SolarWinds NPM Reviews

Graphical presentation of IT data like Bandwidth Util, CPU/Mem Util. etc., Easy way to configure the monitoring etc

This tool can monitor all IT Infrastructure i.e. N/W, Application and basic OS monitoring, Hardware Monitoring etc. Also we can integrate all Solarwinds Solutions on same console called EOC which will helpful for Data Center Operation teams to monitoring.

Also the graphical reports and content of reports also helps the client and OS/Applications teams to measure the challenges in advance.

Solarwinds SAM needs to improve application monitoring for critical applications like MSSQL, Oracle, Exchange etc. They need to add more monitoring parameters.

Since 2009

Yes, have faced few issues while up-gradation of Orion products. But handled successfully with great support provided by Solarwinds.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

It’s fantastic. They will give 24/7 service.

It’s fantastic again. They are very knowledgeable and have KBs available for the fix in advance.

No, as NPM it is cost effective and reliable to use.

I have implemented it on multiple client locations. Also took the help from Solarwinds in installation.

ROI for Solarwinds products is excellent. It’s the cheapest tools which will fulfill all monitoring needs.

5000 USD per NPM Poller for unlimited license.

Yes, CA, BMC and HP monitoring suites.

It’s cheap and will easily fulfill the needs of monitoring environment.

NPM, NCM, NTA and VNQM.

Implementing this product has given us detailed visibility and understanding of our network. Small teams are able to manage large enterprise with this tool.

EOC.

2 years

Not much. Where we did we were able to avail support from vendor.

None except for EOC.

We have deployed it in distributed model with EOC. EOC has been a pain. We are keen to move to Centralized Deployment which we are yet to test and see if it overcomes limitations of EOC.

Customer service is very good.

Good technical support. There is an active online community too.

We have used PRTG, MRTG. However Solarwinds is a more integrated suite to tools for the enterprise or provider.

Installation needs reasonable understanding of Windows Servers, SQL Servers, Services and Group Policies (in enterprise). Customization might need good knowledge of SQL programming.

In-house.

Good.

The product is highly recommended. I am yet to understand how it stands against the competitions.

Interface details and the list of interface charts.

Being able to provide a history of interface behavior helps the organization in a multifaceted way. Current productivity and interface forecasting.

Overall speed of the software could be improved... as it is incredibly slow at times. Polling for items that are in a down state seems to take a long time. This affects up time reporting and metrics.

5 years.

Yes at times there are database stability issues.

Yes we did.

Good. I appreciate not being offshored (at least it wasn't when I called).

Good.

Yes. SolarWinds offers more detail.

As a large school district, I can tell you that NPM is very valuable to us. Being able to see the current status of all our locations and hardware at a glance is priceless.

We use the alert feature of NPM to send emails and text messages to our organization when various network or server equipment is not reachable or performing correctly.

I would say the NPM toolset has room for improvement. I haven't seen the benefit of integrating it into NPM.

I have been working at my company since 2011 and it was here before I started.

I did not originally deploy this software, but I haven't had any issues with upgrading to newer versions or installing new features.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any issues with scalability. In fact, I find that NPM is very easy to scale to your needs.

I have had very fast response times when dealing with customer service.

I have had very fast response times when dealing with technical support.

I do not know of any other solution my school district has used.

I did not originally deploy this software, but I haven't had any issues with upgrading to newer versions or installing new features.

I did not originally deploy this software, but I haven't had any issues with upgrading to newer versions or installing new features.

As we are a not for profit organization, I can not answer this question.

I do not have this information available.

I was not at my workplace when they chose this product.

They offer trial periods. I strongly urge you to try Solarwinds NPM and other products as they are a great asset at my organization.

* Link utilization graphs

* Top-10 charts

* Node/link status monitoring and alerting

* Historical reports

This product was used by our 24/7 NOC engineers and helped them in quick response to network status changes, investigation and narrowing down of performance degradation incidents. It was also used to report customer bandwidth utilization and provide evidence in customer queries and claims.

Better support and integration for vendors other than Cisco.

4 years experience with two different employers and both Internet hosting companies.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Excellent support

Excellent support

Setup is straightforward and smooth, just need to follow the installation wizard. Having worked with various open source and vendor specific NMS solutions, among vendor independent solutions such as WhatsUP, OpManager and Solarwinds NPM I always preferred NPM.

Setup is straightforward and smooth just need to follow the installation wizard.

In-house team.

I have seen various products over the years from open source (Cacti, Nagios, Zenoss) and commercial (whatsup, Manageengine, etc) but Solarwinds NPM was always the one that could check most of the monitoring requirements.

Bandwidth utilization and netflow reports

Our bandwidth consumption continues growing. We need to be aware of overutilization of our circuits. SolarWinds helps us have visibility to the most relevant issues in our network and makes our problem solving process much faster and easier.

IPAM. We wish it would work with Cisco CNR and help us manage all of our DHCP servers from a centralized platform.

7 years

We did have issues while upgrading, but gladly SolarWinds provided good service and assisted us to resolve those issues.

We didn't have any issues with stability.

No. The performance problems that we have experienced at times are due to hardware limitations.

Outstanding

Outstanding

No other product in the market offers as much as SolarWinds does for the price. Great value.

Initial installation is straightforward. However, upgrading can be quite complex if you have multiple polling servers, as you need to carefully follow the same steps and upgrade path on each server.

The installation was done in-house.

I cannot put this into numbers, but from an engineering perspective I believe there is no other product that provides as much value for the buck.

It was set-up before I was hired and therefore I do not have cost information.

No other options were considered.

Make sure that you have the required hardware and dedicated SQL server. Trying to save money can have a major performance problem on your SolarWinds implementation. Make sure you meet the requirements.

Monitoring and reporting are valuable features.

Previously with RTGS software we manually retrieved monitoring reports and checked downtime but with SolarWind NPM reporting is automatic and very good with auto email and message features and because of these great features even late at night or on the weekends our network team knows which link is down.

I faced a problem with GRE over IPSec tunnel traffic, it was not showing Netflow enabled traffic and without IPSec tunnel traffic Netflow was working fine.

2.5 years

The latest issues I've encountered was the Netflow traffic issue I mentioned above.

No issues with stability, if we follow the prerequisites properly.

No issues with stability.

7 out of 10, compared to slow response time from Cisco.

7 out of 10

WhatsUP Gold because of the scalability.

It's a little complex for enterprise level installation.

With Vendor team, 8 out of 10.

Around $50,000 to $70,000 as a one time cost. If we add additional features then it will be an additional cost.

Yes, Manage Engine and Lancope StealthWealth.

It's the best solution on the market so far. I recommend adopting all the latest features in latest update.

With admin-level permissions, the "Manage Node" feature is the most valuable to me since my preference is to search via strings. It provides a quick visual representation based on searched strings but a lot of false-positives as well with certain vendors – Cisco being one of them, e.g. reporting “critical/warning" states on things that don't really matter to us such as voltages on line cards or in the backplane of devices.

It improved the way our organization functions by being a consolidated product which I was able to do a lot of the initial data entry and organization with – unfortunately I have not had time to dedicate to figure out every bell-and-whistle with the NPM product. I’ve deployed rules for SNMP traps, syslog alerts, and other advanced alerts to send emails based on certain parameters – sadly these have been on an “as-needed and as-time-permitted” basis which has been lacking lately.

I honestly haven’t given thought to areas that need improvement since I spend a lot more time monitoring the network than optimizing NPM and features; nowhere enough time-wise to nit-pick and test every little thing. So far for what I have done with it, it has worked, getting there wasn’t always the easiest – usually a lot of trial and error based on research.

In our network we've used Solarwinds NPM product for a little over 3 years.

I wasn’t part of the deployment for it; our systems team was responsible for initial deployment.

Yes, plenty of those that our systems team has spent hours on the phone with Solarwinds support with trying to rectify. Especially after moving to later NPM releases; this has made our systems team weary of moving to later NPM releases due to past occurrences following.

Yes, polling more frequently yields a near exponential increase in resource utilization which becomes a problem on virtualized platforms resulting in excessive queueing on poller engine(s). While Solarwinds support virtualization they prefer dedicated hardware by some of their documentation; pretty expensive when you consider Solarwinds software, licensing, and then dedicated hardware to boot. Virtualized deployments also seems to yield a slower experience when browsing the web front-end, this could be due to the uniqueness of our corporate network though.

I haven’t worked with their customer service probably since the beginning, any problems with the platform our systems team would usually be in contact with Solarwinds customer service and technical support.

I haven’t worked with their customer service probably since the beginning, any problems with the platform our systems team would usually be in contact with Solarwinds customer service and technical support.

Older systems that were part of a legacy network and platform that were not well kept and didn’t have many features we were looking for. During RFP’s we narrowed it down to a couple of vendors with Solarwinds at the time taking the lead.

I wasn’t part of initial setup/deployment of product itself.

I don’t recall, was over 3 years ago and we have undergone major transformations as a company since then.

Solarwinds is highly modular regarding products and services so it is important to keep in mind that most other modules have a separate price and licensing tag and that it can become very expensive very quickly. When looking for features try to narrow it down to only the critical ones you need, I prefer simplicity and functionality over complexity – as a company I imagine the complexities came from catering to as many customers’ needs as possible. Lastly prepare to spend a lot of time working and tending to NPM, the biggest time taker I’ve had with NPM personally was getting Overview, Node, and Interface views setup that were useful and speedy – their default views are not recommended and “noisy.”