predominantly Cisco equipment, so Cisco would offer a better free view of the equipment right now.

Its GUI is very user-friendly. No special training is required to use this product. It is very simple to use and has rich GUI performance reports.

They should increase its accuracy rate as SolarWinds's monitoring accuracy is not good if you compare it with other tools, like NNM/ScienceLogic/Zenoss.

I have used the following versions of SolarWinds: NPM, SAM, NTA, and IPAM for two years.

SolarWinds tools are very stable.

No issues in the tools. 

It is fully depends on the costing, customer, and architect.

It is straightforward.

It fully depends on what the customer wants.

Before choosing a product, I would want to evaluate it and check all requirements. Then before implementation, clear all the customer requirements accordingly. 

I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable. The advanced alerting and notifications capabilities are helpful as well. Devices can be discovered automatically on a schedule, and grouped by vendor automatically, which makes it very easy to track down devices. The customizable dashboards and reporting are flexible and tend to come in handy as well.

SolarWinds NPM allowed the IT department to take a more proactive approach to troubleshooting, and gaining insights on device availability. We were able to use the integration with Storage Manager and Virtualization Manager to gain valuable insight into our storage and virtualization environments. We were able to readily pull reports on device availability, and other metrics, to provide to our senior management staff and external security auditors.

The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application. The SolarWinds Orion/NPM installation comes with a few Windows client application “add-ons” that would be better served if they were built into the SolarWinds NPM web application. Another area for improvement would be better integration between Solarwinds NPM and Solarwinds NCM as it seems that Solarwinds NCM installs a separate version of NPM/Orion console.

I used this product for a little over two years in two different companies. I implemented the product for the first organization I was with to gain visibility and performance monitoring for the network and servers within our data center.

Yes, there can be issues with deployment if you try to install/uninstall or re-install under different account types (i.e. Local Administrator vs. Domain Administrator). I would recommend sticking to one or the other and you won’t run into any problems.

I have never had an issue with stability or performance. I recommend following the SolarWinds documentation (which is very detailed) and you can be assured not to encounter a single issue in regards to stability.

We setup a standalone instance of SolarWinds NPM. However, SolarWinds NPM offers a couple of different HA architectures that will allow you to scale locally (within the same data center) or globally (across multiple data centers in different geographic locations).

The customer service experience was always top notch and I don’t recall ever having a bad experience. The customer support staff were friendly, courteous and always there to help you out. It was also very easy to get in touch with a technical support engineer, all who seemed very knowledgeable, within just a couple of minutes or less.

SolarWinds technical support was one of the best support departments I’ve ever dealt with. All of the technicians were very knowledgeable and technically capable. Also, when you call into their technical support number, you don’t have to jump through multiple departments to get to a technician, which is very nice and not the same with other vendors.

No, SolarWinds NPM was the first network/server monitoring product that was brought into the organization. Other network monitoring products were researched, but didn't have the feature set, didn't seem as easy to use or as robust as Solarwinds NPM.

It was very straightforward, as you basically just have to start up a Windows Server, and click through the SolarWinds NPM installation wizard before you are ready to configure. You can configure most of the basic settings using the installation wizard (i.e. the database storage location).

We implemented it using an in-house team. It should not be necessary to use a third-party team unless you are performing a massive roll (5000+ endpoints) out across multiple sites.

I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years.

We also evaluated ManageEngine OpManager and AdRem NetCrunch before deciding to purchase SolarWinds NPM in conjunction with the SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) module.

If you’re looking to get a lot more insight and visibility into your network devices, servers, applications, and other devices, along with real-time alert notifications, SolarWinds NPM should be towards the top of your list. You will be able to view devices by type or by location and poll all sorts of different data using SNMP or WMI or other methods. Out of the box, you will also receive customizable dashboards, alerting, reporting, and Active Directory integration.

• It is centralized with a dashboard.
• Global network device availability
• Availability alerts via emails and dashboard
• Alerts you when an IP conflict occurs
• Identifies the culprit by MAC address, device type, switch port, and Wi-Fi SSID
• Isolates the offender using a remote port shutdown
• Provides a centralized view on alerts, state, health and performance of the network devices.
• Real time network updates and easy to use
• Monitors packet loss, response time, and performance of devices
• In-depth traffic reports to pinpoint bandwidth issues before it affects end-users.
• Helps administrators to identify and fix bandwidth issues faster.
• Aids in capacity planning
• Auto discovery of devices

The old version was a proprietary system, had limited device visibility, no centralized SysLog, SNMP v2, had per campus monitoring system, no Wi-Fi visibility, and had limited licenses compared to the new version, which is multi-vendor, has a customized dashboard, centralized SysLog, SNMP v3, Centralized Monitoring System, Wi-Fi visibility, and Enterprise Licensing.

We need to investigate technology changes everyday.

Since 2014.

Always stable.

100%. It shows all incidents.

Yes. We still use those as backup: SCOM and Omnivista.

Straightforward, no training needed.

Yes, we did: PRTG and Observer.

The free trial is there to test the product.

Interactive network map dashboard. 

Provides instant visibility to our support team across all the networks we monitor, allowing us to zero in on the most urgent issues and easily identify root causes of problems. 

7 years. 

No

No

There are some issues when trying to monitor multiple networks with the same IP ranges. The solution for this is to purchase additional modules.

Initial setup was straightforward, but this is s big system, ans we've spent years customising and tailoring the software to work the way we like it. 

Significantly reduced support costs, and faster response times when there is an issue. 

Its not the cheapest on the market, but its certainly among the best. 

The ability to monitor multiple devices using SNMP v3 and HP Procurve SFlow as well as multiple setups for different technicians.

We only use SNMP v3 and all of our devices are HP. Not every technician needs to see everything or have control of everything.

Technicians are aware of issues and 90% of the time exactly what caused the issue. Repairs can be scheduled ahead of time and RMA’s can be filed without the technician having to drive to the site only to find out it is a bad power supply or fan in a switch or server.

The speed needs improving. If you have a very large network and are monitoring a lot of devices the dashboard responds slower.

We have been using the solution for almost four years.

We had some stability issues.

We had some scalability issues. The cost for monitoring interfaces is ridiculous.

Technical support is not exactly the fastest. You create a ticket in the morning and probably get a response by e-mail from the actual technician the following day.

We were using Intermapper previously.

The setup was straightforward.

The pricing for monitoring large amounts of equipment is not bad but when you want to monitor the actual interfaces of those devices the cost goes up.

We did not look at any alternatives. This was a government project and only one company responded to their request.

Make sure you have several servers. You must have the actual platform on a separate server from the database. You will need a separate database server for each module you activate such as flows. There is a very big footprint.