SolarWinds NPM Reviews

We are a reseller of SolarWinds, so that is our primary use. SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer is actually a marketing name. That is the brand name of a couple of products in a suite. The main product of the network management suite is NPM, or the Network Performance Monitor, which is qualified as a global market-leading product and has won a lot of awards in the past few years. It is the flagship for network management software.  

The cool thing about that product is that you can use it to also monitor your network cloud connections through the internet. That is quite a unique feature. With this NPM piece, called NetPath, users can see how their applications on the internet are behaving performance-wise. So, for example, you can see how your Office 365 use, status, and performance are doing on the internet. Our customers would otherwise not have a clue when they have performance issues without using this tool.  

What is good about this product is that the customers get real insights into the behavior of their network. They can see what is flowing over it. They will know what kind of data it is, like whether it is YouTube movies or if it is application information. This allows them to get an exact picture of how their network is being used.  

I see a tendency in the industry that a lot of software is going into the cloud. Customers now have to install it on-premises or they could install on-premises software in the cloud. That is also possible. So I see a tendency that software is becoming more cloud-related and I think that it is valuable for customers. SolarWinds should continue in this direction.  

As far as areas that can be improved, we already have NetPath functionality. Maybe that can be improved even more to add more options for visualization.  

We have been using the solution since 2013.  

This product is very stable. It has been a proven software solution for a couple of years. 
We have sold this to global banks who use it to manage their global networks. For this purpose, it needs to be very scalable and very stable.  

It is a very scalable solution as well. It is meant for large businesses but small and medium-sized businesses can also use this product. They can all use it, but I see more and more big companies — enterprise companies — coming to use this software. This includes data centers, global industries, banks, other financial institutions, insurance companies, and big brand names.  

We do not have to contact the technical support for SolarWinds that I am aware of. Sometimes I have heard of support cases that are resolved really quickly by SolarWinds for their clients. We can not have any kind of issues in production. The company knows this so takes this responsibility for support very seriously.  

So I would say that overall they have good support.  

I have been working with another HP product called OpenView a long while ago, but that software is now disappearing and it is being replaced by HP with SolarWinds. The big bank I worked with has already replaced all the HP OpenView software with the SolarWinds product.  

The main difference between SolarWinds network monitoring software and other software is the price and the ease-of-use of the tool. The software has also been made by network engineers for network engineers. The designers are in the industry as well. So they speak the same language and the software is being endorsed by other IT engineers.  

It is very easy to set up. We also deliver consultancy and I recommend to all our customers that they have us involved in the configuration of the software. It is easy to install but then when it is running, it has to be configured. We are good at that.  

We recommend an integrator or consultant while deploying it because this part is very important. That is a bit of marketing, of course. But we are experts with a lot of experience. We see what happens with the customers and we already know what they need and why they have the product, so we recommend they take some help from us with this. 

We do mostly one-on-one consultancy with someone who can do the job. He is engaged for a couple of days and depending on the customer's requirements he takes care of those needs. For example, some of them want to have an integration with other software, like ServiceNow.  

If they want to have SolarWinds integrated with something like ServiceNow it takes a bit more time because it adds a level of complexity. Then the client should also get training in the new product. We provide certified admin training for the software. We train about eight people at one time and they get a certification at the end of the week after a five-day training. Having a SolarWinds certified staff member is very valuable for our customers as then they are experts as well in-house.  

My advice to people who are coming to SolarWinds is that they do a training on the website and take advantage of exploring the trial version. The free trial will allow them to use the product and get to know the features before paying for it. I always recommend that smaller organizations start small. You can make the initial purchase of a very simple license which is not very expensive. Then you can build it out later to a bigger scale and then use the software company-wide.  

So the advice is really to begin small and build it out and take more licenses as you need them. You can pick the functionality that you need at the current time and scale-out. Sometimes you need more functionality or you may need more analysis as well. You can take another module and put it into the Orion platform to integrate it. Sometimes a customer might say they are having some database performance issues. We use the Orion module DPA (Database Performance Analyzer) and then they get to see a lot of information about how their applications are using the databases — like an Oracle SQL server. Another company is also producing a database performance monitoring tool for Progress Databases and some other open-source flavors. So over time, the picture is getting more and more complete to cover everything that clients want to do.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this product as a nine. The reason I would give it a nine is that our customers are evaluating the software and they are big brands, like famous names in the banking industry. They really rely heavily on the software for their business. Before they purchase it, they go through a fairly strict selection procedure to get everything they need, find out if it is stable, and how well it is running. They make the product pass rigorous testing and evaluation. So if it is good for them, it is a proven solution. It is stable, scalable, reliable and not too expensive.  

I love the GUI. Almost everything is accessible through the web interface. It is very user-friendly. It is easy to drag and drop resources wherever you want them.

NPM also includes additional features that come in handy, such as a web SSH console, SYSLOG and trap collectors, and Wireless Heat Maps.

A new feature has now been included called NetPath. This allows you to see the status of a path all the way to an endpoint, even through the internet. This is awesome!

I like having the ability to add custom pollers for anything.

I also like how SolarWinds is integrating all of their products together so you don't have to go different places to get to each monitoring solution.

HA was also added, but there is still a little way to go with that.

I have been able to customize so many things using SolarWinds. I have set up baseline configurations and quickly remediated devices against them. I am using the SYSLOG and trap functions for my non-priority devices. I have NetPath set up to cloud services, so that I know who is at fault when something is down, such as a website, email services, and SaaS.

SolarWinds has also allowed us to be proactive, because now we can spot issues before the user tells us.

I think there needs to be more granularity in the permission sets in almost all of the SolarWinds products. I want to be able to specify almost everything that a specific user group can do. I am being a little picky with this, as there are some permissions that can be set. I just want more.

The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like.

I have been using SolarWinds products since the implementation of the Engineer's Toolset in one of my environments in 2004.

The latest release was the smoothest deployment I have ever done. I have now installed NPM 12.0.1 in 6 different environments and all went very well.

The only times I have had issues with stability have been when I did not apply adequate resources. There is no real all-inclusive recommendation to go by. You really need an experienced consultant to look at your specific environment to spec out what would work best for you. If you don't, you will probably have issues.

I have NOT encountered any scalability issues. I have always speced out at least double of what was required at that time. This has allowed me to add more and more to the SolarWinds architecture. SolarWinds does scale very easily with additional pollers.

Customer service has gotten a lot better. They recently revamped that area.

Some tickets take longer than I would like to get resolved, but compared to other vendors, it is very good. I usually have a major fix done in a few days. Minor things are fixed the same day. Then there is always the Thwack community that can be used to find answers to almost anything. I use that way more than tech support.

The techs in tech support are very knowledgeable. I have almost always had good experiences with them.

I have used numerous other products to do some of the same functions. I have used WhatsUp Gold, LogicMonitor, HPE OpenView, CiscoWorks, LMS, Spiceworks, PRTG, ManageEngine OpManager, Splunk, CA Spectrum, Zenoss Service Dynamics, etc. Nothing really compares to the cost-effectiveness that SolarWinds gives you. Their cost structure and customization ability is what sways me to SolarWinds. There are some areas that are done better in other products but overall, SolarWinds is better.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, as long as all of your devices are set up properly to talk to SolarWinds. However, it does get complex when you start configuring customizations for your environment. You have that with any product. The great thing is that SolarWinds ALLOWS you to customize.

I did implementation in-house, but I am not an average user. I have been using this product in various places for years. I would recommend a SolarWinds consultant to get the most out of the product.

I feel that you see your ROI in the first month. SolarWinds gives you a place to look to find your problems. It eliminates a lot of the guessing when troubleshooting. It gives you historic and real-time data. Alerts are your friend and you get alerted BEFORE the user calls to complain.

The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors. You get so much more for, in most cases, so much less. You can buy the level of license that you need and upgrade very easily when you need to. The support is also included for 1 year after you purchase the license, even when upgrading. Maintenance costs after that are pretty normal, at around 20% of the cost of the product.

Before choosing, I did an extensive evaluation against 9 other products. Most are listed elsewhere in this review. This was by far the most cost-effective solution that met all of our monitoring needs.

Make sure you have a very good machine for your database server. It will most likely use the most resources. As you add more modules, the database will grow and there will be more transactions being written with each module. You want to use RAID 10.

Ensure you have the correct resources allocated to the SolarWinds server, as well. When you spec out your machines, double that for growth. Once you start using SolarWinds, you will want to invest in other modules.

Also, you should really get a SolarWinds consultant a least for your initial install. SolarWinds is great out-of-the-box, but you really need some expertise to get the most out of it for your environment. SolarWinds is a great product that can do a lot. Customization is almost limitless.

The valuable features are SNMP monitoring of servers, CPU utilization, as well as memory and disk-space utilization.

Without NPM monitoring, we would be in a world of hurt and constantly responding to outages and unexpected downtime. NPM allows us to be proactive and fix things before they cause downtime.

On a fairly regular basis, we have servers whose disk drives begin to run low on available space. NPM alerts us when disk space is getting low. We are then able to free up space or add additional storage to avoid a problem that would be caused by running out of available space on the disk.

I would like to see NPM become better able to create dependencies automatically so that we won’t receive alerts for all devices.

For instance, if the power goes out at one of our locations, it would be nice if we could receive a summary alert. The alert could describe the possible causes of a power outage because NPM ‘saw’ our UPS at the site go into battery mode and then eventually it ran out of power. Intelligence like this would be a HUGE addition to an already great product.

I can’t really think of any else. SolarWinds is constantly improving and updating the product and we LOVE every aspect of it.

We have never experienced any stability issues with NPM.

We did hit the maximum number of resources for a single poller. However, all we had to do was purchase an additional poller to scale out NPM to support our growing environment.

I would rate technical support as top notch.

The setup is simple and straightforward. It walks you through everything that needs to happen and is very clear and easy.

SolarWinds is a bargain for the price. You can spend a LOT more on “more sophisticated” monitoring systems, but all you really get is added complexity and an inferior product.

Before this solution, we evaluated IBM Tivoli and WhatsUp Gold.

Go online, download a free trial, and give it a spin for yourself before buying.

• 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.

Our company specializes in the development of a SaaS site. Often times, we look for solutions to complement our existing tool based on customer's needs. 

We recommended the solution to a customer as an infrastructure configuration and monitoring tool that combines multiple domains in a single platform. The customer also wanted issue notifications to be provided in a real-time, viewable format. 

The solution ranks as one of the top five monitoring tools.

KPIs should correlate and combine in one simple report.

The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible. 

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable.

Our customer does not have broad scaling needs. They have fifteen users and the solution works fine with no issues in this small environment. 

The initial setup can take time because it requires proper security access from the customer side. Setup and implementation took our customer one week. 

Our customer utilized an internal team of four technicians to handle implementation themselves. 

Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated. 

I recommend the solution if it is the best alternative for a customer's environment. It is one of five tools that I suggest for assessment of fit. 

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use it for network monitoring, internet monitoring purpose and server monitoring purposes.

It allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance.

SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly.

The time monitoring could be improved from every five seconds to every second. If they can move to an every-second basis, then it will improve the monitoring analysis.

I would also like to see the security system updated to prevent virus attacks.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for around 10 to 12 years.

We have found it is definitely stable.

This product is scalable by purchasing extra modules for more servers.

They're one of the most responsive companies when it comes to support.

Positive

The initial setup wasn't complex, but not as easy as some systems either. It requires someone with experience with the network monitoring system. 

It was implemented in-house.

The charge is currently made per module for the product, and there is no option to buy it as a full system bundle which makes it costly. Also, charges are made annually, it's not a perpetual purchase.

It would not be affordable for SME level organizations.

The other solutions I evaluated were:

• PTRG
• Cisco
• WhatsUp Gold.

I would rate this product at 7.5 out of 10.

What I've found most valuable about the solution is that it's scalable.

An area of the solution that needs improvement is the multitenancy. I'd like to see more features that deal with multitenancy in the next release.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. 

There are issues with newer features so it can take a long time to adjust. The solution is in bad shape because of software hacks.

The installation takes about one day. However, it can take more than a couple of days to work with SolarWinds NPM or other products. The integration is part of the project.

We have specialists that take care of the installation. Usually you need two or three technicians to implement, depending on the company's experience. The main part is integrating the customization.

To get the positive business case within ROI, return on investment, sometimes also use the NCV, the net constant value.

There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer. I have customers that pay anywhere from 25K up to 200K, depending on the subscription model.

The competitors can be PRTG in combination with, for example, log monitoring features. There are lots in that space.

If you look at SolarWinds, it's a very traditional brand, and there are a couple of competitors who are far more modern, also in the layout. Some of the competitors have better visibility, and also have licenses more suitable for some customers.

We have a couple hundred customers using this solution.

Whether the solution is right depends on the customer's needs. What does he want? What is the company's strategy? What expertise does he have? Does the company have its own technicians? Does higher management have the strategy to help their specialists or not? 

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to try to monitor all of our AWS services, including the servers and the cloud. We use both, and this actually helps us with monitoring and certain applications.

The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.

I expected more from the solution. I thought it would be just like the Orion Platform. On Orion, for example, you can spot all the different widgets and everything from the dashboard. This solution is less simple. There are charts and lines and numbers. It might be helpful if the solution offered some more extensions, like a log that could add up your display on the dashboard.

I have mixed feelings about the solution. I started off thinking that this would be a replacement to all of our other dashboards, like Cloudworx. However, it didn't show me that promise. I wouldn't want to replace the other dashboards that we started with because it wouldn't generate reporting. It would be helpful if it would help visualize information better.

There needs to be more integration of widgets, especially for reporting purposes.

The solution would benefit enormously from more automation, especially around reporting.

SolarWinds NPM has been in our company for two years now, but we have just recently started to utilize the solution effectively. We've begun to get the full effect of the product, I would estimate, only in the past few months.

The stability is weak in comparison to other solutions. CloudWatch is far better in the stability aspect. The solution is a bit slow.

The solution has the potential to scale. I'm not sure if my company has tried to do so or if they plan on doing so, so I can't speak from any personal experience.

We are actually in the process of replacing a lot of items. This solution didn't do the things we expected, so don't know the likelihood of scaling it in the future, or continuing to use it.

For the most part, our IT teams are the ones that are on the solution. Not everyone in the company is on it.

Technical support has always been great. They are very responsive. We've been satisfied with their level of support.

We didn't previously have any other hybrid platform to monitor. We were just using CloudWatch for our AWS services. With SolarWinds, we have the potential to take a look at everything across the board. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was really smooth.

I personally did not handle the deployment part, however, the rest of the team who supported me had handled the process and it was my understanding that they didn't have any issues.

I don't deal with licensing or pricing, so I wouldn't be able to guess how much we pay for the services or if they are monthly or yearly. I'm not sure what our license agreement looks like.

We just use the product. We're not consultants or resellers.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we are currently using. It may be the most recent.

I do believe that in the future, users will gravitate towards using one solution for monitoring all the servers and applications. However, right now this product needs a lot of plugins. Currently, a lot of improvements are needed before the solution gets to a good place in terms of usability.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.