SolarWinds NPM Reviews

SolarWinds NPM is generally used for network monitoring for all of the switches, networking equipment, as well as physical and virtual servers in the environment.

We use the top 10 dashboards on a frequent basis, as well as the ability to put systems in maintenance mode when we need to perform patching or other maintenance.

Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disk space statistics from servers and volumes.

The interface can be a bit cumbersome at times. There is a steep learning curve if you wanted to get into it in any depth. 

I would say that both the installation and use of it can be complicated initially. It isn't for someone who doesn't have a lot of expertise or knowledge.  It does have a significant learning curve.

After the initial installation, the configuration is where more knowledge is required.

The reporting could be improved. 

I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it easier to create reports or have a larger assortment of canned reports.

I have been working with SolarWinds NPM for eight years. Most recently version 2020.

SolarWinds NPM seems to be stable.

In our environment, scalability wasn't really a factor. The environment we had, and the method we used for the initial install were sufficient.

In our organization, we had about 20 users consistingn of IT server and network engineers as well as business analysts.

This is a tool that we utilize on a regular basis.

Although technical support is adequate, it could be better, but that appears to be the situation in the majority of businesses nowadays.

I would rate them seven out of ten.

The initial setup was somewhere in middle.

This solution is maintained, deployed, and updated by a team of six people, and it is also automated for operating system upgrades. We have one or two server admins that are responsible for actual application upgrades.

I would recommend having a review with a SolarWinds tech first to make sure you understand the system requirements. It would be helpful to work with them also in regards to unique configurations. 

I would rate SolarWinds NPM an eight out of ten.

If a customer is looking for a monitoring box solution, a medium-scale customer, and he's looking for something that can manage servers, routers, storage, applications, basic monitoring for applications, to cover everything, then SolarWinds is the right choice. However, he has to be a mid-tier customer. He cannot be an enterprise customer. If they are an enterprise customer, then SolarWinds is not the right choice as it will start to slow down.

It's a very good tool and a very stable tool. 

For a medium-sized customer, it has everything that you're looking for.

It has all kinds of functionality that any network team or monitoring team is looking for. It's easy to integrate with any other tool, as it has an open database. It's easy to implement and has a very nice user experience.

One of the problems that SolarWinds has is when the data becomes too big, it will start getting slower. 

It's not at all for enterprise customers. I don't recommend enterprises to go for SolarWinds. They should go for a bigger tool.

They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers. 

I've been dealing with the solution for ten years as a partner at least. It's been a long time. I've used it for about a decade at this point in that capacity. I've been dealing with SolarWinds for almost more than 17 or 18 years, personally.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We have three to four customers on the solution.

It's best for a mid-tier company, and not a large enterprise. 

Technical support is okay.

The only problem that they have is that last year they had a security hack issue. That is something that was a big problem SolarWinds in the market, as everybody is scared to use SolarWinds. They still have managed customers. Still, I have to say, there are very few customers that they don't have SolarWinds.

Whenever I go for meetings for security or monitoring or anything, I find some engineers still using SolarWinds. They may not be using it a lot, however, they are still using it for more than monitoring. Still, people did lose customers over it. 

The initial setup is very easy and quite straightforward. It's not overly difficult or complex. 

The implementation is fast and doesn't take more than a month or a month and a half. 

We only need one consultant to handle implementation. 

We are able to handle the setup for our clients. 

The licensing process is pretty simple. it's not too complex. 

We've done a couple of implementations at this point. We're actually a partner. 

For a mid-tier customer, I would rate the solution at about an eight.

I'd recommend the solution t a mid-tier customer. I wouldn't if the company was quite sizable. 

We were using it to monitor network devices and the monitoring of certain servers.

It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations.

They were pretty good at keeping up with things.

We have replaced SolarWinds with LogicMonitor. 

I had been working with SolarWinds NPM for five years. We stopped using SolarWinds in December of last year when it was revealed that they had been hacked with the supply chain hack and we turned it off. We began a fast-track process of trying to find something else that we could use to replace SolarWinds. We decided that we were no longer going to trust that their products have not been compromised.

At the time, we were using the latest version.

We experienced the typical ones that happen when a parameter is not well understood and that it is implemented, you end up causing issues.

The scalability was complex. 

We had 99 facilities that were a hospital holding company, and we have some 90 other facilities that we are the corporate headquarters of. In monitoring each of those different hospitals, there would be challenges with getting to all of those devices because of firewall rules.

The faculty would use it on a regular basis. There were approximately 90 users.

We contacted technical support all of the time. They were fine.

At the time I had been with the company for just over six years. They had only been using SolarWinds.

I have also been using VMware for a long time, and we are implementing vROps for alerting and monitoring.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It seemed that they nickeled and dimed you for everything that you were doing. There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price.

I would not recommend implementing SolarWinds because of the hacks, it is just not trusted.

Before they had the hack, the intrusion process I would have rated them a six or a seven but after the compromise, I would rate SolarWinds NPM a zero or one out of ten.

My team uses SolarWinds to do some of the network monitoring. I look at the reports.

One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives.

False positives or positive falses are a concern because you want to be as accurate as possible and get them down to zero, which is what you want on your network. Once a week with the reports there, is always a false positive or vice versa where it's showing that it's up and really it's down.

We are looking at how we can overcome that issue. Is it a work issue, or does it come from the tool itself? It will show that something is down when it's up and every once in a while if something is down it shows that it is still up.

We would like to be able to pull information from the vendor's OEM. It would be helpful to have crosswalks or if it could have a running list that goes out of models, software, and it can pull out the end of life, or end of service life dates. Also to suggest the recommend current version to use, that way you can do the comparisons without having to do a manual search. That would be beneficial.

Similar to other tools, I would also like to see a graphical map of your network that highlight in green, red, or yellow, and if you see a specific device you can click on it and it will help you drill down on the details of that device.

There are other things that it should be able to do, such as when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure and my server, and there are issues developing like the circuits degrading or latency is increasing it should give you a notification to know what is going on, rather waiting for the device to go down which at that point it would be too late. You want to be able to do proactive monitoring and reaction.

We want to get to a monitoring level where if it is monitoring the server, the CPU, or the storage level you could have presets where it will identify and give you warnings to say that you are at 70% or 80% storage capacity. This would allow you to get ahead of it before you run out. 

It would be the same for the CPU utilization and knowing if it is running 20 or 30% premiums normally or is it running at 90 or 100% and you have to add CPUs.

It could let you know if you have other tools or applications that are running too hot or if they need to be changing out that tool or is it something else.

To have something in place where it can help us to do some analysis and be proactive would be helpful.

I don't use this solution, I oversee a team who uses it.

We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM. 

We had one problem, but it wasn't a stability issue, it was a hack that occurred earlier this year that affected everyone using SolarWinds. After that, it took a bit to get it stabilized to where it is now. 

Our team that has worked with technical support hasn't had any complaints. It goes pretty well. 

I am familiar with several tools.

They will be putting NetScout on their network to look at some of the differences and to look at the pluses and minuses of each of the two tools.

I would rate SolarWinds an eight out of ten.

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.

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.