SolarWinds NPM Reviews

I use NPM for traffic monitoring in my network. It monitors all my traffic.

It is good for notifications and monitoring traffic, especially since most of them are remotely done.

The abnormal traffic notifications are good. Most of them are remote, and it is very good for notifications and monitoring for the traffic.

The price could be better. The maintenance or upgrade system regarding the payment is not good. It must be upgraded and is not related to the additional support payment. 

Also, if I need to make a feature enabled, I have to buy another edition and include support, which is unnecessary for me.

I have been working with the product for six or seven years.

There are points where the system drops, and you need to restart or monitor the system itself. It is not a SaaS system; it is an on-premises system.

It is pretty scalable. I would rate scalability as eight out of ten, with no issues.

Customer service is linked to payments. If you do not have a license or renewal supported, it is not supported for you.

Positive

I also use Microsoft Defender as it is good. However, the user needs a license for any additional user in SolarWinds.

The initial setup is simple. Sometimes I do it by myself, yet at other times, I do it with a consultant from SolarWinds teams.

I did the setup with the help of SolarWinds teams at times and by myself at other times.

The price could be better, and the system has a payment structure linked with upgrades, which I find unnecessary.

I use Microsoft Defender at times due to licensing restrictions with SolarWinds.

I can recommend the product, especially for small or medium-sized companies.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM is used in our organization as a monitoring tool for network devices. As a network administrator, I use this solution to monitor devices like switches, routers, interfaces, and tunnels. 

The tool monitors tunnel utilization, interface status, UBS, data center humidity and temperature. 

It's a highly reliable product. SolarWinds NPM is one of our company's most valuable products. SolarWinds NPM immediately notifies via email in case of any downtime situations. 

The response time of the support team needs to improve. Sometimes, there is a wait time of three or four hours to obtain a response from SolarWinds NPM. The consistency of support also needs to improve, in some cases a quick response can be noticed from the support team of SolarWinds NPM. 

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for one and a half years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. The solution is highly stable. SolarWinds NPM has showcased the utmost stability for one and a half years of usage in our company. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. SolarWinds NPM adapts well enough to the workflows in our company. The solution is used in our organization to monitor more than 200 nodes. At our company, we are already using the maximum user license of SolarWinds NPM.  

The customer support is satisfying for SolarWinds NPM. I would rate tech support a six out of ten. Quicker responses are expected from the support team. 

Neutral

I would rate the initial setup a nine out of ten. Our company team effortlessly deployed the solution. Only a few free resources, like YouTube, were utilized by our organization's professionals to learn the product installation process.

The deployment of SolarWinds NPM took one or two hours in our organization. After the primary installation of SolarWinds NPM, every node needs to be restarted, it takes time to add the nodes at the monitoring end. Only one or two professionals from our company were needed to deploy SolarWinds NPM. In the post-deployment monitoring, only one professional is required.  

The product was implemented in-house. 

We have realized ROI in terms of saved time in our organization. The product has also contributed towards ROI through accurate and reliable downtime alerts. For instance, the exact number of down switches is notified by email. I would rate the solution's ROI a ten out of ten. 

The product price can be considered to be affordable in economically strong countries like the US but it appears as a bit expensive in Egypt. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten. Our company pays for the license on a yearly basis. The price of the solution is fixed and can be checked by anyone on the vendor's website. 

I would definitely recommend the solution to others. SolarWinds NPM has also helped improve our organization's network performance. The alerting and reporting capabilities of the tool are impressive and can be customized easily. The alerts or reports can always be obtained via email. I would overall rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

Our company uses the solution to monitor NPM for 100 large accounts that typically have 40,000 interfaces. 

Basic monitoring includes CPU memory, errors, and interfaces. Advanced monitoring includes F5 load balancers, in-depth tunnels, and AP alarms. 

We also monitor CM for backup parts and integrate monitoring with Azure. 

The solution's interface is very user friendly and easy to navigate. We provide customers with access and they have no issues learning and exploring the solution. 

Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization. 

The solution always includes new features in their releases. 

The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. 

The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more. 

I have been using the solution for five years.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable but dependent on appropriate licenses. 

We reach out to technical support when we need assistance with issues. 

I rate support a seven out of ten. 

Neutral

The initial setup has been made very easy over the last few years because all functions of the server become available on the solution's console upon installation. There is no longer a need to log in on the server side when performing routine tasks.

Deployment takes less than 30 minutes to run on a single machine if pre-requests, servers, databases, and ports are readied in advance. Errors or troubleshooting might add a bit of time to deployment. 

We implement the solution for our customers. Each of our technicians manages a group of 20 accounts for NPM and other services such as SAM, PM, NPA, and NTM for backup.

The pricing is based on a licensing model with bulk discounts offered annually. 

Licenses start with a low-cost option for 100 devices that runs between $2,000-$3,000. With 400 devices the cost is $4,000. With thousands of devices the cost can reach $50,000. 

All license levels come with technical support. Engineers are available to assist with challenges and there are no extra fees for that support. 

The solution provides comprehensive monitoring that includes proactive items such as advance notifications and engineer tickets for code breaks. This allows engineers to quickly resolve issues before major outages occur.  

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

SolarWinds NPM was used for everything. For interface monitoring, load balancing checking interface uptime and device status. 

We had the full suite of products, not just NPM.

It is simple to use.

It can be agentless.

The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is.

Their IPAM component is severely lacking. The process is extremely manual. It just doesn't get in there if you don't manually enter it. 

It is not particularly DNS-aware. When it comes to DNS names, you pretty much have to configure everything manually. It will not grab anything on its own. 

They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.

I am been using SolarWinds NPM for 15 years.

I believe that we are working with version nine.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution, aside from the fact that they had a major hack a couple of years ago and effectively allowed the Russian government to completely hack their code, making everyone vulnerable.

SolarWinds NPM is not very scalable.

We had 10 users.

There was only an IT engineer that was responsible for upgrading.

There was only one administrator. The rest were read-only.

Technical support is very good. You always got a live person.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to set up.

The initial configuration is simple. Because, they did not use a backend SQL database, their initial setup was extremely simple. 

As they grew, they began to use SQL, which made things a little more complicated. 

It was extremely simple at first.

It probably took me a week to get it all set up and running, and another month to get everything in it. 

The initial configuration to the point where it was up and running took me about a week.

We installed it in a central data center and then began implementing it. We had to manually discover devices, pull them in, and manually add them one at a time.

It was implemented in-house.

We have seen a return on investment.

It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first.

It is significantly less expensive than Infoblox.

I don't recall the exact amount, It was approximately 20 years ago, but I recall it being relatively inexpensive to install. The initial part was really cheap, but the licensing cost became really expensive over time.

I would advise people to only use it for monitoring or viewing traffic flows. Don't use the IPAM section, the DHCP section, or the DNS section.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM a seven out of ten.

We've been using SolarWinds for our network monitoring. It's basic advanced network monitoring, up-down of Rogers switches, as well as metrics, latency, wireless metrics, where users are, errors on interfaces, route cables, and things of that nature. We're just pulling as much data from our network devices as possible to present that in an easy pane of glass.

I find the NetPath to be very valuable. It visualizes that traceroute that you can share with anyone in the business. For example, when they say, "Hey, what's going on? The network's slow because my application or my server's having issues" you can show them this nice graph that visualizes where there may be congestion or if there isn't any congestion at all.

Its initial setup is simple. 

So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions.

Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital.

There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.

We've been using the solution for about three years. 

The stability is fantastic. We haven't personally had any issues other than a few gripes about the lack of information. However, as far as it being stable, for me, it's been pretty solid.

It's possible to scale, however, it comes at a cost. You have to go through them and there's a whole nother license piece that costs a large lump sum to grow your polers to start importing more if your initial server is getting towards a limit. It's scalable, with the caveat of it's going to cost you.

We have about ten to 20 users. It's a mix of network analysts, CIS admins, storage administrators, and application administrators.

We do not plan to increase usage at the moment, mainly as we're pretty much utilizing it as much as we need to, however, it is pretty much monitoring our entire environment or maybe couple hundred switches, some routers, couple hundred servers, and applications and things like that. We pretty much monitor our whole environment and our environment's not really growing anymore. We're pretty good right now.

Technical support is pretty good. In the few cases we have reached out for any support, they've been pretty responsive. Also, their online resources and knowledge bases are very extensive as well.

Positive

We actually didn't use anything before this product.

The implementation process is pretty straightforward. They give you an MSI and once you have your servers and databases set up, it's just a couple of clicks and it's set up.

For overall importing of everything may have taken a couple of weeks to have things up and running due to how our organization is structured and how we can gather information to pull into SolarWinds and our implementation strategy. For example,  who set up servers and applications. We start getting with the appropriate aims to get whatever monitor or whatever polling method we need, whether it was S and NP strings or accounts for any server monitoring with administrative access or whatnot. Then we look at the network and do those automatic scans from there. Once we start pulling in that information, we start actually organizing all the nodes in there to properly alert and monitor. It takes maybe a month or so to get it to a baseline.

For deployment and maintenance, honestly, it's just me by myself doing it. It would be easier with a few more people.

The setup was done in-house. We did not use any third party, like an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

As far as assisting in being proactive in our network, it's been a great help in helping us maintain a healthy environment and being proactive and making sure things are up to date and upgraded.

The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing.

There weren't any other options were evaluated. We saw SolarWinds and noted our other sister companies use that. We just went with it to be standardized within our entire conglomerate.

We are a customer and end-user.

I would definitely advise others to do their homework. There are a lot of different modules you can buy with different licensing. You need to understand what you're looking to monitor, and what you're trying to present to your business, and then do the homework on the solution itself and see how that fits your needs before just going and buying it or even talking to a sales representative.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's pretty good at its job. I haven't really delved into too many other things. I've tried to look at other tools recently and in my opinion, solutions like Nagios or Zabbix aren't the best. I haven't really looked into other things like Datadog or LogicMonitor yet, however, I'd say this solution is kind of a leader in the pack for what it's doing. Still, there's definitely room for improvement.

My company uses SolarWinds NPM for interface monitoring because we are not required to put in any keywords and do the manual thing, making it easy to onboard. In our company, we just export the device and download the configuration, while the NCM part can be enabled by going to the settings and changing the configuration. The solution becomes easy if you use everything on a single dashboard.

My customers have experienced benefits from SolarWinds NPM since it supports Akamai Guardicore, Akamai Synthetic Monitoring, and VMware-based device monitoring. In general, SolarWinds NPM integrates smoothly with every solution. The integration part of the solution might not be as easy as it seems since one may have to enter some commands in JSON format in the integer part. The templates are already set in the solution, but there is a need to change the parameters, values, and IPs. After the aforementioned steps are followed, integrating the solution with tools like Tableau, Power BI, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Teams for notifications and alerting an incident becomes easy.

Though in SolarWinds NPM, there is no need to go into other interfaces and set up some settings with other parameters, SolarWinds NCM allows you to do so more easily. We just put the configuration and execute the particular IP, or you can just put the Excel sheet, where once the import is done, it shows all the IPs there, and so you just need to do the configuration and execute the IPs. The solution provides you with real-time data, including details like how many devices are completed, how many are left, and how many are getting errors.

The dashboard of the solution is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement. Having all the features and parameters under a single tab in the solution would be good. For knowledge-related purposes, SolarWinds needs to consider adding documentation to its portal to provide users with the upgrade command if they want to upgrade the solution and how to carry out the onboarding procedure.

I would like to see real-time visualization and monitoring, especially when attempting to connect globally where one router is in the USA and the other is in the UK. With real-time visualization, all the interfaces can be made visible properly, while the users also get more visibility and their network. If an interface goes down, then one can monitor the interface directly with the help of the dashboard provided in the solution.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for nine to ten months. I operate as a system integrator for SolarWinds. I use the open-source version of the tool.

It is a stable and good solution.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users. When I joined my current organization, I saw SolarWinds NPM handling 10,000 devices, including the backup, storage, and everything else. SolarWinds NPM never had any performance problems, like hanging or lagging issues, and this may be because the solution only has a few features in it.

For SolarWinds, my company needs to send an email to the customer support of SolarWinds, after which they will reply back to us with their incident number, and then work on it. If required, the customer support of SolarWinds will set up a call with our company to understand the real-time situation at our end.

I rate the support team an eight out of ten.

Positive

Though I wasn't involved in the deployment process of SolarWinds NPM, I was involved in Fortinet FortiCloud's deployment. With the deployment part, my customers have deployed SolarWinds NPM and Fortinet FortiCloud on the same server.

My company's current customers plan to replace SolarWinds NPM with Fortinet FortiCloud.

In comparison to other tools in the market, SolarWinds NPM hasn't been upgraded yet. I believe SolarWinds NPM plans to upgrade itself in the future and have more features, like the ability to support other devices or vendors, like Arista, Juniper, Guardicore, or Akamai. In terms of the advantages provided by SolarWinds NPM, I would say that the solution is easy to use, easy to onboard, easy to set up, easy to delete, easy to configure, easy to get the report on a single interface, and one can also apply a filter to get what is required.

In the last four years, I have deployed three tools in Avaya and another four in my current organization.

The maintenance of SolarWinds NPM is not difficult.

SolarWinds NPM is one of the easiest and most flexible tools, but I would say that SolarWinds NCM is a better tool. I rate SolarWinds NCM a nine out of ten.

I don't know if there have been any upgrades in SolarWinds NPM. Considering the performance graph, one will see a clear visualization in SolarWinds and not in Fortinet FortiCloud.

I rate SolarWinds NPM an eight out of ten.

We're using SolarWinds NPM for server monitoring, report monitoring, and application monitoring.

I found a lot of valuable features in SolarWinds NPM, such as the customized application monitoring that allows you to customize any monitoring and script customization, and you also have the option to deploy and upgrade SolarWinds NPM online, which is very useful for my organization.

An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data.

SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed.

Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature.

I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.

I've been working with SolarWinds NPM for almost two years now.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution.

My team contacted technical support for SolarWinds NPM a lot of times. On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate support as seven because one of my cases remained open for a year without the perfect answer or resolution, though the SolarWinds development team has been working on it.

Neutral

I've previously worked with HPE and IBM, but that was for another organization. My current organization uses SolarWinds NPM.

The initial setup for SolarWinds NPM is relatively easy, and anyone can do it.

As I deployed SolarWinds NPM in a huge environment, the deployment took almost six to eight hours for fifteen servers.

We deployed SolarWinds NPM in-house.

Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay.

I'm an end-user of SolarWinds NPM.

In the organization, over a hundred people use SolarWinds NPM, with five to six administrators. The solution requires specific maintenance, mainly because it has a lot of DW issues.

My advice to people looking to start working with SolarWinds NPM is that it's the best solution for a medium-scale environment. For a large-scale environment with many requirements, such as a vast number of nodes, for example, more than twenty-five thousand, SolarWinds NPM may not be as scalable, DW-wise. If you have below fifteen thousand to fifteen thousand nodes, then it's okay to use SolarWinds NPM.

My rating for SolarWinds NPM is eight out of ten.

We are using Solar NPM to send alerts to the NOC and SOC teams. Some reports are used for our network to link to the router for internet utilization. We are also monitoring wireless access points using SolarWinds. Our network, security and system teams use this solution and its dashboards. 

This solution offers a very good view of our network and allows us to effectively monitor performance.

The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network. We would also like to show the number of devices which we need to improve our service.

I have been using this solution for ten years. 

It is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. A few months ago I had a problem with the number of nodes on the system itself. We have the SLX NPM license which is unlimited and I can add an unlimited number of nodes. It seems there was a limitation on the one server. When I contacted support, they told me that I either need to delete some nodes or add another server to scale.

Whenever I have a problem or I need to ask a question, I contact the SolarWinds support team. I would rate their support a four out of five. 

Our company decided to change to SolarWinds due to a security breach they experienced. Other solutions that were considered were more expensive than Solarwinds. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

To install the SolarWinds for the first time, you need a virtual machine to install the demo or trial version of SolarWinds. You can then add some devices, monitor and try to use whatever dashboards or reports you think you will need. Installing NPM itself and adding the nodes took us three months.

We implemented this solution in house with the help of a third party who were Solarwinds experts. 

We have seen a return on our investment using this solution. We are now working on a re-innovation project for the whole organization's network because our network is very old. Some vendors offered us a management solution for network performance monitoring but their devices offer the same functionality as SolarWinds. Based on what other solutions charge, the $700 we pay for this solution is fair. 

We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license.

I would advise others to test the environment before deploying the whole solution.

I would rate Solarwinds an eight out of ten. I would give a higher rating if I could use root cause analysis to point to one device in the stack to understand which device has a problem. In general, I think SolarWinds is one of the most stable solutions and it has a lot of useful features for network performance monitoring.