SolarWinds NPM Reviews

* 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.

Customer Service:

Excellent support

Technical 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.

Customer Service:

Outstanding

Technical Support:

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.

Customer Service:

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

Technical Support:

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.

Customer Service:

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.

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.”

When it comes to the new features in NPM 11, the most valuable addition for us is the deep packet analysis Quality of Experience dashboard (QoE).

There's so many times where we get a question such as – “Is the network running slow?” It's really helpful being able to configure the deep packet analysis to say we want to look at these servers and just these particular applications - and get rid of the other noise. Before we started using NPM, we could get this info with Wireshark but it was incredibly painful getting it.

From a QoE point of view - I'm really grateful it was released so that we could get started taking advantage of the features. The one thing that would make it even more helpful would be to allow us to define our own applications. But having said that, I posted a feature request on the thwack community and got a response from SolarWinds within a half hour, asking for more details about my feature request.

We started using NPM about a year ago and we’ve been using NPM v11 for about 3 months.

We previously used WhatsUpGold, which has a fraction of the features for a tenth of the price. Moving to SolarWinds was a huge jump for our management since they were moving from a $3,000 - $4,000 solution to something which costs us $30,000 - 40,000 (5 SolarWinds products). I showed management the feature request page for NPM. What they noticed right away was that 50% of the feature requests had a "what we're working on" tag. With SolarWinds, management gets visibility into our infrastructure without them having to ask us questions. They can look themselves, it's all there. The fact that SolarWinds listens to customer feedback and requests makes all the difference.

For NPM 11, it enables management to see all of our infrastructure and gives them a heads up without doing a lot of work of how our systems are doing. To quantify it, I’ll explain it like this: we were looking to upgrade portions of our networks and our CIO suggested spending money to increasing bandwidth in our datacenter. We used NPM 11 and found that our network bandwidth within the datacenter was incredibly underutilized, we could use more bandwidth by our workstations. NPM helped us focus where to spend money on our infrastructure because we can tell where we need to spend, rather than just a gut feeling. We didn't have that visibility with WhatsUpGold. WhatsUpGold is good as an alerting tool but it’s useless for historical reporting. Graphs and easy correlation in SolarWinds are light-years ahead of what we were doing previously. Historical data is also more useful, we can go back 6-months and say ask ourselves what our pain points are and where we should invest more money. NPM paid for itself by allowing us to spend money where it needs to be spent.

The email and GUI alert system that it has is the most valuable for me. It also features the IP address management with manages your IP subnets internally and externally all in one place. Also the customizable alert feature is really helpful if you want a specific monitoring and alerting to configure.

Before we were using the Microsoft DHCP server to manage our IP addresses. However, it was not configured to replicate all throughout the domain so the IP address database and allocation is outdated and we are not sure if this is still active or not. Upon using the IPAM feature of Solarwinds we manage all IP addresses centrally in one location and it is cloud based so we can access it wherever we are in our intranet. I also liked the customizable alert feature because i was appointed to configure and monitor alerts for all the power supply on Cisco devices only. I made series of testing and research and I was successfully able to configure and implement an alert specifying the monitoring of power supplies of Cisco devices only, ie, excluding any other devices.

Perhaps they could hire more tech support for this awesome product. I had a difficult experience in their support, not technically but the availability of the engineers. Since they are so little and the bulk of demands for their support is huge, I would have to wait in line to get a response because my ticket is not network down impacting. It took me about 3 months to finish this customization.

5 years now.

Yes. During the test, I encountered troubles because the specific MIBs could not focus on certain power supplies only. I needed to find help from their product tech support.

There are minimal issues of stability for the NPM of Solarwinds. This is the reason you need to update the version as often as they release to address the minute bugs of this product

No issues with scalability. It can accommodate as much nodes so long as you update your hardware all together.

Customer Service: I would say 7 out of 10 stars. They really know their product technically. However, the response time for non impacting tickets is very slow.Technical Support: 4 out 5 stars. They know their product so well that you could count on a bug fix update yearly.

I used Concord before and it is limited to monitoring network devices. Well, I think that's the only license that my previous company had with it. I did not switch because I liked the product, I simply switched companies that already is using the product.

I wasn't the one who set this product up. it was already there when I transferred.

It will cost you to buy additional license for additional features. However, there is not day-to-day cost in using this.

No. Like I said, I just moved to a different companies that were already using the product.

Utilize this product to its full potential, NOC will find it very useful and easy to manage.