SolarWinds NPM Reviews

The two most important features are SNMP monitoring capabilities and the beautiful web interface. SNMP is all about being able to access devices, it's a must have, and every monitoring tool will have these features. Not all monitoring tools will have a beautiful graphical user interface that includes charts and graphs and reports. It's very, very easy to read and work with. This is important because we are all humans, and we want nice things. We want nice gadgets and the people who are actually using SolarWinds are engineers. They are all humans, as well, so they want nice things.

It may sound trivial and pathetic, but it's really important. One tool can do a hundred times better than the other, but if the presentation layer lacks this beauty, then people just won't use it. They will be lost and they won't use it and they won't appreciate the complete power of the tool. The elegance and the way it's implemented is very important. It's very, very important from the elegance perspective alone, not just from a usability perspective.

There are multiple examples of how SolarWinds improves how the company functions. The most obvious is that the engineers are much more willing to keep an eye on network health and to work with the dashboards. That leads to faster resolution of problems and better communication between the teams. Instead of explaining and spending a lot of time, they can simply send the link to SolarWinds and directly access what they need.

Additionally, there is the flexibility to automate or semi-automate functions completely. As a result, we don't need as many people as before when we were working on the reactive side of things. If our service desk had five people before, now we have none. Infrastructure engineers handle most service desk functions, such as ad-hoc or BAU tasks. But we don't need dedicated service desk people anymore.

I work for multiple clients, so I'm just giving examples from them. Some clients do need to maintain service desk functionality as a business function. SolarWinds certainly helps to reduce the workload on the front end at level one and level two escalation. Clients have much more free time to focus on the things they like doing and leaving all the mundane tasks to SolarWinds to sort out. It's a definitely time saver. I love everything about SolarWinds.

We have been using SolarWinds NPM for about three years.

We have not had any problems with stability. I think the way it's implemented it's pretty robust. I started to use SolarWinds three years ago; not from the beginning 15 years ago. So, I don't know what it was like then. From my experience over the past three years, it has been a fairly stable system. Often, clients underspec the platform and SolarWinds requires quite a lot of resources, especially on the database and on the disk-use side, and it needs to be planned. Some customers simply get a box, install all the modules in one box and then complain that SolarWinds is slow. It's not SolarWinds. It's an underspec'd platform.

Some clients think, "Oh, it's all SolarWinds' problem. SolarWinds doesn't perform well." When I come to consult them, we quite easily find that it's the server struggling and not SolarWinds.

The bottom line is this: I am a SolarWinds expert. I know what I'm doing. They are not experts in SolarWinds. From their perspective, what they see straightaway is SolarWinds is not performing well and it can mislead them to think that it is SolarWinds when it's not.

Again, to summarize, I don't think SolarWinds has any performance issues or problems if correctly planned. Go through the documentation and make sure your environment meets the recommended minimums.

The most important point I'll make is that SolarWinds markets its product as an out-of-the-box, click-click-click, do-it-yourself solution. It may work like that for very small organizations, although very small organizations will probably go for Nagios or other free tools. For larger enterprises, this is not the case. Just clicking next, next, next to discover nodes, and everything just works, is not the case. It appears to be working, but when you go beyond that and start to understand how the workflow operates, how people respond to alerts, who receives them, who is not receiving them, how to manage thresholds and many other issues, they all add to a much larger picture. That then becomes a not-out-of-the-box solution.

To work with it properly, you need to have extensive skills and knowledge around the SolarWinds product. I'm not saying that you need to be a geek who knows coding and APIs. But you do need to be well aware of what's possible. That helps you set up SolarWinds the way the client wants. Once it's set up, running and maintaining it takes pretty much no time. It functions almost on automation. This is why I think there's still a huge need for consultancy work. Organizations need experts to deploy SolarWinds and to help them to define exactly what they need. Then the organization can manage themselves. They just need to be properly trained.

Many times I have seen SolarWinds installed and then it would sit for years doing nothing simply because the people there don't know what to do and there's no time for anyone to actually to dig in and make a masterpiece out of it. It probably shouldn't be advertised as an out-of-the-box solution.

SolarWinds has scalability solutions and it's completely extendable and expandable and the licensing model is just beautiful. I love it. It can be as cheap as a few thousand pounds, which is very affordable to smaller organizations. It can also be as expensive as tens of thousands of pounds, which is still very, very cheap even for enterprises and bigger organizations. If you compare it to other solutions, it's at least 10 times cheaper. The scalability models are beautiful and there are no problems whatsoever handling a large amount of work. If you need more nodes, you can always add more servers and expand your platform with an additional poller. There's always a way to manage it.

Technical support is probably 8/10. Sometimes they tend to respond a little bit slower than I would want, but it's not unusual. If you want something, you want it now and that doesn't always happen. Sometimes I need to wait a few hours or even a few days. Sometimes I need to chase them a couple times. Other than that, the level of skills and the support I receive to actually solve the problem is next-to-none. It's probably a 10. I'm giving it an eight just because of the response time, but other than that it's really good.

However, the sales team at SolarWinds is extremely aggressive and I would give it probably a 1/10. It's very interesting that these different teams are working in the same company. The support is so wonderful, and I know a lot of product managers there. I know them personally and they've been in London and we've talked. They're all techie so they're all great guys. When it comes to sales, they are very, very aggressive. I keep receiving calls and they keep pushing and they keep offering discounts. I don't need those discounts. Just give me my time, you know? When I'm ready with a decision, I'm ready. The way I see it, I'm an engineer and I'm doing the solutions. Aggressive sales is not good. It can be frustrating.

I tried different alternatives, but I was never really able to set up other tools the way I wanted. I consider myself a very creative person; an artist so to speak. I come up with something in my brain, I like it, I make a note and then I try to implement it. Very often, with other tools, I was just stuck. I wouldn't be able to do this and that and then I would be coming up with my own bespoke solutions, using my own bespoke scripts. I'm doing them manually and sending manually.

With SolarWinds, everything just works. It's not that SolarWinds has everything I need. It's that SolarWinds gives me enough power to implement everything I need. It's a proper platform. I don't think about it as a tool. When I have an idea and SolarWinds doesn't provide it, I implement it. I write a script or a SQL script or VB, or PowerShell, or whatever. Then I simply attach it to SolarWinds and voila, suddenly SolarWinds is actually is giving me the output that I need; drawing charts and graphs and generating reports and it all works. Then, in a click, I can apply the same monitoring to hundreds and hundreds of nodes, which is awesome.

When working with clients, I tend to compare my experience working with different monitoring platforms to SolarWinds. Without really going too deep in understanding how things are done there and here, they just say, "Oh, you know what? We want SolarWinds." I'd say, "That's fine, so let's do SolarWinds."

I’m doing initial setups all the time. As a consultant, I go from client to client on a regular basis. The setup is by far the easiest setup of any software that I know. Not only monitoring software, but any software. Even installing Microsoft Office is more complex than SolarWinds. It is really, really easy and straightforward. The wizard provides many guides and notes. The deployment is so well tested and structured that I literally click through the wizard.

Out-of-the-box, it works beautifully. But when it comes to the logic and company workflow, that's when I need to add a bit of a creativity.

I'm not doing sales and marketing, so I'm not really trying to sell the product. Usually, they have already done their thinking and decided to purchase SolarWinds. Then they call me to implement it. I evaluate what they currently have in the infrastructure in terms of devices and interfaces and the whole network structure. I make sure that whatever they have matches what they need. If it's too much, most of the time they say, "Okay, so we overestimated." I'm like, "That's fine. Let's just be more rather than less." Sometimes they purchase unlimited licenses when they don't really need them. Often they purchase too little and we simply go and purchase a license, which is a fairly easy process. The customer portals are all managed very well.

New clients will sometimes ask, "Okay, so let's run through today's simulation, let's see how it works and then we will make a decision." They know I'm going to install it and then they'll evaluate it and find that they're happy. For me personally, I know SolarWinds is releasing new, major releases at least once, maybe twice, a year. I'm on the forum watching all the new features and releases, and adding my own input. I'm pretty much in the know about what's going to happen next, and I'm always anticipating starting working with new features. I don't go and explore anymore; I already know what's in there.

Obviously, the actual process of testing is very fulfilling, as well, especially after we've been communicating on the forum and suddenly it's all live and working. The forum is the number one place I go for my information.

I would advise to get a consultant, at least short-term. I have found that companies, especially big ones, and even some small ones, don't need a SolarWinds expert on site all the time. It's too expensive and unnecessary. At some point, the expert will just sit and do nothing. I think it's absolutely proper to get someone at least for a month, maybe two or three. They can then advise you to pick the right product, choose the right tools, implement it in the right way, and to set up the workflow alerts to make sure it's working.

It seems like the sales team has a slight disconnect from the presales guys. It all works well, but as I said, the sales team sells a product. They do not actually help deploy and implement workflows. They expect the company themselves to deploy and set up their own workflows and then to rely on the documentation and the forum. In reality, they just don't have time. They have their own functions and responsibilities and SolarWinds is a new project for them. It's a huge stretch to learn something new. You know that. It's human nature. That's why my advice is to get a consultant.

The most valuable features are:

• The new F5 Load Balancer dashboard and NetPath.
• The flexibility of the product to meet any organization’s needs, instead of forcing the organization to bend to the limitations of the product.

The most common feedback I receive as a consultant is how the product ultimately finds issues and bottlenecks in the enterprise that the engineers were previously unaware existed. Also, issue resolution speed is always improving!

Two or three of the core functions are still nested in Win32 apps on the server; but it seems that the foundation was laid in the current website for porting those functions over in the near future.

I have used this solution for about eight years.

We have only very rarely experienced any stability issues; and hotfixes are generally made available in a timely fashion.

I have worked with some of the largest SolarWinds deployments in the world. It seems that we are always able to push the product far enough to cover the needs of any organization.

Technical support is superb. Not only is the actual technical support very knowledgeable, but the user community at www.Thwack.com is the best online community that I have ever been a part of.

I have used several competing solutions over the years and always come back to SolarWinds’ superiority in function, flexibility, support, and price.

You can quite literally download the installer, run through it, discover your network to add devices, and be “live monitoring” within one hour. Obviously, there are other factors in a complex environment to consider, such as scalability; but the installation of all SolarWinds core modules is extremely straightforward.

I always advise anyone who is new to the suite to run a free 30-day demo in their environment; and set it up as they would for production. At that point, you will have a solid idea about your license size requirements. When you make the purchase, you can apply the license to your demo with no downtime or loss in man-hours from the initial setup.

I evaluated SolarWinds Network Performance Manager and compared it to WhatsUp Gold, PRTG, OpenNMS, InterMapper, ManageEngine, LanSweeper, Cacti, and FogLight.

• Download a demo.
• Don’t be afraid to push the boundaries and customize the product according to your needs.
• Use the Thwack community!

We have a lot of “home-grown” apps to handle the interesting and challenging monitoring requests and alerting needs.

This product is extremely flexible and customizable. It will do just about anything you need it to do. Out of the box, there is a significant amount of monitoring you can do with very little setup. Then, with custom properties and some ingenuity, you can get it to do pretty much anything else. Additionally, there are a lot of ideas and support in their forum, Thwack.

With custom properties and the alerting flexibility, we’ve been able to customize the alert trigger and reset logic to meet the needs of our users, as well as eliminate the likelihood of making mistakes in the operations center.

We used to be fraught with scenarios, such as:

• Only call if the alert doesn’t clear after 45 minutes.
• Ignore that alarm.
• Don’t call on that night.

The SAM custom script for running component checks only supports 10 pairs of results. I am not sure whether this is a scalability issue. It would be nice to have the option to do more. We worked around it by doing a component check per pair as much as we needed.

The product is excellent at taking feedback, especially from the Thwack form, and implementing popular feature requests.

We’ve been using it for almost 10 years.

Back in the early days and new major releases, of course, there were some hiccups and gotchas. Bleeding edge, baby! It’s all a matter of risk assessment with new feature needs, etc.

We have not run into scalability issues.

In general, the technical support is great. Around new major releases, you do experience longer waits; and every so often, you get a support technician who is newer. Still, if you call in and it’s critical, they fix your issues in a timely manner. This is to be expected; and you need to take this into account in your risk calculation when you schedule upgrades.

We were previously using HPE OpenView. The biggest reason was its lack of mapping flexibility at the time. The ops part is still very visual with the green/yellow/red color-coding of icons. Our systems side is based on alerts and emails.

I don’t recall any troubles during the initial setup. It was a long time ago. I was enamored by its mapping capabilities.

• The software is structured and priced well. It’s not cheap; but it’s not overly expensive either. You get what you pay for, and they are well positioned.
• You are able to spread the costs out by implementing it in steps. Your team is probably not huge. You don’t need to sit around waiting to install and configure the entire monitoring solution. Start with NPM, and start adding modules and capabilities as your existing implementation matures.

We were required to assess alternatives, but I don’t recall the specifics. When implementing SAM in the last 2 years, we moved from Big Brother and evaluated Nagios.

• Gather the official requirements for a monitoring solution, and alert all the consumers. The consumers here are the owners of the monitored gear and apps, and the engineers in the support and ops teams.
• Set a good chunk of time aside to test drive the solution, and get creative with the custom properties.
• Learn SQL or SWQL, a SolarWinds query language that is easier than SQL. This will expand your potential capabilities for customization significantly.
• I am very active on the forum. I get a bunch of ideas and help; so I like to give back.

Pretty much all of it is valuable, really. You buy NPM if you want to monitor devices and interfaces on those devices. It's mainly geared towards network devices, primarily; the ability of seeing uptime for the device and the interfaces; and also the new features that they've just added. NetPath and the high availability; those are pretty key in a lot of environments. That NetPath is amazing.

Since NetPath came out, I use it to basically check that my internet is working as it should be by adding in, through NetPath, paths to my cloud-based applications, to things like Amazon, and also to things that we use quite often in the office, and make sure that there's nothing wrong with our ISP. That's actually been quite useful because we have seen an issue with their networks and they have resolved. It's just having visibility of the entire networking estate for myself and for my clients; that's the main benefit of it and it's probably the best product out there.

It’s tough to find areas with room for improvement, because they are always improving on it. I guess making the universal device pollers and the custom pollers a little bit more user friendly to the complete beginner would be useful. An awful lot of my clients don't have an awful lot of experience with SNMP. Going through the wizard to create these new pollers is quite cumbersome if you don't understand what you're doing. A lot of people just give up and not use it. Making them a little bit easier to understand for those who don't understand SNMP would be ideal. It would be a lot of work but that would useful.

I'm a SolarWinds consultant. Not only do I use it in labs to actually get the best out of it, I obviously support a lot of customers who also use it. I've been using it for on and off for about three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues; it's solid.

It's really useful that you can have additional pollers. I think you can have up to four, but I can't remember off the top of my head. It's great to be able to add in pollers, if you get to the point where your existing poling engine – that you have when you install the product the first time – is swamped.

They are going to be releasing in the future branch, smaller pollers, which would be really handy for people who have lots of little branches but don't want to go to the expense of paying for a complete new poling engine for each site. That's going to be cool, so I know they're building on additional bits. It's as scalable as you need it to be.

Technical support is excellent. This is a review of NPM and therefore the SolarWinds Orion support is great. If I was reviewing SolarWinds N-able, it would not be so great. I’m not, so, it has great technical support.

I personally did not previously use a different solution. A lot of my customers do use other stuff, such as Paessler’s PRTG and so on, but I wasn't.

The installation of it is simple. Getting the best of the product is where my consultant-level knowledge comes in. The average Joe tends to go as far as getting it installed and working, and then says, “Get lost.” Well, “Get lost” to get the extra bits and pieces to make it a little bit more flexible.

It's easy to get it in and install.

The way the SolarWinds does their licensing can be quite difficult, especially if you're a managed service provider and you want to use the Orion product, because, obviously, you buy the big chunk of licenses and the unlimited licenses are quite expensive. You don't have a subscription model, where you can say, "Right, OK. Mr. customer, you've got 25 devices; we'll charge you X amount." Then, you can obviously go to SolarWinds and say, "This customer needs this many licenses. Can I buy this many please?"

It's literally tiers, which is fine for most people, who just have their own individual installs. If you have lots of little customers and you want to use a central system, it can be quite expensive for you personally to get it set up and licensed. Then, trying to monetize that to the customers can be quite hard.

Join Thwack. The Thwack community that is free for anybody to join, whether they actually have a SolarWinds license or not, is quite possibly the unique selling point that SolarWinds has. It's without doubt the best technical community that I've ever been a member of. A number of big vendors like Cisco have tried to recreate it and failed. It is a one off and it is perfect for what it does.

While the forums are one of the best things about the product in general, the most valuable feature of the product itself is the customization. We can make it do whatever it is we want it to do. The basics pretty much work for us, but sometimes we have devices that are a little bit different, I guess, so we have to look at them a different way. We're not just confined to what came out of the box. We can build our own monitoring pages; our own pretty much anything.

It has improved my organization’s efficiency, as far as our awareness. We add something new in our network, and we can start to monitor it within a few seconds. We can be alerted on it any time after that. It's pretty easy to not be caught off guard.

The price is probably an area with room for improvement. It's not the least expensive option out there, but it's a decent balance. I'm pretty certain my supervisors would say that.

As odd as it might be, I'd like it to not be as advanced. I'd like a text mode, almost.

I have probably used it for a total of 10 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues; nothing that we could point our finger to SolarWinds about. There were server issues, so whatever was on the server was going to happen anyway.

We had scalability issues. We have several additional servers, too, so upgrading is kind of a pain, but that's with all the other modules, too. NPM alone is pretty quick.

Overall, since we've been using it until now, I'd say technical support is pretty good. On a scale of 1-10, I'd probably give it a seven or so. The biggest problem is probably getting a hold of someone, but once you get someone, they're pretty decent about figuring it out.

We were actually previously using SolarWinds. Then, we stopped and used another vendor for a similar purpose. Then, we stopped using them and went back to SolarWinds.

We switched back to SolarWinds because of ease of use. It was just so completely simple and easy to use. Everyone voted for it, and we got it.

I was involved in the initial setup when we re-purchased it. It was very straightforward.

Pricing and licensing is good. I'd rather pay a little bit more and have it easy, efficient and effective, than pay a little bit less and miss something.

We only considered the other vendor that we previously used.

Get on their Thwack forums. That’s the best thing about the product; all the people on there, all the users. If NPM doesn’t do something, you can probably find someone to make NPM do it.

• Ease of use
• Ease of training for others
• Good reporting
• Nice dashboard customization options
• Good map building capabilities
• Good integration with other SolarWinds tools to provide a “single pane of glass”
• Great support
• Great online community, “Thwack”

We were able to unify our entire company under one monitoring solution that works for everybody, saving a ton of time and significantly speeding up problem-resolution time.

• More automation around node additions and management

With regard to this I am looking for a faster way to add nodes. Currently we deploy nodes in bulk into different environments for our clients and having the ability to have monitoring deploy equally fast would be helpful versus having to spend a significant amount of time manually adding each system. I did recently open a Feature Request for this HERE

• Adding multi-tenancy into the product

We are a hosting provider and we give our clients access to Orion to see their nodes. Orion is not a multi-tenancy platform by design so I am continually challenged to provide clients access in a way that limits them to only see their stuff. In a more true multi-tenancy platform, it would be easy to choose what a client sees and what they don’t and not have to worry if there is a way to work around or break free of the limitations.

• Providing more monitoring capabilities for public cloud such as Azure, AWS, etc.

We are a Hybrid Cloud service provider and we work very closely with Microsoft and Azure. Currently, I am able to monitor nodes in Azure just fine, but I don’t have a good way to monitor PaaS based services.

I have used it for about 10 years.

There have been some versions that have had stability issues, but the current version seems pretty stable.

Technical support is fantastic.

We previously used HPE OpenView, OpenNMS and Zenoss.

The initial setup is very straightforward; you can have it running in about an hour.

Compared to other solutions on the market, the pricing is very good. The licensing is a bit confusing, though.

We evaluated:

• OpenNMS
• ScienceLogic EM7
• Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold
• A few others that either no longer exist or were consumed by other companies

Take advantage of their free, 30-day demo.

Definitely leverage the online community, “Thwack”.

• Extensible REST API
• Excellent technical support
• Mature product, strong brand, Gartner awards
• Custom MSSQL scripting support in both alerting and reporting.
• Support for a wide variety of makes and models of network equipment/appliances.
• Support for monitoring Windows, Linux, Unix, and some other server OSes.
• Consistent and constant application improvements.

• Our ability to locate the source of a network issue has dramatically reduced our mean-time-to-resolve.
• Helped us to consolidate different network and server monitoring needs under one product.
• Low administrative maintenance compared to alternatives. The system simply 'works' most of the time. Our previous tools required constant maintenance by admins just to keep them running.

• Failover functionality does not exist without the purchase of the "Fail Over Engine (FoE)" license.
• Software upgrade and installation procedures are time consuming, especially for large/multiple site installations. Consulting the support matrix for software versions and modules is critical.
• Multiple server software upgrades still require a planned downtime outage window for the entire NPM instance regardless of the size of installation even if using the Failover Engine module.
• Each NPM polling server require a full Windows Server with GUI operating system to install and administer.

5 years

Yes. Remember to do your homework on required ports, especially for when installing a polling engine server across the WAN in a different domain.

Yes, multiple times. Some of the areas of stability had to do with 'monitoring capacity' per polling server several versions ago. Official documentation claimed each server can handle monitoring for up-to 10,000 elements (i.e. ports, volumes, nodes, etc.). In reality this number was more like 5,000. However, monitoring capacity improvements have been made with each software release and we are now back up to the 10,000 element.

Another area of stability issues we have experienced are with the dependency on MS SQL. There were a few times where we had stability issues with SQL server, which in turn impacted NPM performance. When there are issues with the SQL database NPM doesn't make this known and is up to the admin to figure it out.

Yes, every once in a while. SolarWinds defines 'scalability' in the same manner as 'monitoring capacity' --- which is incorrect. This is a huge issue and is one of the hits against the rating I gave NPM.

Excellent. Customer support is knowledgeable about the product line and will engage with technical resources if needed.

Excellent. Technical support is responsive, knowledgeable, and friendly. My team and I do not hesitate to contact support if we have a question or need immediate assistance. They will also escalate to a higher support tier if the issue is not resolved in a timely manner, or if we request them to do so.

Yes, multiple products were used previously including Microsoft MOM 2005 (current versions are System Center Operations Manager) and What's Up Gold. Switch was made to attempt to consolidate various monitoring tools into a single space.

Initial setup of the application servers were very straightforward. It is possible to get started with one app server and the main SQL server then add more polling engine servers as your monitoring needs increase.

In-house installation was done. The product is designed for self-installation and self-maintenance in an on-premise mode.

Unknown at this point.

Always contact your sales rep for best pricing. There are multiple times per year where the vendor will make special licensing offers that you can take advantage of.

The official North America pricing list is available at solarwinds.com. Use that as your pricing baseline for your monitoring project.

NPM licenses by "element" you want to monitor, not by device as a whole. Take this into account while you evaluate monitoring software vendors.

Yes. We looked into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2, What's Up Gold, ManageEngine, AppDynamics, NewRelic, and Nagios.

The features I find most valuable are--

• Reliability
• Security
• High-tech development
• Collateral
• Essentially they deliver what they promise for the end-user

We use it to create guides for end-users. We install SolarWinds on cloned virtual machines and offer free access to partners of my company.

I've used it for four years.

I had a customer who had a problem adding to a database for DAP-end integration with Orion. Simple details were needed to resolve with correct passwords and the release of ports on a firewall. Also, a deployment problem was failing in some versions of Windows and Meso. After all updates were performed, the Orion installation package did not work. We restarted it and worked.

I have no problems with the support of SolarWinds. When my client has a problem, our support always uses the documentation immediately. As we also have a lot of training and always test a lot of tools in our environment, when the client asks for something we know exactly where to go. Our SLA is five minutes for the first call, and to solve problems one-and-a-half hours.

We did, and we switched because the interface is more user friendly and easier to configure.

It's very simple. Anyone can install and configure SolarWinds with a step-by-step guide, even if that person is a layman when it comes to IT.

We used a vendor team.

It's the best of platform for IT management. It shows statistical data in a very detailed manner, where the user can customize the entire platform and input any information from the database through a fully-customized report.