SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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.

CRC monitoring for each port is a valuable feature for us.

Today, the webapps are getting worse for showing all items. Sometimes your browser will not respond.

My recommendation is to create separate console-based applications, especially for network operation centers.

The security information and event management could be improved.

I used it for five months, then removed it from my system.

I had issues with the SQL database, and I would suggest they add MySQL.

There was slow performance after adding 100 devices with 400-500 elements with 10 second interval pooling.

There were issues with scaling it.

0/10 as there were no knowledge base articles when I used it, and every new patch required customer login to apply.

The product I am still using, PRTG, was very simple, so I never had experience with technical support.

I am still using PRTG.

Initial setup was a simple process.

I worked with the partner, and honestly, we did not require any support after the initial installation.

For small customers, it's good.

• PRTG
• Nagios

They should change the database and OS.

Alerts, reports, overview of network, graphical picture of WAN for support team, port level visibility, and ease of use.

By finding out about problems or potential problems quickly and having a great view of my entire network.

The admin web site could be a lot faster.

8 years

No issues encountered.

Yes, but that was due to using just a recommend server size. Moved to a better server and all was well.

Yes, the more items I added the slower it became. But this was corrected once I split the servers apart. I had NPM and NCM on the same server.

10 out of 10

Any time I contacted support they were knowledgeable and fast.

No other solution used before, but looked at many.

Pretty straight forward if you know your environment.

In-house implementation.

I never put a dollar amount on it, but it sure saved me some big heartaches!

Setup cost and ongoing was just my time.

Yes, HP, Nagios, Cisco, Spiceworks, GFI, and Manage Engine.

SolarWinds makes a great product and their support is second to none! They continue to acquire/develop new software that rolls in nicely with their entire solution.

It gives us an insight on what we need to monitor on our network. We get granulated data on where issues are occurring in regards to traffic latency and bandwidth utilization. Also we can monitor the health and functionality of our nodes on the MPLS.

Both the NPM and the NTA modules. We are able to track down information in regards what kind of traffic is being generated on our network and also help us determine what applications we can allow and what not to allow.

We were able to determine if end users were using the network to do work related stuff or otherwise and reduce bandwidth hogging for non-business related activities on the network.

So far I am satisfied with the result but I am still learning how it works.

One year

No it was very straight forward. You have understand the concept of networking to apply the tool. If you do then implementing it is easy. There were some version releases that had stability issues but the support team was very good at letting us know what we needed to do to fix the issues.

There were some version releases that had stability issues but the support team was very good at letting us know what we needed to do to fix the issues.

Scalability was not a problem. We only monitor nodes that matter most on the environment. This makes managing the environment easier. Less is more`

They have always been helpful when we needed support I have no complaint at all.

I would rate it at an 8 out of 10

We used network instruments. For what we were trying to accomplish it was not just doing it to the level we needed and it was not very straight forward to use either.

The initial set up was very straight forward. I think complication comes with differences in environment.

It was an in house implementation and I did it myself.

ROI on this has been fantastic. It was supposed to be a very expensive investment. We got a good deal and the product did not disappoint it has definitely help us dodge several bullets on several occasions.

Product including support was about $6000 but I would say for what its able to help us do its more than that.

Yes I was able to go through a whole bunch of options such as managed engine but I was not very impressed with the licensing scheme. Also most products were SAAS and we wanted independence and ownership over the product.

I would say understand your environment and what you want to see. Also know what you deem important to your business and policies that guide your network usage. Not everyone one would find this particular product to their liking but for those who want to get to the granular level of assessment this is definitely a product to look at.

Also they have now added a feature where the traditional style of setting up monitoring reports is no longer necessary. Initially you had to create complex alerting to know what happened at a particular time. Now you just have to filter by date and time and you can choose what network protocols to filter by to see what happened at a particular point and time in real time stats.