SolarWinds NPM Reviews

We use SolarWinds NPM for monitoring. We don't change anything, and we just look at it.

I like the tracking feature to track devices and see where they are connected. This is very practical.

The console could be more user-friendly. It would be better if SolarWinds updated the user interface.

I have worked with SolarWinds NPM for two or three years. 

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution, but it costs a lot. As long as you pay, you can scale it as much as you like.

Technical support is quite efficient, but they have to be a little more responsive.

On a scale from one to five, I'll give them at least four.

Positive

The initial setup was quite complex and took a while. You need an engineer to install the solution and the database and configure everything. We have only two people accessing and maintaining SolarWinds.

We had a contractor implement this solution.

I did a proof of concept with ManageEngine. The functionalities are similar, but the ManageEngine interface is way more user-friendly.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give SolarWinds NPM a seven.

We use SolarWinds for monitoring internet bandwidth, both outbound and inbound. We also use it to check out network tools like switches, routers, and other things including user monitoring for RAM and CPU. We typically get a report on the internet interface about, for example, HTTP traffic and other software traffic. 

The solution is easy to use. It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical.

It's quite stable and reliable. 

The reports are excellent. They give good graphical information. It gives a lot of great details about everything that's going on in my network and it's easy to read and understand due to its visual nature.

The scaling is quite good.

It's a very easy solution to set up.

If SolarWinds integrated with other solutions, for example, something like in a SIEM, security operations system, it would be more useful for customers. It would be ideal if they could integrate more with security solutions down the line. 

There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country.

I've been using the solution for more than five years at this point.

The stability and reliability of the solution are very good. It's got more stability than other software options. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is good.

The solution can scale well. It's not a problem if a company wants to expand it.

Currently, we have more than 50 users on the solution. 

Unfortunately, in our country, we do not have access to official support channels. We need to find answers online. It would be ideal if they could establish agents in the country that can help with setup and questions. It would be good for customers like us and good for SolarWinds. 

We did not use a different solution previous to SolarWinds. 

The implementation process is quite simple and straightforward. In fact, it's easier than a lot of other solutions. I wouldn't describe the process as difficult. 

The deployment is fast. It likely didn't take more than ten minutes or so. 

We have a technical team of about five or six people that are able to handle deployment and maintenance tasks. Two of those team embers are managers. 

We didn't need any assistance with the implementation process. We did not use any integrators or consultants. We did it ourselves. 

You do need to pay for a license in order to use it. We have a license paid for two years. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We're pretty happy with it overall. The downside is that there is no official support available in my country. 

This product is useful for monitoring our network devices.

It monitors bandwidth utilized on the network and tells us whether particular nodes or particular services are available or not. 

This product is of good caliber and we get better results by using it on our network.

Not many technical people are needed for administration.

The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring.

I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better.

We began using SolarWinds NPM a few months ago.

This is a very stable solution and we use it extensively.

SolarWinds NPM is scalable.

Up to now, we haven't opened any cases to tech support. Our local support is helping us to deal with the issues and if required, we will contact the vendor for support.

This product is easy to install.

A single technical person can deploy it.

We have a technical team aligned with our support SLA and they are helping us in this regard.

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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.

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 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. 

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.