SolarWinds NPM Reviews

This solution provides one standardized platform for network device monitoring.

This solution allows us to monitor physical and virtual devices and applications.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the alerts.

It is difficult for stakeholders to translate technical requirements, which results in difficulties selecting a platform or implementing a solution.

We have been using this solution for more than ten years.

I primarily use it in the OT environment. We use it for important equipment, voice equipment, safety devices, and to alarm and report on.

Solarwind NPM gives you a quick overview of the OT environment. This greatly  improves response times on down equipment.

The solution is quite customizable. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution is stable.

We have had a good experience with technical support.

The product is scalable.

So far, we have found the pricing to be reasonable. 

It meets expectations. With a bit of SQL knowledge, you do manage to get a lot out of your reports.

There are still huge concerns about security. The image of Solarwinds NPM took a huge knock due to SUNBURST and SUPERNOVA. Security experts are still concerned. I would suggest that Solarwinds put more effort into rebuilding trust with the customers and the market.

I've been using the solution for five or six years. I've been using it for a while. 

The stability is great and any issues we face are addressed very quickly by technical support.

The scalability is there. If you need to scale the solution, you can. 

Technical support is good. All of the issues I had were addressed by the support team within hours. They are helpful and responsive and I am satisfied with the level of support.

The initial setup is not difficult or complex. It's quite simple and straightforward.

We have an internal team that can handle any maintenance we need.

In-house

As we monitor safety equipment and underground phones, the first incident you can prevent and save a life, the ROI is instantaneous. 

The product compares well against all the other monitoring software out there. It is not overpriced at all.

We're just customers and end-users.

The solution is easy to use and customization is possible. It is extremely powerful when set up correctly.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been pleased with its capabilities, although its level of security is still worrisome.

We primarily use the solution for network health.

The ease of deployment is great. I also would say that it gave us good capabilities to tune alarms. 

I'm overall a huge fan of Solarwinds. To me, it's a top quadrant for a solution and I would be pushing for it internally were it not cost-prohibitive for startups.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

The initial setup is easy.

The downside was the expense. At large, large companies, that's okay. However, at companies like mine where we're building a tech startup, it can be cost-prohibitive.

They've had some issues with security, and confidence in their product is probably down.

Technical support can be slow to respond.

I would like to see more of a focus on edge computing and edge device monitoring.

I've used the solution for several years.

The stability is good. Aside from the very public hack, from a user's standpoint, it's good.

It's easy to scale. I'm probably an avid fan and I'd say it's easy to scale. 

We have around 100 to 150 people using it at our company.

We didn't always get the responsiveness that we needed in terms of the level of urgency. If it was something where it was potentially project-related and very time-sensitive, they didn't match our level of urgency which could be frustrating. 

That said, overall, when it came to deployment or wanting upgrades or improvements or changes, that we would get good support. 

Still, for incidents where you are in a mission-critical and you have an incident that you need assistance with, they weren't always as quick to respond.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and simple. A company wouldn't have any issues with it. It's somewhat easy to deploy, however, I'm not the engineer. I was the business leader. I just know that I never received any complaints.

The solution is expensive and may not be very affordable for startups or smaller companies.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are likely using the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number.

We use both the public and private cloud deployment models. 

I led a team of several hundred engineers who used SolarWinds every day. I would be involved in making the decision of a product to go through. Once they came in and recommended me their top three, I would choose it.

I would advise potential users to first take a look at some of the newer vendors on the market who may be a little bit more nimble and are coming out of the box with a focus on edge and edge devices. SolarWinds has a heavy, heavy background. There are lighter options. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy to use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install.

It would be good to have high security. This is a concern after the attacks. 

They also need to focus more on the application side.

I've been using it for nearly six months.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

It was easy to set up.

We compared it to Zabbix. You can do a lot of parameters in Zabbix, but you have to configure them all. Also, it is not as easy to install.

It's good to go for SolarWinds NPM, but make sure that you do all the upgrades on time.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM at seven on a scale from one to ten.

We have been making use of the most recent version.

We use it for monitoring our uplink ports on our routers and switches. We also use it to monitor our servers and we utilize its disc space and processor memory. We do the same thing for the routers and switches.

An improvement the solution has brought to our organization is that it enables us to track down what I call brown outs in a multi-host, multi-guest virtual environment. It allows us to see why and when this occurred and to know what else was transpiring at the time that we had received an end-user complaint of the system running slowly. 

As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service. 

The solution should make things easier to set up on a node by node basis. When turning on the network scanning to try to set up nodes, it has a tendency to grab everything in site, every port on a firewall, for example. One should have the option of picking through these before they're automatically added, so that there should be no need to go through them manually and delete them. The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work. Once the nodes have been added, there is a need to go in and delete them manually. 

I cannot think of additional improvements that are worth mentioning. The solution does a pretty good job all around. 

We have been using some version of SolarWinds for 20 years.

The solution is very stable. We don't see many outages of the actual platform. The sole exception would concern us taking a process in which we would be restarting it on a monthly basis. 

The solution is very scalable. I've never seen a problem with this.

I don't have any plans to increase the usage in the future. I would not say that the solution is being extensively used, as we're not necessarily monitoring everything that we could, there being no need for some of this in our environment. I would make use of the performance monitor should I wish to dive deeper into a running system for detailed analysis.

As I have been using the solution for so long, I have not had any need for technical support. 

I have used other products prior to SolarWinds NPM. I switched because the solution provides a consolidated view of everything. 

A moderate level of knowledge of the product's use is required for installation. 

The initial installation occurred a long time ago. While, for me, this process would not take long, somebody who is new and who has never used the solution may take a day or two to do installation and to become fully up to speed of what is being added, the reason for doing so and how the solution should be configured. 

Installation is not easy for a person who lacks the requisite experience. 

I did the integration myself. 

I renewed the licenses around two-and-a-half to three years ago and do not have the relevant numbers off the top of my head. 

I would estimate there are three insfrastructure managers, with myself as the head of the IT department. There is at least one other technician working on the wide area, local area network.

My advice to others is to add their nodes manually, not to let the network discovery and auto ad run.

I rate SolarWinds NPM as an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for one of our very big customers. We are consultants and I'm the technical specialist and consultant. The company is a customer of SolarWinds. 

SolarWinds core data is organized in a very good way. The solution can easily be interconnected with other management systems to get information not only from networking devices but also applications and servers.

I think the graphical environment, the GUI still has to be improved. Other tools like Power BI provide a more graphical dashboard for executives to show what's going on with operations. SolarWinds has the data but the representation needs to be enhanced for an executive view. It requires a large amount of customization to get to a point where you are able to have something concrete for the upper management team.

For additional features, I'd like to see something more in automations, the graphical interface, and some dynamic dashboards or at least the ability for integration with some dashboard tools. 

I think it's a pretty stable solution although we have identified some security gaps around it. I think it's more about managing it correctly and having the security hot fixes and patches up to date. It's generally stable and we haven't had many issues. 

Technical support is pretty good, they are very keen to help. There are some options which provide premier support and that enables access to direct SolarWinds support and upgrades. 

I think the initial setup is pretty simple, the challenge is more about trying to generate all the dependencies, setting the rules and actually setting up internals, ENBB. Our deployment was staggered and took five to six months. We started with a pilot in a region with the most number of users and complexity in order to test and configure the rules we needed. We then went global, starting with the big operations and then moving to the smaller ones which would be easier and take less time. Implementation required a couple of consultants who were familiar with the application and a team that managed the whole operation. The deployment probably involved around 10 people.

Any WAN or LAN environment will benefit from this sort of solution because it consolidates not only the monitoring but also the operation. You can actually trigger some actions based on the conditional threshold that you set in the tool.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We have been using this tool to monitor our multiple network devices, interfaces, physical and virtual memory, application servers, databases, and applications to keep a track of what is causing an issue that we are having.

Either it is the network, or it is the application, or it is the database queries that are causing our users to experience slowdowns. Due to alerting mechanism, we get notified if anything is responding slowly or if anything goes down so that we can resolve the issue as quickly as possible and keep providing best services to our customers.

We had been having some issues recently with network choking at a specific time, and we had been working on multiple things to identify the root cause. Using those methods, we were unable to trace it.

We decided to install a tool that would show us where the issue is being produced, and we can monitor our internal and external network traffic. We are able to determine whether the issue is being caused at the ISP end or our internal network, and with the help of SolarWinds NPM, we were able to track down the root cause of the issue.

We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down.

In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.

Even though SolarWinds NPM provides monitoring for a vast number of vendors and products, they do not support all of them. They should keep in mind that due to ongoing threats and daily malware attacks, companies have deployed network security and hired security professionals who are doing penetration testing. Certain devices provide ongoing security features, which can keep our network secure.

Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM.

We have been using SolarWinds NPM for more than two years.

The stability of SolarWinds NPM is very good.

Scalability-wise, it is very good.

Technical support from SolarWinds is the best.

We previously used ManageEngineOpManager, but we switched because it did not have enough features.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We had to do some customizations, which was great to provide better visibility of our entire network.

We implemented it through a vendor and their level of expertise made us choose this tool. They gave such a great demo that we didn't even have to consider other options.

We achieved ROI within six months.

The licensing is based on the number of nodes, interfaces, and volumes.

We were recommended SolarWinds by a friend so we tried it and purchased it. We did not evaluate other options.

We use this product to monitor our performance. It gives us visibility of our environment, especially for software.

The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less.

The agent that we use is also light and does not block server memory.

SolarWinds makes it easy for us to monitor our environment.

The reports that it generates are useful for creating documentation.

The integration needs to be improved. SolarWinds has many modules for things like application monitoring and network performance monitoring, but sometimes they are not as good as others that are being used. This means that we use other tools and eventually, we want to integrate them into SolarWinds. It might also be the case that we have other tools, like Splunk and Windows Event Collector, and we want to integrate them but can't.

We began dealing with SolarWinds NPM about two years ago, in 2018

SolarWinds is quite stable. In the last couple of weeks, I have heard that they have a bug or a security hold in the RMM platform. Luckily, we do not use it, but instead, just use NPM. Nevertheless, we contacted the supplier and asked them to help us update to patch the security hole.

I think that it is easy to scale.

We receive our support from the local vendor and it is good. When we call and ask for support, the response is very good.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It was easy for us to install and the deployment took about one month to complete. In the first week, we gathered the software that we wanted to install. From there, it took us another week to do the different installations. After that, we deployed the agent and the tools for working with it.

We use BigFix to deploy, so it's easy for us. 

The product is updated regularly.

Overall, this is a good product and I can recommend it, especially if you have a Windows environment and network. That would not be complex. My only issue is with the integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It is for our current infrastructure or servers and storage system. We're using it globally to monitor our global network. We are currently monitoring all the infrastructure APM, network, switches, and routers. We have some elements in the UK and the USA. 

It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there.

It has covered everything, so no improvement is required at their end. The only thing is the price. 

We have been using this solution for around eight years. 

It's stable. We didn't face any issues in the last period.

It's scalable. We see expansion there. More than 500 users are currently using it.

We contacted them once last year. We requested their support with an upgrade. They were very helpful.

It's easy and straightforward. There is no complication. 

We deployed it in one day. We had POC in one day, and we prepared the servers, virtual machine. We did the installation, database setup, and firewall setup in one day. It was easy.

We get some consultants. If there are some challenges, then we definitely need a consultant.

It is too expensive.

We also use Microsoft Operation Manager SCOM. Microsoft is dedicated to monitoring servers, but it needs some improvement in network monitoring. SolarWinds is more appropriate.

We are also comparing SolarWinds NPM and Zabbix. Currently, we have SolarWinds NPM, but its license is about to expire. We need to see which product is suitable for our environment.

I would recommend SolarWinds NPM. From the product side, it covers everything. It is perfect.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

We have a data center that is used by multiple clients and we need to see how applications are performing when clients are on our network. The NPM tool is used to analyze what different applications are consuming, in terms of bandwidth.

The most valuable feature is the graphical user interface.

SolarWinds needs to be improved such that it is on par with the leading products in the market. There are better products available, albeit more expensive.

We have been using SolarWinds NPM for three months.

This is a mature product and the stability is quite good.

We have eight users including an operations analyst, system analyst, and support engineers.

We have been in contact with technical support and they are good.

SolarWinds was the first product of this type that we used.

The initial setup is straightforward. The implementation took about two weeks in a controlled environment. We had no problems with the installation and connecting to our devices.

We did not require assistance for the deployment.

One person is suitable for deployment and maintenance.

It is not an expensive product.

We will probably continue looking for a better product.

This is a product that I recommend, although it requires technical skills in order to use it.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.