SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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.

Our installation is on-premises on a virtual machine. When we purchased NPM I was particularly interested in the features of Orion. We were going through a maturation process propagating the monitoring of applications throughout the server policy here at the university. It was more to monitor various applications that are primarily used for individual schools. For example, we have the school public health, and we have the school of nursing and they have different needs. You have all these applications like Banner and Canvas and other web-based applications that get used by particular areas. We are working with one application now for COVID-19. There is an application that has been spawned from that, but mostly our monitoring is for up/downtime, space, memory, availability, and those types of things critical for performance analysis. We are just now getting more into monitoring databases and a broader scope of applications as well.  

What I am mostly referring to is not the whole Network Performance Monitor suite. This is the actual operations monitoring piece of it. We have the network and we are responsible for set up and monitoring of those particular tools.  

We identified the five areas that we wanted to have be our key performers, like memory utilization, CPU utilization, and those core components. Just the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they were physical or virtual.  

We were looking at using DPA (Database Performance Analyzer) which is another component of the NPM and that looks like it takes care of an area we had not really dove into yet. But in talking to the DBA, they like another product that they want to use for the database monitoring. It is an Oracle product called OEM (Oracle Enterprise Manager).  

In talking to the DBA's, there was a lot of functionality that they were just used to and they had issues because they did not see some things that they thought were important but missing in the DPA product. That is the only thing I have run into so far with the product that seems to be a shortfall. Everything else is pretty good.  

I do not really have other suggestions for additional features beyond working on the development of DPA to make it a more complete tool. We are still learning the product.  

There may be some things that they could improve in the reporting aspect of the product. You can create custom reports and those types of things. But the product seems to be missing some depth in that area and it leaves a little bit to be desired. For example, the filtering system and formatting reports and things like that seem to have room for improvement. You are a little limited on the information available on that front and the utility could be improved.  

They do have some templates that you can use for report setup. It would be nice if you could maybe make your own. That might make it a little bit more easy to generate other reports that follow the way you like to do things.  

We purchased SolarWinds NPM (Network Performance Monitor) about three years ago.  

SolarWinds is a pretty good, stable product, but we have had some issues with support. That is especially true of the last release we upgraded to. There were some SQL issues that we were looking for them to help us out with and, finally, it took so long that someone on our internal SQL team had figured out what the problem was. So, I would say that the upgrades to the product itself from what we went through can be somewhat of a pain point and maybe there needs to be more rigorous testing.  

Typically, I don't think scalability is an issue. If you are talking about individual users, we have anywhere from 20 to 25 people across the typology. Probably one of the biggest users is a resource/research support group where they have various servers on the Orion Monitoring System. They actually take on their own responsibility and monitoring role for their servers. So, there are some groups that adopted monitoring through Orion, and then there are some other groups that have quite a bit more of a blasé approach to it and do not really think it is important.  

We have not had a lot of opportunities to use technical support. When we did I was not particularly impressed with their response time or expertise.  

The initial setup with Orion was somewhat complex. They do have templates in there that you can utilize, but most of those you are going to have to customize anyways. We found that it was easier just to go ahead and do our own.  

The way that I found it to be complex was that we had to do a lot of our own scripting to collect the data that we needed. Once you have got a template set up, you can pretty much populate that information to the Orion database, but I mean there is some pain to get started off. Overall we got involved in a year-long project where we were meeting on a weekly basis discussing all the issues. I think it took us a little over a year-and-a-half to actually declare success on the project.  

Only after that declaration of success were we able to get on to monitoring and dissemination of information to various users and get started with the monitoring. But our monitoring is a lot better than what it used to be. We were using Homegrown, Nagios, and Check_MK. People were not paying attention to alerts. I think the way we handle it now has really helped users mature in that way. We have still got a lot more work to do though.  

We started out with an implementation strategy, but there were some challenges when our directions got changed on us by senior leadership. We would have a plan and a direction and head down a path to implement those particular types of solutions. We would set up the alerting and monitoring and then three months later somebody would come up from an executive level and say, "Hey, we need to monitor this as well." So, we would have to make some changes just like any project. We had to learn to be flexible with it to meet people's needs, but having clearer goals from the outset would have made it easier and quicker in the long run.  

We did just about all the work on the implementation on our own with an internal team. Right now, I have got one person that is in charge of the actual product itself. They take care of all the changes, releases, upgrades, deployments, the agents, and those types of things. I have another individual who is responsible for creating tickets and disseminating the information to the owners of the server monitoring in various groups to get their alerts fixed. It does require attention but it does not take a large group for maintenance requirements.  

I do not handle the negotiations on pricing, so that is outside my realm of influence. I know that our initial purchase was about $200,000.  

One of the things I would suggest to people considering this product and products like it is having a clear agreement upon targets of what you really want to monitor. If it is applications or servers or whatever it is, it just makes sense to come at your choices with a plan. Implement that on the front end by picking out what is important instead of coming back on the back end and trying to do things after-the-fact.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this solution as about 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.

This solution has many different roles in our company. There is the application support group who configure it for monitoring specific services within applications and our desktop or operations group which monitors toner in laser printers. My group, which is primarily networking and servers, use it for bandwidth monitoring, server processor utilization monitoring, and for disk space monitoring. So we use it for a lot of different things. There are probably 200 services that are being monitored within our financial system to make sure that it is running optimally. I'm an infrastructure supervisor and we're customers of SolarWinds.

The outcome of using this solution is that we've been able to become more proactive on really resolving issues before users know that there's a problem. Outages have reduced by probably around 90% because we're able to take and proactively add space to a disk or add processors to a server before users know there's a problem. It means we can take something down at night and fix it, rather than disrupting work in the middle of the day. 

The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.

This is a complex product to set up and I think it's really too detailed and could be simplified. It's a change from their older product which was very easy to set up and manage. The new one is more difficult because it's far more detailed. The solution does everything we ask of it, but it takes a long time to deploy.

Additional features and improvements would be to simplify initial data gathering so that we can deploy easily and then refine it over time. Ideally, we'd like to be able to get something up and running in a week and then go through and decide, for example, to monitor things on one particular server and not necessarily on others. They could possibly create a generic installation and then let us go back and refine it. We spend a lot of time without having all of our equipment monitored because it takes so long to initially set up each server. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

I think this is a very stable solution.

I think the solution is easy to scale although it does require a lot of resources. When we initially set it up, we had about a quarter of the resources that we currently have and we set it up too conservatively which caused a lot issues. When the consultant reset it, we quadrupled the amount of resources that the system has. We have about 10 people that get alerts and are actively involved with the system. The system requires about 10 staff hours for maintenance, updates and verification that everything is working.

As we refine it to monitor services, we are going to increase the usage. So right now we have it monitoring a database server, but we're not monitoring all of the services within that server. So we might have 30 databases in there. We're not yet monitoring each of the individual databases.

We have very few issues that require technical support, we only contact them a few times a year. They generally resolve things pretty quickly and our issues are generally related to improving deployment. 

We used to use a product called ipMonitor, which is a much simpler solution. It's one-tenth of the cost and we used it strictly for alerting. It would tell us when a server was down, but not that the server was running at 70% utilization for the previous week. ipMonitor was strictly a something is working or a something is not working solution.

The server configuration for installation took about a week. And then another two to three weeks to get it installed across all of our servers. We're making modifications every day. We initially set it up ourselves and then about two years after the initial installation, we hired a consultant to redo the installation and make it more efficient because it wasn't initially configured optimally. It's the amount of detail you need that will determine how much time you spend setting something up.

Our ROI has been in the savings in downtime during business hours.

Our annual maintenance fee is USD $15,000. 

HP had a similar product that we looked at but it wasn't nearly as universal as SolarWinds products. HP has a product to monitor servers and a product to monitor networks, but they don't have one product that does both well, SolarWinds monitors everything very well.

I would recommend taking into consideration that you will need more server resources than you think. Knowing that means you can save on having to rebuild the whole environment later on. We ended up going from one server to four servers and it's running much better now. Don't skimp on the server resources you get with the application.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

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.

We primarily use this solution for network troubleshooting and monitoring.

The interface is user-friendly, making it easy to use.

This is a comprehensive product that covers security, networking, and more.

Having more technical and support resources available in Saudi Arabia would be helpful.

I have been working with SolarWinds NPM for one year.

Up to now, everything has been reliable.

In terms of scalability, it is very much so. It is not determined by the number of end-users for this type of solution, but rather, by the capacity of network flow. This is something that we expect will increase in the future.

Technical support is something that is very important for us. It is the number one factor.

We are dealing with the vendor directly and are satisfied, although having more local engineers, support, and other resources in Saudi Arabia would be helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward.

I find that the pricing is acceptable.

This is a valuable and powerful product that will provide users with more than they expect, all in one place. Other products, by comparison, often have limitations in the features. SolarWinds is comprehensive and covers everything, and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily used the solution for routers and switches.

The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.

From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. I think it was kind of a neat feature they added. However, it obviously depends on who's using the platform. I use it as a troubleshooting tool mostly for historical data. That's kind of why I have a monitoring system. We rely heavily on that. We are supposed to be on 24/7 so if some resource is knocked out we can just do troubleshooting using historical data. Performance Analyzer was one of the core features I thought was pretty cool.

The idea that you can automatically trigger alerts from the TRAPS received is still something that still hasn't really taken off or worked properly. We have to manually go into the database and create SQL queries or SQL queries, to be able to match those and trigger those as alerts. On the engine itself, the Orion platform, just being able to receive the TRAP and generate the alert or something like an alert is a manual process.

We have all of these other networks that rely heavily on their own vendor protocol for monitoring, and then what the vendor has in place is just a place to be able to northbound, whatever it received to another server. 

It becomes tricky when you're trying to, for example, dry contact monitoring for power, etc. Those are not necessarily your network, they're using dry contacts. Just analog. The vendor needs to get all the information, and then put it into a format that actually works to be able to be received by other networks.

Basically, it's just important to have some sort of TRAP alert generation. There's no point of us trying to do queries into the database.

Before I joined my current company, I had been using SolarWinds for about six years.

The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes.

In terms of scalability, there is room for improvement. When you start monitoring, if you have so many interfaces and you're trying to monitor them at a faster interval, or a shorter interval, you get to a point where you need to request another node.

If you have a router that has over 400 interfaces, you need a very robust server. If you don't you'll end up running into issues.

I've never really reached out to technical support. I understand that it's alright. The very few times I've needed assistance, I was able to get some things from the SolarWinds page and their knowledge base. That's where almost everything you would need is found. 

For the most part, I've not had issues that required me to go past their knowledge base. The other thing is, when people do try to reach out past the knowledge base, the support staff always bounce back with a question like "Hey, did you check the log?" It can be frustrating because obviously you've looked and that's why you're calling. Because the answer isn't there.  

For the most part, they do a great job of having people share stuff on their knowledge base. Once you get access to that, most of what a general user would need is on there, if they running into something. The few times I've actually worked with support, it was in relation to something that was related to an enhanced feature. The experience, overall, I'd say has been okay.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

It's easy. A user can download the file, then they simply click the installer and it provides simple step-by-step click-through style instructions. It's been very intuitive for the most part. Before installation, it's important to consider space requirements, resources for the server, etc. before jumping in. Users will also need to consider (if they're running netflow) whether to save the data on the email server or not. It's possible to run out of space that way, however. There are various guidelines, however, at the end of the day, the installation process isn't complex in and of itself. 

I no longer work at the company that uses Solar Winds, so I don't have information about what they were paying or what they pay now. The current package I'm using myself is a free package as I do a comparison between PRTG and SolarWinds.

We're in the process of doing a comparison between SolarWinds and PRTG. 

At my old company, we were always using the current version of the solution. We'd like to keep up to date with the latest releases. The company even changed over when there was a move from a 2012 Windows server to an updated version of Windows (16).

We had a single server located in one location and all the other devices were networked. Sometimes SolarWinds was used as a slot receiver and trap receiver for some of those devices that have their own "NMS" (network managed system). It's not really proprietary, but we had a northbound interface to be able to send syslogs or TRAPS. SolarWinds was used as the one central location to be able to receive and process alarms and alerts for any trigger actions.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. The solution is kind-of expensive, but at the end of the day, it's quite robust. It has several great functionalities. It has groups, maps, almost everything. It's just a matter of the price point that makes it somewhat prohibitive.

We are a solution provider and we evaluated this product, amongst others, for one of our clients. This product is used as a network monitoring tool.

This product has a lot of good network monitoring features.

The interface could be made more user-friendly. There are lots of features but using them is a little bit difficult. For somebody doing network monitoring for the first time, it is quite difficult to use. For example, they could add better dashboards.

We evaluated this solution for one month.

It was used on a daily basis during the PoC and it was stable, once the configuration was completed.

We did not test scalability during the PoC. There were four or five network operators and the infrastructure included more than 200 devices.

This product is supported well. The people in technical support are very good.

The setup is a little bit complex and it took me about a week to deploy. It took time to configure everything.

Expertise is required in order to deploy this solution. I received some support during the implementation and deployment.

The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine.

I also tested ManageEngine while I was evaluating SolarWindws, and I prefer ManageEngine so that is what we decided to implement. It was more user-friendly, less expensive, and we didn't need to bring in any help for deployment.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is if they have expertise in SolarWinds then they should implement it. If they do not, then they should look at another option.

Overall, SolarWinds is a very good product. However, compared to ManageEngine, there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

It would be nice if SolarWinds added some technical protocols like Modbus. The market needs a simple solution for monitoring a technical device.

I have been using SolarWinds for two years. 

It is an absolutely stable platform.

It's very easy to scale. The scalability is brilliant. If you need additional monitoring resources or if you need to plug in your secondary data center, it takes thirty minutes. It's easy to use.

I like SolarWinds support because it's 24/7. You describe your issues, your situation and maybe two or three hours later you can discuss a solution with a technical engineer.

The setup took approximately two to three hours. You need about two hours for tuning. If you use only two or three modules like network performance monitors or network traffic analyzers, you need two or three hours, not more.

The setup required two staff members. One network administrator who needs to pre-configure the network infrastructure and one administrator. You need only two administrators.

You pay for the license you need. You buy it and use. The next year you will have to buy a renewal.

I would recommend this solution to someone considering it. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

The primary use case of this solution is for network monitoring.

The biggest thing for me is that it provides enough information for me to monitor. It alerts and provides you with the information that you need.

SolarWinds is one of those tools that work across the spectrum with different products, such as Cisco HP.

It is very customizable. I am quite happy with what it gives me.

I can say that SolarWinds is good on the market, but it's also expensive. The price is an issue.

It would be nice to have the device tracking software as part of the Network Monitoring suite. If you go with Spiceworks, which a free shareware product, they will give you all of that type of information. They will tell you that this is all of the features you have and this is what is up and what is down, and they will tell you if the device is a laptop or if this computer is plugged into this port, which is handy. SolarWinds has that tool, but it's an additional license.

Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product.

The market is always changing, but one thing that would add value would be analytics. Many put that into a SIEM-type solution, but from a network point of view, if I had analytics on my network to expand with then it would be helpful. I would say normally this port does this much traffic and over the last six months it's doing that much traffic, and then all of a sudden, today, it's doing an amount that isn't normal. It means that something is wrong in your environment and you can start an investigation.

When you are dealing with a large network, there is a lot of information coming through. If you had a system that did some sort of analysis and collating of information into smaller blocks, you could quickly look at a dashboard and say these are ten points I need to go and look at because these are things that are not 100% correct in the environment.

I have been using SolarWinds for about ten years.

We have four or five users, and we have approximately 150 devices that it's monitoring.

I have contacted technical support once or twice. I logged a ticket and they responded quite promptly, and they tried to help me with it.

The only time that I have had any issues was when I was upgrading. I had one surprise in my ten year period. When I upgraded to a new version of the product, the upgrade failed. It leaves you in a position where you can't go forward and you can't go backward. You're stuck. You almost have to reinstall it from fresh and start over, which is not a great point to work from. You would like to keep all of the history and information that you have built.

It's expensive and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing.

They have additional modules, for instance. They have a device tracking software that is an extra module. It tells you which device is connected to which port on your switch. It's a module that you have to pay extra for, at about $2,000.00 to $3,000.00.

It becomes expensive when you add all of these modules, just trying to do work with basic network tools.

We don't have any plans to increase usage in the future, but we do have some additional plans on providing it as a service to other companies. That said, I don't think that we will be changing anytime soon.

I have recommended this product more than once. It's one of the better products on the market, and it also has an extensive suite.

If people are looking for network monitoring software, and are willing to pay for it, and don't want a free version, I have always said that SolarWinds is one of the better options.

I think that there is room for improvement. I have seen other products that do similar, where some elements are better and some are worse. I think that it's a good all-round product, but it can be better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.  

We primarily use the solution for detecting weaknesses and portal connectivity with our client's machines. We also use it to analyze the stacks of data to figure out where downtimes are and for how long. 

It helps us figure out how to fix problems faster than we were able to before.

The connectivity of the solution is very good.

The solution is quite robust.

My team has had a lot of issues with support.

The solution should offering monitoring for the database and for the TC (traffic controller).

I've been using the solution for three years.

The stability of the solution is very good. We haven't faced any bugs or glitches.

The scalability of the solution is okay.

Currently, we have ten people in our organization using the solution. They are mostly admins.

Technical support hasn't been the most reliable. Sometimes it takes them a long time to respond or resolve the issues. Occasionally they aren't able to resolve issues at all. The solution is great, but they're really missing the support piece.

Out of ten, I'd rate support at three or four.

We didn't previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward. We didn't have any issues at all. I don't recall how long deployment took. It does depend on what the company needs though. It can vary from company to company. Most installations don't take longer than six hours at a maximum.

Three people handled the implementation.

We handled the implementation process ourselves. We used our own team.

We did try out some other software before we decided on SolarWinds, but I don't recall the names of the other companies.

We use the solution on a daily basis. 

I'd advise others that if they just implement the software with an engineer that knows how to handle the installation they should be okay.

We've generally had a good experience using the product.

I'd rate the solution overall eight out of ten. I'd rate it higher if the support was better.

We primarily use the solution for our network.

All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great. 

The UI needs improvement, although in the latest version we installed I've noticed it has gotten better. 

Improvement also is required the monitoring of multiple interfaces from different devices. 

The solution is stable.

Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing.

We have been very pleased with technical support. They respond quite quickly and the responses are always helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had it up and running pretty quickly. The actual deployment takes a bit of time, but the initial configuration to import a few devices was about a day.

The solution was installed quite a long time ago. We may have used an integrator, but I don't think he did much more than I could have done myself.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use it for our network LAN and some problem that we saw in our switching networks.

We had some interfaces where the SFP Ports were having some problems after a while. We found which of the SFP Ports was having the error and changed it, so the bandwidth become okay.

The error handling interface has been helpful. 

Mostly, we use the bandwidth monitoring because we experience problems with the bandwidth.

SolarWinds is not an all-in-compassing product. We need other products like Cisco and HPE to work with it.

It couldn't find the error to the problem because it was missing detail in the reports. The reports that we received from it weren't clear.

We aren't getting the solution that we need from the device.

We are looking to change away from this solution because of the documentation and the solution doesn't have enough integration in our country. The documentation is too weak.

The stability is very good.

We use it every day. We use it as a monitoring tool.

One person maintains the solution.

The scalability is very good for physical machines. For virtual machines, the scalability is challenging.

We have 10 users for 2000 devices. Most of the users are admins.

We have no plans to increase our usage.

We haven't called the technical support team. 

There wasn't enough SolarWind's documentation to fine tune the system.

For networks, we prefer to use Cisco Prime.

For service devices, we use HPE OneVIew. This is helpful for HPE services.

The enterprise setup was complex because we have too many devices (about a 1000 routers). It is very challenging to tune all these devices.

Maybe the support team didn't train us well on how to use the product. We might need experts to train us.

Deployment took about six months.

We deployed it ourselves. For deployment, two people worked.

It is expensive.

We are having some problems. Our network can't find the problem. We will probably go use Cisco Prime.

We have also considered switching to Zabbix due to its support and deployment.

Some solutions are open source and free.

We use this solution for network node monitoring and alerting.

This solution has scaled as we have grown.

It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation.

This solution has a very large and active user community.

This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API.

Network automation is a hot topic now, and SolarWinds needs to be focused on developing the product with that in mind.

We are a larger and dispersed company so there are many, many network nodes monitored by NPM. It has been able to expand and scale to manage that well.

We use this solution to monitor workstations and to remotely perform workstation software upgrades.

This solution has improved our organization because it saves time, in that I do not need to visit every workstation in order to update it. I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates. I can also help customers remotely.

The most valuable feature is remote access and the fact that there are multiple options to choose from. These include VNC (Virtual Network Computing), RPC (Remote Procedure Call), and Splashtop.

This pricing for this solution needs to be better.

I would like to see integration with antivirus or other security endpoint solutions. There are only one or two solutions that they integrate with.

Sometimes, the responsiveness is slow, but overall the stability of this solution is good. 

We only have between one hundred and one hundred and fifty nodes, so it is difficult to judge the scalability of this solution based on that.

We have two people in the company who are responsible for this solution, and it is used on a daily basis.

We do not plan to increase its usage because we do not expect to increase the number of workstations or network devices.

Technical support is a paid service for this solution.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup for this solution is pretty straightforward.

It took about a week to set up everything. First, we started with all of the networking devices and then we moved on to the workstations and servers.

I handled the implementation myself.

The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them.

My advice to anyone who is implementing this solution is to be well prepared. You need to know your network infrastructure before you start implementing. Otherwise, it will take longer than necessary to set up.

This product does what it is meant to do, although it takes ample time to get what we want. I would say that whatever is indicated in the product description, it does well.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution for infrastructure monitoring, including servers and network devices.

This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments. We also use it to monitor our services. When a critical service goes down, SolarWinds will send us an email alert. It also supplies us with information that makes it easier for us to find the root cause.

The most valuable feature is the notification that we get, via email, when a device in our network goes down.

The user should be able to customize the dashboard to their own requirements. Right now, we have to design separate dashboards for visualization. For example, there is one for the environment and another for the infrastructure. I would like to design a single dashboard that contains my visualized environment, my physical environment, my services, and my processes. This would make the job of monitoring easier.

Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution.

The reporting is in need of improvement.

The stability is very nice. This is a good solution, compared to other monitoring solutions.

We have had no issues with respect to scalability. As we get more devices, routers, and servers, we simply add them to SolarWinds for monitoring.

There are nine people that manage this solution and receive email alerts. We have six people with read-only access in our NOC department, and there is also an admin console that the remaining three people are managing.

There are a lot of guides online, and whenever we have issues we consult them. Most of the guides are "do it yourself", and we have not encountered any problem that has necessitated contacting technical support.

Prior to this solution, we were using HP NNM, the Network Node Manager. With HP the monitoring was in silos, whereas SolarWinds gives us a unified dashboard. This is the reason that we switched.

The initial setup for this solution is very straightforward.

The time required for deployment depends on the number of devices that you want to monitor. For example, if you want to monitor a hundred devices then I think that it will take three or four days.

In our environment, we are monitoring more than four hundred servers and approximately two hundred network devices. Our deployment took about three weeks to complete.

Two or three staff are suitable for deployment.

We handled the implementation in-house.

We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap.

In addition to this solution, we evaluated SCOM. We found that SolarWinds is better.

SolarWinds is a great solution, and I think that for anybody looking for a nice infrastructure monitoring tool, this solution will do the job.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am working at a company which is an Internet service provider (ISP). So, I'm monitoring the traffic on some nodes, like switches, routers, firewall, the traffic, and the CPU.

I am using the latest version, which I just downloaded from their site.

There is a customization feature, but it is not a good feature. While it's somewhat good, it is too complicated.

The aesthetic widgets should be dynamic widgets, so the customization can be even more customizable.

It is stable.

It does not take much staff to maintain.

It is scalable, but my network is not that big. We have just a few nodes.

For technical support, we are dealing with someone in Ireland. I have not always received responses to my inquiries.

I previously used PRTG, but PRTG is now forbidden in Libya. So, we switched to using SolarWinds and ManageEngine OpManager.

The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour.

We used a SolarWinds reseller for the deployment in Libya. We found them on the SolarWinds website.

The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it.

PRTG is easier to use, but SolarWinds is more customizable. SolarWinds also has more features, but they are complicated to use.

We are just trying the demo. I am not going to recommend this to my company because PRTG is much easier. We're looking for something that is very easy to export the reports from the dashboard. SolarWinds is sort of complicated.

If you are looking for something which is very customizable for the customization of your network, then you should go with SolarWinds. However, overall, the customization feature is also a disadvantage because it can be very complicated.

The primary use case is to to know what nodes or devices are up or down in our environment. I can also provide a performance report, if needed to anyone who asks, by pulling it out from SolarWinds NPM. We have it integrated with other SolarWinds products, like NDM.

I have been using the solution for the last seven years. The company has been using the solution for over nine years now.

This solution provides us with proactive reports.

We use it to understand our historical reports, since we keep these reports for 365 days per our compliance requirements. We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future.

At this moment, we are facing some problem with Zoom and our web content sync. We are having trouble with the quality of our user experience. A lot of users are reporting that their calls and screen shares are getting disconnected, and it is happening very frequently. Therefore, I would like to monitor the Zoom application from SolarWinds NPM. Unfortunately, it doesn't have this capability right now, and I had to find another application for this.

We would like a single application from SolarWinds that incorporates all their products.

It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. While it is very flexible, and you can do lots of things with the SolarWinds, the down side is that the product can be unusable. Also, sometimes, the performance is slow. In comparison, I have tested some Unix-based applications, which are very quick. However, SolarWinds is Windows-based, so we are seeing a lot of performance issues.

The scalability is good.

A number of times, I have contacted SolarWinds technical support. Depending the issue, sometimes they will just ask me for the diagnostic. However, if we call support for critical issues, we expect immediate solutions. However, sometimes in these cases, they still just ask us for the diagnostic report and tell us that they'll get back to us within 12 to 24 hours. But, if we are in the critical state, we need to answer to our management about what is happening. We cannot wait 24 hours. That is too much time for us. There are times that they do resolve issues quickly. Therefore, sometimes they are good, and sometimes they are bad.

We used to be on NetIQ, but were scaling very fast. This product was very scalable and flexible, which is why we went for it.

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex.

The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now.

We are currently exploring New Relic as an alternative product. The Zoom monitoring issue is one of the reasons that we are looking at New Relic and willing to pay their higher price.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support and flexibility.

Server and network monitoring.

• Single pane for monitoring
• Scalable
• Creates new business opportunities.
  

Monitoring.

More MIBs.

We use NPM to monitor our enterprise for up/down status on network devices.

We consolidated five different products into a series of applications which helps us monitor our production network.

Dashboards are very useful.

SolarWinds should have integrations back into products like ExtraHop, VIAVI, Riverbed, and NETSCOUT.

We monitor five firewalls and five switch stacks in five offices. We also monitor around 30 servers that are both physical and virtual. Most of them run Windows Server 2016.

The data available per device is particularly valuable when trying to determine what caused a problem.

• Performance history is the most valuable feature, especially when tracking down a problem. 
• Root cause analysis is very valuable to us.
  

Stability is an issue. We have installed SolarWinds (Server 2016) on a dedicated physical server and as a virtual machine in a brand new Hyper-V environment with brand new servers. We only monitor five firewalls and 30 servers. In both installation scenarios, SolarWinds randomly starts reporting falsely that devices are down. We have to bounce the server, and then it behaves for a while. SolarWinds support was no help. So, we are looking for a replacement.

My primary use case for this is for monitoring router switches, and using the solution to support the collection of this information for us.

It can even support Windows or monitor a Windows server, even on the application level, because they have this module called Server Application Monitor. You have WMI support. You can even monitor performance centers. You can also look at the process monitors, if it is processing or not. It's quite powerful. 

Also it supports IP SLAs, so you can have even more information from a remote site. You
can monitor something like the performance, like mid-latency and other stuff.

When you buy the product, there's a lot of things. You can configure a lot. There's some variable in the report so you can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL. 

Of course, if you have a small team and you have so many sites to monitor, then the
alerts will help you already. Let's say you're monitoring MPRs out there, you know
that the neighbor route could go down, so you know the site is already on a secondary
link instead of primary. You are aware of what's going on, or if things go down, then you
can react quickly.

I think it's a great product. It has ease of use. Just add the IP with the correct credentials or SAS and multistring, and you can already collect all that information including you have NTA, then you're going to have NetFlow. Anything that has an IP that you want to monitor up or down, they can monitor it. If you have SNMP support, they can also collect the information for you.

Also it supports IP SLAs, so you can have even more information from a remote site. You can monitor something like the performance, like mid-latency and the like. You can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible, a flexible solution. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL if you need to.

Also' maybe if SolarWinds would have something you may subscribe to that would be like a polling engine on your site, so all the reporting would go directly to SolarWinds, They could then manage the database and everything else. That would be a nice asset to have.

The only other issue I have is that sometimes when upgrading, it becomes complicated to manage the upgrade.

You sometimes lose some statistics, but if you have HA, then you have a backup that will pick up the monitoring. I think it's going in the right direction.

I only use a single instance at the moment, but I see there are some things there like HA that is quite interesting. Of course, it will cost more to support, but if the company wants it, then maybe yes.

Very seldom. I will contact them directly. Usually, the thing I notice in SolarWinds is you go to the community, it is called THWACK. I never personally contacted tech support.

It's simple. I installed it. You just look at documentation, install a database, install the server and add the NTA. They have some recommendations, a separate database, but we didn't follow them. We just set up with the same server. Yes, it's easy. It's only the upgrade from the older version to the newer version where things start to get complicated.

It's a bit tricky when you go to the cloud already. I don't know what's the right metric myself, what should you be monitoring. Then, the newer trend right now is they don't even have the concept of a virtual machine. Some deployments, they will just have containers, and a container can be on any machine that they can shoot up anytime and deploy the apps there. But, my question is: How do you monitor the performance? What metric are you going to use?

Overall, when considering a new solution, I always consider:

• Ease of use
• Ability for data collection
• Generation of alerts.

Our primary use case for this solution is for default of the stability of the network track.

If we need to plan the network, or measure our network utilization, SolarWinds enables us to do so. 

One of the best features is the reports feature. We can get an editor's report for the last five minutes, fifteen minutes, hour, month, or more. And, the correlation data that we can get from the different resources of data from routing, routers, swtitches and samples is really a benefit.

It would be nice to manage all network devces from just one single platform, instead of going to different platforms.

The solution is very stable. 

It is very scalable. For years we have not had a problem with scalability.

I am looking at other solutions, to compare. For example, I am currently looking at ManageEngine OpManager. We also looked at Zabbix

I would like to see this product becoming more flexible in the future. In addition, integration with other solutions would be helpful.

We're using it for monitoring network uptime. We were testing it out for applications and for servers, but that didn't work for us. We wanted a different solution, an end-to-end type of monitoring. We wanted to see the end-user experience.

It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network.

The ability to be able to control the network equipment.

It would be helpful if they were tied up with one of the hardware vendors so we wouldn't have so much to set up. Another feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows.

The stability is good. 

I'm part of the THWAK, a community that uses SolarWinds. They're okay. There are so many configurations there, although they didn't really apply to us.

We didn't have any network monitoring when I started with the company, and SolarWinds was already there.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor is support, onsite.

It was straightforward. You just install the application.

You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work.

SolarWinds is pretty straightforward. If you're a startup, you want to stand up a solution quickly, then SolarWinds would be good for you because it doesn't have a big learning curve to implement it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. They're pretty good but we really have pretty predominantly Cisco equipment, so Cisco would offer a better free view of the equipment right now.

Its GUI is very user-friendly. No special training is required to use this product. It is very simple to use and has rich GUI performance reports.

They should increase its accuracy rate as SolarWinds's monitoring accuracy is not good if you compare it with other tools, like NNM/ScienceLogic/Zenoss.

I have used the following versions of SolarWinds: NPM, SAM, NTA, and IPAM for two years.

SolarWinds tools are very stable.

No issues in the tools. 

It is fully depends on the costing, customer, and architect.

It is straightforward.

It fully depends on what the customer wants.

Before choosing a product, I would want to evaluate it and check all requirements. Then before implementation, clear all the customer requirements accordingly. 

I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable. The advanced alerting and notifications capabilities are helpful as well. Devices can be discovered automatically on a schedule, and grouped by vendor automatically, which makes it very easy to track down devices. The customizable dashboards and reporting are flexible and tend to come in handy as well.

SolarWinds NPM allowed the IT department to take a more proactive approach to troubleshooting, and gaining insights on device availability. We were able to use the integration with Storage Manager and Virtualization Manager to gain valuable insight into our storage and virtualization environments. We were able to readily pull reports on device availability, and other metrics, to provide to our senior management staff and external security auditors.

The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application. The SolarWinds Orion/NPM installation comes with a few Windows client application “add-ons” that would be better served if they were built into the SolarWinds NPM web application. Another area for improvement would be better integration between Solarwinds NPM and Solarwinds NCM as it seems that Solarwinds NCM installs a separate version of NPM/Orion console.

I used this product for a little over two years in two different companies. I implemented the product for the first organization I was with to gain visibility and performance monitoring for the network and servers within our data center.

Yes, there can be issues with deployment if you try to install/uninstall or re-install under different account types (i.e. Local Administrator vs. Domain Administrator). I would recommend sticking to one or the other and you won’t run into any problems.

I have never had an issue with stability or performance. I recommend following the SolarWinds documentation (which is very detailed) and you can be assured not to encounter a single issue in regards to stability.

We setup a standalone instance of SolarWinds NPM. However, SolarWinds NPM offers a couple of different HA architectures that will allow you to scale locally (within the same data center) or globally (across multiple data centers in different geographic locations).

The customer service experience was always top notch and I don’t recall ever having a bad experience. The customer support staff were friendly, courteous and always there to help you out. It was also very easy to get in touch with a technical support engineer, all who seemed very knowledgeable, within just a couple of minutes or less.

SolarWinds technical support was one of the best support departments I’ve ever dealt with. All of the technicians were very knowledgeable and technically capable. Also, when you call into their technical support number, you don’t have to jump through multiple departments to get to a technician, which is very nice and not the same with other vendors.

No, SolarWinds NPM was the first network/server monitoring product that was brought into the organization. Other network monitoring products were researched, but didn't have the feature set, didn't seem as easy to use or as robust as Solarwinds NPM.

It was very straightforward, as you basically just have to start up a Windows Server, and click through the SolarWinds NPM installation wizard before you are ready to configure. You can configure most of the basic settings using the installation wizard (i.e. the database storage location).

We implemented it using an in-house team. It should not be necessary to use a third-party team unless you are performing a massive roll (5000+ endpoints) out across multiple sites.

I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years.

We also evaluated ManageEngine OpManager and AdRem NetCrunch before deciding to purchase SolarWinds NPM in conjunction with the SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) module.

If you’re looking to get a lot more insight and visibility into your network devices, servers, applications, and other devices, along with real-time alert notifications, SolarWinds NPM should be towards the top of your list. You will be able to view devices by type or by location and poll all sorts of different data using SNMP or WMI or other methods. Out of the box, you will also receive customizable dashboards, alerting, reporting, and Active Directory integration.

• It is centralized with a dashboard.
• Global network device availability
• Availability alerts via emails and dashboard
• Alerts you when an IP conflict occurs
• Identifies the culprit by MAC address, device type, switch port, and Wi-Fi SSID
• Isolates the offender using a remote port shutdown
• Provides a centralized view on alerts, state, health and performance of the network devices.
• Real time network updates and easy to use
• Monitors packet loss, response time, and performance of devices
• In-depth traffic reports to pinpoint bandwidth issues before it affects end-users.
• Helps administrators to identify and fix bandwidth issues faster.
• Aids in capacity planning
• Auto discovery of devices

The old version was a proprietary system, had limited device visibility, no centralized SysLog, SNMP v2, had per campus monitoring system, no Wi-Fi visibility, and had limited licenses compared to the new version, which is multi-vendor, has a customized dashboard, centralized SysLog, SNMP v3, Centralized Monitoring System, Wi-Fi visibility, and Enterprise Licensing.

We need to investigate technology changes everyday.

Since 2014.

Always stable.

100%. It shows all incidents.

Yes. We still use those as backup: SCOM and Omnivista.

Straightforward, no training needed.

Yes, we did: PRTG and Observer.

The free trial is there to test the product.

Interactive network map dashboard. 

Provides instant visibility to our support team across all the networks we monitor, allowing us to zero in on the most urgent issues and easily identify root causes of problems. 

7 years. 

No

No

There are some issues when trying to monitor multiple networks with the same IP ranges. The solution for this is to purchase additional modules.

Initial setup was straightforward, but this is s big system, ans we've spent years customising and tailoring the software to work the way we like it. 

Significantly reduced support costs, and faster response times when there is an issue. 

Its not the cheapest on the market, but its certainly among the best. 

The ability to monitor multiple devices using SNMP v3 and HP Procurve SFlow as well as multiple setups for different technicians.

We only use SNMP v3 and all of our devices are HP. Not every technician needs to see everything or have control of everything.

Technicians are aware of issues and 90% of the time exactly what caused the issue. Repairs can be scheduled ahead of time and RMA’s can be filed without the technician having to drive to the site only to find out it is a bad power supply or fan in a switch or server.

The speed needs improving. If you have a very large network and are monitoring a lot of devices the dashboard responds slower.

We have been using the solution for almost four years.

We had some stability issues.

We had some scalability issues. The cost for monitoring interfaces is ridiculous.

Technical support is not exactly the fastest. You create a ticket in the morning and probably get a response by e-mail from the actual technician the following day.

We were using Intermapper previously.

The setup was straightforward.

The pricing for monitoring large amounts of equipment is not bad but when you want to monitor the actual interfaces of those devices the cost goes up.

We did not look at any alternatives. This was a government project and only one company responded to their request.

Make sure you have several servers. You must have the actual platform on a separate server from the database. You will need a separate database server for each module you activate such as flows. There is a very big footprint.

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.

An easy-to-use interface for both admins and users is key. Adoption of any product can be constrained by a UI that is neither intuitive nor visually engaging. The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products.

We used a monitoring platform from an enterprise vendor that was so complex to manage that we struggled even to deliver the base infrastructure monitoring services. This is not a unique position as many IT departments manage by the mantra of "Nobody was ever fired for recommending [insert enterprise vendor here]".

In a few short years, SolarWinds has empowered us to provide robust infrastructure monitoring, including a converged view of our servers, both the physical and virtual servers, and the storage and application environments.

• Real-time analytics is the major weakness of the SolarWinds NPM platform today. They've done a fantastic job enabling the collection of data. Users are now demanding the ability to generate their own graphs, views, and so on; all of this must be done by an admin today.
• Scaling to the enterprise level is also an issue. SolarWinds NPM officially supports up to 100K elements (the number is unofficially about 50% higher), but enterprise customers could scale beyond that limit. However, this would only be applicable to environments with extensive interface monitoring requirements (where every interface is an element) or there is a node count > 10,000. SolarWinds is committed to growing that threshold in the near future, but no official announcements have been made.
• Enterprise customers would also like to see high-availability and fault-tolerance. HA v1 was implemented in the latest release at an additional cost. FT has yet to hit the current release but is something we regularly discuss on the Thwack forums.

I have been using various versions for the past 10 years.

We are currently using:

• SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor 12.0.1
• SolarWinds Server & Application Manager 6.3.0
• Storage Resource Manager 6.3.0
• Network Traffic Analyzer 4.2.1
• Virtualization Manager 6.3.1.575

Scalability and HA will impact larger customers. The current HA release requires the redundant nodes to be on the same VLAN. This limitation is being actively addressed in version 12.2 which is in beta testing as of the writing of this review.

Scalability is fit for most customers with capacity for over 10K devices (~100,000 elements). As with all applications running at scale designing your infrastructure is key. The published specs will need to be tuned for your environment at both the polling and database layer to push your implementation beyond 10K devices. (See notes below on scalability)

Again, enterprise-scaled customers are probably the only ones to notice issues here and it usually happens post-upgrade. We process 4,000 transactions per second in our monitoring environment and that scale exacerbates any code inefficiencies or bugs. However, the platform is generally very stable and any issues are dealt with rapidly via tier 3 support and the development team.

SolarWinds NPM officially supports up to 100K elements (the number is unofficially about 50% higher), but enterprise customers could scale beyond that limit. However, this would only be applicable to environments with extensive interface monitoring requirements (every interface is an element) or a node count >10,000. SolarWinds is committed to growing that threshold in the near future, but no official announcements have been made.

Virtualization Manager can scale almost infinitely, but we found that it performed best, especially when integrated with the SolarWinds NPM framework, with more moderately sized vCenters rather than a fewer large vCenters.

Customer service is exceptional if not a little too communicative at times. SolarWinds does an exceptional job of engaging their customers.

Technical support is currently the achilles heel of SolarWinds.

• Non-critical issues can be handled through an extremely active and passionate user forum (at thwack.solarwinds.com), but actual technical support requires engaging their team via a case that can be opened from the support portal or by phone.
• Every customer receives the same level of support regardless of their size, and there is no option to purchase 'advanced' support at this time. Enterprise customers will find this model challenging. This is mitigated by hiring experienced SolarWinds engineers, especially SolarWinds MVPs.

Developing an enterprise support model with measured and reported SLA and OLA targets should be at the top of the SolarWinds support model to do list.

In every case where I have used SolarWinds, I have displaced an enterprise platform from a larger software company including, but not limited to, IBM, HPE, NimSoft, and so on. I've also displaced segment competitors because of the aggressive pricing model from SolarWinds and their favorable cost-to-value ratio.

The initial setup is as about as easy as they come. SolarWinds products are renown for being easy to install and configure, and for rapid time-to-value; but the devil is in the details.

As an experienced enterprise engineer, I often see inexperienced engineers jump into the product and start producing metrics that add value under the assumption that everything out-of-the-box adds value. This is not the case; and it is a weakness of the installation model. Customers can be lulled into a false sense of success by their rapid deployment and TTPP (time-to-pretty-pictures). Understanding the data is just as important, perhaps more important, than getting the data.

We implemented through an in-house team but that team consisted of a lead engineer who is now a SolarWinds Head Geek. You can absolutely deploy this without professional services but depending on your timeline, objectives, and workload within your organization you may need to engage the services of a consultant. There are many freelance and corporate freelance options out there but be sure to ask around about their experience.

Reduced annual support costs by 75% year-over-year based on our prior solution.

The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs. The first year of maintenance is included in the initial purchase. This helps drive down the ROI in the first year. Subsequent years are a percentage of the retail cost. They are on par with similar service offerings from other companies.

We considered options from most major vendors. SolarWinds won out because of the low price-to-value ratio; and the immediate and long-term cost savings made by displacing other products.

Avoid the urge to go quickly. Take the time to forecast your growth in the next 12-24 months and plan the infrastructure for that target. Always follow the size and scaling recommendations, especially for your database environment. Do not use RAID5 for your database as the transactional environment or SolarWinds Orion will overwhelm your storage environment.

It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass. The user interface is logical and standardised; if you know one module, you know the others. Everything is customisable. Support techs are great.

It can be selectively focused. At one stage, it simply highlighted full boot volumes, and steadily increased to now analysing poorly performing web pages & SQL queries. It’s what you need it to be & when you need it to be that.

Server stability dramatically improved, additional bandwidth was purchased where needed, and ESX resource was clawed back to be re-assigned, so system performance was improved and new hardware purchases were postponed.

Time: A worldwide deployment can be confusing for dispersed users with non-local times. Each node should have a local time (with summer offset if appropriate) & each user should view & report in their local time. This means that the database must record metrics in Universal Time and that each node must be assigned an offset with user viewing based on their local time. It’s a significant re-write, but is essential to attract global customers.

We have been using various modules since 2003. Right now, most modules are at the latest version including IP Address Manager 4.3, Network Traffic Analyser 4.1.1, Network Performance Monitor 11.5.2, Server and Application Manager 6.2.2, Network Configuration Manager 7.4, Web Performance Monitor 2.2.0, Voice and Network Quality Manager 4.2.2, User and Device Tracker 3.2.3 plus Virtualisation Manager v7, Additional Polling Engines, Additional Web Servers and the Engineers Toolset.

I have only rarely encountered stability issues.

I have only rarely encountered scalability issues.

The quality of the support staff is exceptional and their dedication to improve the client’s installation is outstanding. The community site must be unique in the way that customers, SolarWinds engineers and SolarWinds managers interact.

I have been forced to use a variety of other products with other clients, but most have migrated to NPM after an evaluation. Simplicity in use, in administration & the ability to present anything that management or the business wants is a killer to other products.

Initial setup was simple. Run an evaluation & win the team over, then procure the hardware/VMs/licences & follow the books.

SolarWinds used to make a big thing about “20% of the cost for 80% of the functionality”. I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products.

I regularly have to run gap analysis on other products, such as CA Spectrum, Nagios, Check_MK, OneSight, PRTG, and Munin, but NPM always wins. J

Download and run the evaluation bundles on a spare server; it‘ll offer SQL Express.

The ability to pick and chose modules per need, but at the same time close and seamless integration once deployed: While everything is pretty complicated and fast moving, we do not want the monitoring and management software to be complicated. That is the reason the ease-of-deployment and ease-of-use is extremely valuable.

Proactive alerting helps prevent outages to meet our SLA, as well as in forecasting.

Some features are missing (which will be in any product out there) but there is a community that either provides workarounds or the ability to request the improvement.

I have been using SolarWinds for nine years.

For the most part, it is just like any product and is as stable as it could be. At the same time, it is just as vulnerable as the infrastructure it uses (server/VM, storage, network and database).

SolarWinds has come a long way to provide scalability. What initially used to be for small enterprises is now much more expandable and can accommodate larger enterprises. The implementation is easier by deploying additional polling engines (of course, with limits like in any other product).

Other than some occasional delays getting hold of someone in the telephone queue, technical support is good for the most part.

We were using Big Brother, HostMonitor, OpManager and HPE OpenView. We migrated as a part of the initiative to consolidate the monitoring system into one platform.

Installation is very straightforward; however, upgrades are a bit tedious (though not complex). It is complex only when you have a large platform of monitoring systems. For a small implementation, it is extremely simple.

The key is not to look at the current situation but consider future needs. It should be aligned with the infrastructure growth. Unless it is a really small environment, I always recommend to go with the unlimited license because the elements get used up quickly.

I was using other products so I did not evaluate, per se. But I knew the difference between other products and SolarWinds.

It requires absolute thorough and all-round details on the infrastructure and its future needs. Once the scale is identified, get the right licenses and underlying platform (physical vs virtual and quick storage).

• If you are almost in the dark, SolarWinds can give you a quick view of what you have and you can start basic monitoring.
• The user interface is good.
• You can build a live inventory of the equipment you manage.
• You can start structuring and digging deeper into Network Performance Management and Diagnostics.

• It helped to bring a basic monitoring in place that could be a platform for additional information you need to manage a large IT infrastructure.
• IT network visibility can help the organization a lot.
• It provides a buy-in from other IT groups (database, Windows, applications)

Scalability: In general, the scalability for most organizations is OK.

The product is also used by larger companies and TELCOs. They encounter scalability and stability issues. You need a dedicated person or team to keep everything under control.

We have used the base product for more than 12 years.

You certainly can have stability issues. The system runs on Windows Server and a dedicated MS SQL Server.

You need a lot of polling engines for larger networks (50K+ interfaces). This will consume additional resources, such as licenses, support, and patching.

SolarWinds does not provide professional services. You have to rely on partners that provide this service.

If there is an issue, you will have a pretty slow response. You need access to the SolarWinds portal to register a ticket.

In general, the response time of SolarWinds should be improved.

In general, it is mainly switching from open-source systems to a supported system.

The initial setup worked fine. This depends on the system and scale you are trying to implement.

General advice is to build the monitoring as a layered approach.

Add devices/systems by categories, starting with basic monitoring ICMP and SNMP, and then add specific metrics to the system.

The pricing depends on what company you are. If you are you an enterprise or TELCO, the pricing is really great.

If you are a smaller company, it can become expensive and also complex to get it running.

For SMBs, you have to sit down and think what you are going to do. Some companies outsource a lot to get rid of the IT pain.

• Create a very simple requirements list.
• In general, do not start a paper comparison.
• Install the product or let someone help you with the install and configuration so you will get a quick start.
• Do not try to find out everything yourself.
• Based on what you have seen, you can build the so-called "gap analysis".
• If you go for SolarWinds, it will not solve all your IT problems. You will also need complementary tools.

At the time, we did not have a central repository for network mapping. This product help us with this and allowed us to drill down on the elements in the maps to get more detailed information.

It provided visibility into network performance, which at the time we really did not have.

Reporting: Generating reports could be improved.

NOTE: This is related to the version 9.5. I believe they are on version 12.1 and this may have been addressed.

I have used SolarWinds for 10 years.

I did have some issues with the stability of the database, but that was due to issues whereby nightly maintenance of the database was not running.

I had some performance issues but they were due to the need for addtional pollers.

Technical support is average. Sometimes it took days to get responses and the responses were via email.

I was using an open-source solution that was not scalable.

Setup is very straightforward and easy to install.

For the price, I would purchase the unlimited version especially for medium-size companies.

We looked at eHealth, CiscoWorks, and HPE OpenView.

Make sure you plan the implementation of the product; i.e., resources such as the number of pollers, add-on modules/product, etc.

The most valuable feature is the ability to use a few custom properties to manage multiple nodes and alerts; thus, saving hardware resource usage.

• Improved, more detailed service monitoring and reporting.

Dependencies: Created dependencies are not visible for management/editing by default until some tweaking is done. It would be better if this is enabled by default.

I have used it for months.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer service is good.

Technical support is very good.

We previously used a different solution. We switched for better, more detailed service reporting.

A vendor team implemented it.

In my opinion, one of the most valuable features of this product is the level of customization. From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization.

It has helped to provide a user friendly interface for support to drill down and see where the issue lies and remediate issues quickly. We have other solutions that might have features NPM does not but the front end could look confusing to an inexperienced user. With NPM, we are able to fine-tune what the support accounts look like so users only see the things they need to do their jobs effectively.

Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers (which have no connection to the public internet). Also, if you add a new license and don’t remove the old one first, NPM will recognize only the expired one and ignore the new one, which prompts an additional call to support.

Personally I have been actively using this product for a little over a year but our organization has been using NPM for many years.

We had some issues with getting failover polling engines working properly and were forced to abandon the effort. So we’re currently backing up data to a warehouse database but we currently don’t have any redundancy with our polling engines.

On the whole, NPM is a very stable product. Occasionally, we might have a poller that stops communicating with the mother ship but usually a little bit of basic troubleshooting is able to resolve the issue with minimal downtime.

This is one of the strengths of NPM. As our infrastructure grows, NPM is able to grow organically to accommodate it. Scalability is as simple as spinning up another VM, installing the product, and ensuring connectivity to the primary instance of NPM.

Customer service at SolarWinds is great. I have had several issues in the past and they were prompt, helpful, and were able to resolve these issues quickly. SolarWinds also cares about what their customers want from a network monitoring standpoint. Rather than release a new version and hope that this is what customers want, they hold regular sessions to show customers what they’re currently working on and can fine tune future releases of NPM based on the feedback.

As a company, SolarWinds goes out of its way to put a human face to their technical support staff. The main way they’ve accomplished this is by creating a community out of their customer base. Using their forum, Thwack, customers are able to interact with SolarWinds staff from numerous departments, including from support, development and marketing. I’ve been a member a short while and I’ve already been blown away with how tight knit this forum can be.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It’s installed via a wizard and walks you through the steps, installing the extras it needs to function along the way. Then, it’s just a matter of activating your license and configuring the front end web page to look the way you want it. Most of the complexity of the initial setup and configuration is from custom modifications done by us on the back end. We had to modify the database to get NPM to hook into our in-house alert management system. But, for other companies' environments where this level of customization is not needed, NPM has an excellent amount of alerting methods that work right out of the box.

We do all of our NPM implementations using an in-house team. I am one of the engineers responsible for setting up new environments when new data centers come online. I’m not sure if SolarWinds has vendor teams available that can do this function but as I’ve stated, NPM is designed to be unboxed and up and running in an hour or less depending on how much customization is needed.

Due to the large size and scope of our organization, our cost of using this product is comparatively high. Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines. Pricing differs if the NPM server is a primary or secondary polling engine and how many elements (nodes and interfaces) will need to be monitored by it (e.g. 250, 2000, or unlimited).

My advice to others before implementing this, is to attend one of their webcasts to get a feel for what NPM can do for you. The presenters are technical people who understand the product well and can answer a wide range of questions. Secondly, I’d make an account on their forum, Thwack, so if you’re ever stumped on an issue, you can pose a question to the community and glean information from other NPM users or from one of SolarWinds’ resident “Head Geeks.” Lastly, from personal experience, I would make sure you’re on good working terms with your network engineers before considering implementation. Like any other network management tool, you will likely run into firewall or connectivity related issues when adding nodes and having a good network engineer on your side can really make a big difference .

• Reporting
• Alerts
• Network map view
• Netpath
• Interface monitoring

With reporting, we are able to spool ISP WAN links availability for the month and make necessary deductions based on the service level agreement we signed with the service providers.

Alerts have also helped us to improve network performance, keeping everyone on their toes in resolving downtime before it is escalated.

I would like to see continuous improvement on the reporting and graphical views of customized portals.

We have been using the solution for ten years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

We encountered an inability to display graphical views of some customized reports.

I would give technical support a rating of 8/10.

We previously used WhatsUp Gold.

The setup is straightforward if you follow the OEM administrative guides and the server specifications and deployment.

Pricing is quite competitive. Licensing should be based on projected organizational growth.

We evaluated WhatsUp Gold and Entuity Network Management solutions.

Anyone planning to implement NPM or other SolarWinds products should download the evaluation versions which give you a 30-day, free trial. This will help you make an informed decision. This should also be evaluated with other network monitoring solutions.

I find there to be three areas in which this suite provides significant value.

It integrates well as an ‘everything’ tool. We all understand the concept of “jack of all trades, master of none”, but SolarWinds tends to cover 80-95% of everything across every module they have. This means that if I have vendor A for product A and vendor B for product B, there’s a pretty good chance they can integrate it with the rest of their suite.

For example, they have a network monitoring (NPM) core module that integrates with SAM (Server and Application Monitor) and NTA (Netflow Traffic Analyzer). This gives you a very good first view of an environment. It’s very analogous to SCOM in how complete it is with Microsoft products, but with none of the limitations. For example, SCOM doesn’t handle network equipment very well.

With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server. They can all:

• Be monitored as if they are on-premise
• Handle syslogs/traps/logs
• Monitor most applications out-of-the-box with a lot of flexibility
• See who sends traffic to whom via NTA.

All of this tends to display on a single page for each node that I choose to monitor. Every tool tends to build on one another and SolarWinds does tend to highlight where the tools integrate and how.

With staff that has some technical knowledge, this tool is pretty intuitive out-of-the-box. Getting people to look at it may be one thing, but getting those that are at least at a helpdesk level of knowledge serves to take them very little time to orient, if the tool is set up properly.

They have a THWACK support forum that is incredibly useful. I remember the days of trying to search for Microsoft problems and running into support forum posts that range from "useless" to “actually something that would harm your environment” with an extremely high noise ratio.

With THWACK, the developers will often reply directly in the forums with helpful replies. The community is also extremely helpful and fairly loyal. I’d consider it to be more like how I imagine that the Splunk community functions.

In a more recent example, we rely on this tool to let us know when a site is about to go down, before it does so.

We do this by monitoring when interfaces drop (multiple connections to a site) or when interfaces have received errors. Both typically occur before a site goes down entirely. It has helped us a ton to actually be proactive and not simply wait for customers to call.

I feel there are two areas of improvement. One of which SolarWinds employees will probably roll their eyes about and the other one that maybe they didn’t realize:

• If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools.
  
• For example, if you don’t have the storage module, you won’t be able to even do the basic monitoring (interface, memory, CPU, etc.) for a NetApp device that you can do for other device types that are covered in other modules. Install SRM and suddenly it works, like magic!
• I’m OK with the concept of “you have to pay for the storage monitoring if you want to do storage monitoring”, but this becomes an issue in certain areas depending on what modules you license. This is also something that people may run into the hard way if they didn’t realize that this was the case.
• Some of the older components are in need of updating, which is something they’re focusing on more and more. But there are some areas where new tools work this way and old tools work that way. Some of these have gone away little by little, like classic report writer (which was on the server itself requiring RDP) and the old “advanced alert manager” which required the same. In today’s environment, having to RDP to the server just to do things that you’d do on the front end doesn’t quite make sense. There are some that still exist, though they are lacking some modern features.

I have used SolarWinds for almost five years.

There are a few things to watch out for regarding stability. All of them are basic administration issues. For example:

• Do run configuration wizard after EVERY single module update
• Do not give every user of the tool view rights and report rights, etc., where people are going to be messing with everyone else’s views and reports (or creating reports that kill the DB).
• Do create custom views so that people aren’t seeing everything and stressing the web client, etc.

In older module versions, there were issues where upgrading from module version A to module version B could sometimes carry over old things that had a performance impact on the app servers themselves. But these days, you can blow away the install and do a clean one to fix that.

On new installs, as of the latest few releases, they upgrade everything for you and/or have smart installers to make this significantly easier.

Scalability is something that isn’t quite straightforward for new admins. But, you can either:

• Install an additional poling engine on a second server for more scalability
• Install an additional polling engine on the PRIMARY app server for more scalability (stacking)

I rate technical support everywhere from poor to great. Lately, it’s been getting better and better. But in the past, it was very hit or miss.

I’ve used SCOM and CA before. We switched off of both because they were awful. CA cost a boatload and had a very limited feature set.

SCOM requires too many people to be dedicated to SCOM to be of actual use.

Plus, the aforementioned scope limitations and the requirement of having to go through *every* monitoring pack with every affected group in detail, takes up way too much time.

The initial installation is super simple. Pretty much you install SQL on one server, the app on another, and then you’re done.

I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers. Sales will negotiate on new product purchases as well as upgrades. Also, remember you can always run a 30 day trial of any tool you want to consider without committing any money.

We’ve evaluated PRTG, CA, SCOM, and Splunk.

It’s a super easy tool to use, but you need to make sure you have a plan for what you want to do with it.

• How easy it is to get good metrics out of it.
• How extensible it is.
• There are many different ways to customize it to fit your environment.

Compared to many products, SolarWinds is very simple to use. When you add a node in NPM, it is easy to get it to start monitoring everything it supports and you very quickly see the results of this in the graphs and such. When you want to get some special things out of a box, let's say the number of connections on a ASA firewall, you can very easily add a UnDP, add it as a graph to your screen, and see the results right away. This is a real-world example, because the company I worked with was having Internet problems with our main firewalls due to maxing out the number of connections going through the box. Having it graphically presented makes it easy, though.

That was one way of customizing it, via UnDPs. Another, that I did a bunch of at my previous job, and ended up making generic versions of and posting on THWACK, is the ability to add new resources. Any given page within NPM can be customized by clicking "Customize" and you can add quite a few prepackaged resources to a page or change their order around to better fit you. You might even want to delete some. But, if you get to be a SW geek like myself, you start realizing that SW doesn't always display every bit of info that it has by browsing through the SQL tables and seeing what’s there. Nowadays, you can do this either directly with SQL, or via SWQL, which is a bastardized SQL that has pre-built relationships between the tables set up in a way that is very easy to leverage without complex joins and such in SQL. From that, you can do some very simple to very complex things.

An example of a simple thing I did, was I built a "CDP Neighbor" resource, which, if you click on the Node Details page, it tells you what devices are directly connected to it via the CDP protocol. Plus, SolarWinds made it simple for me to link to those nodes and you can basically traverse from node to node within SolarWinds looking at stuff.

Before NPM, we had to spend quite a bit of time using freeware tools, because there wasn't anything that offered the features we needed at a price point we were willing to pay. Most were far too expensive. Because of this, we only monitored some key devices and links. With SolarWinds, it’s easy to monitor everything and, with a little setup, everyone can help out. NTA brought things up a notch. Rather than seeing there was too much bandwidth being used and trying to guess what it was through diagnostics on the device and guesswork, we can see what is consuming all the bandwidth and easily relate it back to a specific user or device.

The module UIs can have different features based on what module you're in. I'd love to see feature parity between them. Selecting nodes, for instance. In NPM, you can use one criteria for grouping, while in NCM, you can group in multiple levels.

More granular permissions! I'd like to see a role-based system where you can granularly apply permissions for administrative tasks and be able to assign these roles to people. Just because you need to edit a node doesn't mean you should have full admin permissions!

Stability depends on the module/version. In general, it is very stable if you wait a bit before upgrading to the latest version and let some patches come out. There has been a problem in NCM when you deploy compliance remediation jobs to a large number of nodes that use config blocks that has persisted through a couple updates. But this is a pretty advanced feature.

We haven’t had scalability problems so far. The different jobs I've been in have had very different environments in terms of scale and this solution works at any level.

Technical support is very good. It might take a bit of time for initial contact, if you don't classify the severity high enough and don't call them. But a phone call will always rectify that.

At the different jobs I’ve had, it was a mishmash of different freeware tools and things like CiscoWorks/Prime or WhatsUp Gold.

Basic setup is a breeze for most folks!

In general, pricing is pretty good. Although, the jobs I've been at have usually had unlimited licenses. I have heard some people have issues with the pricing and licensing of another module (SAM).

We evaluated WhatsUp Gold and Cisco brand tools.

Download a demo and have fun! It’s easy to use and gives great outcomes.

The simplicity of this product is a valuable feature; everything you need is easily accessible and the maintenance is low. In addition, it is customizable which makes it possible to do anything you want with little work.

NPM gets information out fast, so troubleshooting time is reduced.

I enjoy their latest revamp of the alerting feature. However, I still think there is a little more that can be done there.

I have used this product for around 12 years.

We are currently using:

• Orion Platform 2016.2.100
• WPM 2.2.1
• NCM 7.5.1
• NPM 12.0.1
• DPA 10.2.0
• QoE 2.2.0
• IVIM 2.1.2
• SAM 6.3.0
• NetPath 1.0.1

I have encountered issues only with the Microsoft OS that it lays on.

NPM has scaled in pace with my business.

I would give their technical support a 7/10 rating.

As their customer base has increased, they have been walking through more basic troubleshooting. Thus, it takes longer to get through the basic checklists of questions that I have no doubt solve many of the other issues experienced by their customers and may not even be related to their product.

Initially, we used a home-grown solution. Since it was not scaling/developing with the rate of technology, we moved onto this product.

The initial setup was simple. I have also used Whatsup Gold and open-source Nagios; they were either too simplistic or too difficult to get actionable data.

The only thing I don’t like is that NTA license size is tied to NPM’s license size, since my organization's need for NTA is lower than our need for NPM.

We looked at other solutions, namely WhatsUp Gold, TNT software and Nagios.

Keep your imagination open and keep looking around Thwack; there are lots of great ideas in there.

It is an awesome production, I just haven’t found a way to do all my work yet.

The most valuable features are ease of implementation, strong out-of-the-box reporting, and the ability to customize the GUI.

From a platform standpoint, the integration of NPM with the other SolarWinds modules is very strong, seamless, and valuable in presenting a single pane of glass for network, application, and database performance and availability.

We're a small enough company that it would be difficult for a single person, or even a small team, to attempt to tie data together from different software products in the way that SolarWinds does.

We no longer have to ask questions about who is using bandwidth/CPU, what application is driving that usage, and how our databases perform as a result of that usage. We have completely eliminated any blind spots in the operation of our core networks, applications, and platforms.

I would like to see stronger integration with SolarWinds LEM. This would be a nice-to-have integration at this point. This is really the only product with which it is not integrated.

When one looks at the entire suite of SolarWinds products, what we've seen
over the past several years is an ongoing theme of integration - as
modules like SAM, NCM, IPAM, VMAN, DPA, and others benefit full integration
into the base NPM product - allowing a user to leverage
application/database-specific performance metrics into views, reports, and
alerts.

When I say that LEM would be a nice addition, that's precisely what I mean is
- right now, there is no method for view integration, correlation, or cross-platform data sharing between the LEM appliance and our NPM
installation.

In other words, say I'm looking at the Node Details view on one of my domain controllers. It would be excellent to have one of the
widgets in that node details page pull in the last XX events LEM has on
the node in question.

I have used NPM since 2004 and have leveraged it at multiple workplaces since.

We have not had any stability issues. It's been a predictably solid platform across software revisions, even with the jump from 11.x to 12.x. That upgrade also included a complete graphical update for the console.

We did not have any scalability issues. We're monitoring thousands of elements across three continents with one poller and we have had no scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 7 out of 10. When I get on the phone with a support engineer, I'm usually impressed with their level of knowledge in providing a timely resolution to customer issues. The secret is to get on the phone first if you need something solved the same day.

I've used HPE OpenView and PRTG in the past. My reason for switching was a combination of ease of use, customizability, and integration between network/application/DB monitoring and measurement.

The setup is straightforward almost to a fault. If you can follow directions, you can set this platform up in a day and start getting usable information.

It's not as cheap as some solutions, but the value you get is excellent. Licensing increases are largely painless and are easy to accomplish.

Identify the business/organizational problems you're looking to solve. Build your graphs and reports with an eye toward those problems. This creates business value almost immediately.

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.

One of the main features is ease of deployment. Adding new devices only takes a few minutes. This allows me to do my other duties.

We are now able to respond to problems before the customer is even aware of them. As an example, our VPN router had a memory leak which was going to start causing performance problems. We were able to get ahead of the complaints by restarting the device. We didn’t need to wait for a complaint from a remote worker.

NPM comes with a tool called Network Atlas. Currently, it can only link switches to switches and only if all the corresponding ports are monitored. I would like it to figure out next-hop devices, which other tools like NetBrain can do.

I would also like to see better mapping of devices and how they connect to one another.

We have used this solution for four years.

We haven’t had any issues with stability.

I haven’t had any issues with scalability. There is plenty of documentation available to help with it.

SolarWinds has a community called Thwack. That is where I get most of my help. I would give it the highest rating.

Before this solution, we used Spiceworks. SolarWinds had the nicest single-pane-of-glass monitoring solution, so we decided to go that route.

I was involved in the installation. After discovery, you select what you want to monitor.

Licenses go quickly. Each interface is a license.

Have a goal in mind. Prioritize your monitoring goals in terms of alerting, reporting, and dashboards. Then you can focus on completing those areas in order of importance.

The product is always being expanded and additional features are constantly being added.

It is hard to identify a single feature for each product as the three products function as a chorus to help me manage our IT throughout the enterprise. Nonetheless, here are the valuable features of each product.

NPM 12.0

The most helpful feature with in NPM is the NetPath Services. Having the ability to view the end-to-end view of the path for accuracy and availability provides me with the data to visualize an issue in the network.

NCM 7.5

With NCM, I am able to track the accuracy and changes to my networking devices to make sure configuration integrity is adhered to.

SAM 6.3

With the SAM application, the Application Health Overview feature lets me know that my production traffic is running as expected.

Having all 3 products tied together gives me the data I need to accurately pinpoint a problem within moments, instead of collating data from various applications and servers. The difference is five minutes with SolarWinds, compared to two hours without SolarWinds.

These three products have provided us with the information we need through a single interface to identify issues from server to network to remote site. They provide us with the intel we need to make better decisions on improving our network while reducing costs through under-utilized paths.

I would like to see more information on design, customization from the community, and a better certification department.

I have been using SolarWinds products since 2000.

Once I installed it as a high performance server, there were no stability issues.

Once I got my pollers deployed to different areas of the globe, the system functioned better.

Technical support is good, but I got faster answers from the community pages.

The SolarWinds setup is wizard based and walks you through each step. It will identify shortcomings with your system resources, but it could use a little more work. It would be helpful if the system would identify and configure based on a solution type, such as large (with pollers), medium (different buildings), or small campus.

Start with the three products and your licensing needs, and then increase capacity as you grow.

I would suggest the following:

1. Install the product with default settings
2. Build the database
3. Reinstall based on the needs and requirements of your deployment

The two most important features are SNMP monitoring capabilities and the beautiful web interface. SNMP is all about being able to access devices, it's a must have, and every monitoring tool will have these features. Not all monitoring tools will have a beautiful graphical user interface that includes charts and graphs and reports. It's very, very easy to read and work with. This is important because we are all humans, and we want nice things. We want nice gadgets and the people who are actually using SolarWinds are engineers. They are all humans, as well, so they want nice things.

It may sound trivial and pathetic, but it's really important. One tool can do a hundred times better than the other, but if the presentation layer lacks this beauty, then people just won't use it. They will be lost and they won't use it and they won't appreciate the complete power of the tool. The elegance and the way it's implemented is very important. It's very, very important from the elegance perspective alone, not just from a usability perspective.

There are multiple examples of how SolarWinds improves how the company functions. The most obvious is that the engineers are much more willing to keep an eye on network health and to work with the dashboards. That leads to faster resolution of problems and better communication between the teams. Instead of explaining and spending a lot of time, they can simply send the link to SolarWinds and directly access what they need.

Additionally, there is the flexibility to automate or semi-automate functions completely. As a result, we don't need as many people as before when we were working on the reactive side of things. If our service desk had five people before, now we have none. Infrastructure engineers handle most service desk functions, such as ad-hoc or BAU tasks. But we don't need dedicated service desk people anymore.

I work for multiple clients, so I'm just giving examples from them. Some clients do need to maintain service desk functionality as a business function. SolarWinds certainly helps to reduce the workload on the front end at level one and level two escalation. Clients have much more free time to focus on the things they like doing and leaving all the mundane tasks to SolarWinds to sort out. It's a definitely time saver. I love everything about SolarWinds.

We have been using SolarWinds NPM for about three years.

We have not had any problems with stability. I think the way it's implemented it's pretty robust. I started to use SolarWinds three years ago; not from the beginning 15 years ago. So, I don't know what it was like then. From my experience over the past three years, it has been a fairly stable system. Often, clients underspec the platform and SolarWinds requires quite a lot of resources, especially on the database and on the disk-use side, and it needs to be planned. Some customers simply get a box, install all the modules in one box and then complain that SolarWinds is slow. It's not SolarWinds. It's an underspec'd platform.

Some clients think, "Oh, it's all SolarWinds' problem. SolarWinds doesn't perform well." When I come to consult them, we quite easily find that it's the server struggling and not SolarWinds.

The bottom line is this: I am a SolarWinds expert. I know what I'm doing. They are not experts in SolarWinds. From their perspective, what they see straightaway is SolarWinds is not performing well and it can mislead them to think that it is SolarWinds when it's not.

Again, to summarize, I don't think SolarWinds has any performance issues or problems if correctly planned. Go through the documentation and make sure your environment meets the recommended minimums.

The most important point I'll make is that SolarWinds markets its product as an out-of-the-box, click-click-click, do-it-yourself solution. It may work like that for very small organizations, although very small organizations will probably go for Nagios or other free tools. For larger enterprises, this is not the case. Just clicking next, next, next to discover nodes, and everything just works, is not the case. It appears to be working, but when you go beyond that and start to understand how the workflow operates, how people respond to alerts, who receives them, who is not receiving them, how to manage thresholds and many other issues, they all add to a much larger picture. That then becomes a not-out-of-the-box solution.

To work with it properly, you need to have extensive skills and knowledge around the SolarWinds product. I'm not saying that you need to be a geek who knows coding and APIs. But you do need to be well aware of what's possible. That helps you set up SolarWinds the way the client wants. Once it's set up, running and maintaining it takes pretty much no time. It functions almost on automation. This is why I think there's still a huge need for consultancy work. Organizations need experts to deploy SolarWinds and to help them to define exactly what they need. Then the organization can manage themselves. They just need to be properly trained.

Many times I have seen SolarWinds installed and then it would sit for years doing nothing simply because the people there don't know what to do and there's no time for anyone to actually to dig in and make a masterpiece out of it. It probably shouldn't be advertised as an out-of-the-box solution.

SolarWinds has scalability solutions and it's completely extendable and expandable and the licensing model is just beautiful. I love it. It can be as cheap as a few thousand pounds, which is very affordable to smaller organizations. It can also be as expensive as tens of thousands of pounds, which is still very, very cheap even for enterprises and bigger organizations. If you compare it to other solutions, it's at least 10 times cheaper. The scalability models are beautiful and there are no problems whatsoever handling a large amount of work. If you need more nodes, you can always add more servers and expand your platform with an additional poller. There's always a way to manage it.

Technical support is probably 8/10. Sometimes they tend to respond a little bit slower than I would want, but it's not unusual. If you want something, you want it now and that doesn't always happen. Sometimes I need to wait a few hours or even a few days. Sometimes I need to chase them a couple times. Other than that, the level of skills and the support I receive to actually solve the problem is next-to-none. It's probably a 10. I'm giving it an eight just because of the response time, but other than that it's really good.

However, the sales team at SolarWinds is extremely aggressive and I would give it probably a 1/10. It's very interesting that these different teams are working in the same company. The support is so wonderful, and I know a lot of product managers there. I know them personally and they've been in London and we've talked. They're all techie so they're all great guys. When it comes to sales, they are very, very aggressive. I keep receiving calls and they keep pushing and they keep offering discounts. I don't need those discounts. Just give me my time, you know? When I'm ready with a decision, I'm ready. The way I see it, I'm an engineer and I'm doing the solutions. Aggressive sales is not good. It can be frustrating.

I tried different alternatives, but I was never really able to set up other tools the way I wanted. I consider myself a very creative person; an artist so to speak. I come up with something in my brain, I like it, I make a note and then I try to implement it. Very often, with other tools, I was just stuck. I wouldn't be able to do this and that and then I would be coming up with my own bespoke solutions, using my own bespoke scripts. I'm doing them manually and sending manually.

With SolarWinds, everything just works. It's not that SolarWinds has everything I need. It's that SolarWinds gives me enough power to implement everything I need. It's a proper platform. I don't think about it as a tool. When I have an idea and SolarWinds doesn't provide it, I implement it. I write a script or a SQL script or VB, or PowerShell, or whatever. Then I simply attach it to SolarWinds and voila, suddenly SolarWinds is actually is giving me the output that I need; drawing charts and graphs and generating reports and it all works. Then, in a click, I can apply the same monitoring to hundreds and hundreds of nodes, which is awesome.

When working with clients, I tend to compare my experience working with different monitoring platforms to SolarWinds. Without really going too deep in understanding how things are done there and here, they just say, "Oh, you know what? We want SolarWinds." I'd say, "That's fine, so let's do SolarWinds."

I’m doing initial setups all the time. As a consultant, I go from client to client on a regular basis. The setup is by far the easiest setup of any software that I know. Not only monitoring software, but any software. Even installing Microsoft Office is more complex than SolarWinds. It is really, really easy and straightforward. The wizard provides many guides and notes. The deployment is so well tested and structured that I literally click through the wizard.

Out-of-the-box, it works beautifully. But when it comes to the logic and company workflow, that's when I need to add a bit of a creativity.

I'm not doing sales and marketing, so I'm not really trying to sell the product. Usually, they have already done their thinking and decided to purchase SolarWinds. Then they call me to implement it. I evaluate what they currently have in the infrastructure in terms of devices and interfaces and the whole network structure. I make sure that whatever they have matches what they need. If it's too much, most of the time they say, "Okay, so we overestimated." I'm like, "That's fine. Let's just be more rather than less." Sometimes they purchase unlimited licenses when they don't really need them. Often they purchase too little and we simply go and purchase a license, which is a fairly easy process. The customer portals are all managed very well.

New clients will sometimes ask, "Okay, so let's run through today's simulation, let's see how it works and then we will make a decision." They know I'm going to install it and then they'll evaluate it and find that they're happy. For me personally, I know SolarWinds is releasing new, major releases at least once, maybe twice, a year. I'm on the forum watching all the new features and releases, and adding my own input. I'm pretty much in the know about what's going to happen next, and I'm always anticipating starting working with new features. I don't go and explore anymore; I already know what's in there.

Obviously, the actual process of testing is very fulfilling, as well, especially after we've been communicating on the forum and suddenly it's all live and working. The forum is the number one place I go for my information.

I would advise to get a consultant, at least short-term. I have found that companies, especially big ones, and even some small ones, don't need a SolarWinds expert on site all the time. It's too expensive and unnecessary. At some point, the expert will just sit and do nothing. I think it's absolutely proper to get someone at least for a month, maybe two or three. They can then advise you to pick the right product, choose the right tools, implement it in the right way, and to set up the workflow alerts to make sure it's working.

It seems like the sales team has a slight disconnect from the presales guys. It all works well, but as I said, the sales team sells a product. They do not actually help deploy and implement workflows. They expect the company themselves to deploy and set up their own workflows and then to rely on the documentation and the forum. In reality, they just don't have time. They have their own functions and responsibilities and SolarWinds is a new project for them. It's a huge stretch to learn something new. You know that. It's human nature. That's why my advice is to get a consultant.

The most valuable features are:

• The new F5 Load Balancer dashboard and NetPath.
• The flexibility of the product to meet any organization’s needs, instead of forcing the organization to bend to the limitations of the product.

The most common feedback I receive as a consultant is how the product ultimately finds issues and bottlenecks in the enterprise that the engineers were previously unaware existed. Also, issue resolution speed is always improving!

Two or three of the core functions are still nested in Win32 apps on the server; but it seems that the foundation was laid in the current website for porting those functions over in the near future.

I have used this solution for about eight years.

We have only very rarely experienced any stability issues; and hotfixes are generally made available in a timely fashion.

I have worked with some of the largest SolarWinds deployments in the world. It seems that we are always able to push the product far enough to cover the needs of any organization.

Technical support is superb. Not only is the actual technical support very knowledgeable, but the user community at www.Thwack.com is the best online community that I have ever been a part of.

I have used several competing solutions over the years and always come back to SolarWinds’ superiority in function, flexibility, support, and price.

You can quite literally download the installer, run through it, discover your network to add devices, and be “live monitoring” within one hour. Obviously, there are other factors in a complex environment to consider, such as scalability; but the installation of all SolarWinds core modules is extremely straightforward.

I always advise anyone who is new to the suite to run a free 30-day demo in their environment; and set it up as they would for production. At that point, you will have a solid idea about your license size requirements. When you make the purchase, you can apply the license to your demo with no downtime or loss in man-hours from the initial setup.

I evaluated SolarWinds Network Performance Manager and compared it to WhatsUp Gold, PRTG, OpenNMS, InterMapper, ManageEngine, LanSweeper, Cacti, and FogLight.

• Download a demo.
• Don’t be afraid to push the boundaries and customize the product according to your needs.
• Use the Thwack community!

We have a lot of “home-grown” apps to handle the interesting and challenging monitoring requests and alerting needs.

This product is extremely flexible and customizable. It will do just about anything you need it to do. Out of the box, there is a significant amount of monitoring you can do with very little setup. Then, with custom properties and some ingenuity, you can get it to do pretty much anything else. Additionally, there are a lot of ideas and support in their forum, Thwack.

With custom properties and the alerting flexibility, we’ve been able to customize the alert trigger and reset logic to meet the needs of our users, as well as eliminate the likelihood of making mistakes in the operations center.

We used to be fraught with scenarios, such as:

• Only call if the alert doesn’t clear after 45 minutes.
• Ignore that alarm.
• Don’t call on that night.

The SAM custom script for running component checks only supports 10 pairs of results. I am not sure whether this is a scalability issue. It would be nice to have the option to do more. We worked around it by doing a component check per pair as much as we needed.

The product is excellent at taking feedback, especially from the Thwack form, and implementing popular feature requests.

We’ve been using it for almost 10 years.

Back in the early days and new major releases, of course, there were some hiccups and gotchas. Bleeding edge, baby! It’s all a matter of risk assessment with new feature needs, etc.

We have not run into scalability issues.

In general, the technical support is great. Around new major releases, you do experience longer waits; and every so often, you get a support technician who is newer. Still, if you call in and it’s critical, they fix your issues in a timely manner. This is to be expected; and you need to take this into account in your risk calculation when you schedule upgrades.

We were previously using HPE OpenView. The biggest reason was its lack of mapping flexibility at the time. The ops part is still very visual with the green/yellow/red color-coding of icons. Our systems side is based on alerts and emails.

I don’t recall any troubles during the initial setup. It was a long time ago. I was enamored by its mapping capabilities.

• The software is structured and priced well. It’s not cheap; but it’s not overly expensive either. You get what you pay for, and they are well positioned.
• You are able to spread the costs out by implementing it in steps. Your team is probably not huge. You don’t need to sit around waiting to install and configure the entire monitoring solution. Start with NPM, and start adding modules and capabilities as your existing implementation matures.

We were required to assess alternatives, but I don’t recall the specifics. When implementing SAM in the last 2 years, we moved from Big Brother and evaluated Nagios.

• Gather the official requirements for a monitoring solution, and alert all the consumers. The consumers here are the owners of the monitored gear and apps, and the engineers in the support and ops teams.
• Set a good chunk of time aside to test drive the solution, and get creative with the custom properties.
• Learn SQL or SWQL, a SolarWinds query language that is easier than SQL. This will expand your potential capabilities for customization significantly.
• I am very active on the forum. I get a bunch of ideas and help; so I like to give back.

Pretty much all of it is valuable, really. You buy NPM if you want to monitor devices and interfaces on those devices. It's mainly geared towards network devices, primarily; the ability of seeing uptime for the device and the interfaces; and also the new features that they've just added. NetPath and the high availability; those are pretty key in a lot of environments. That NetPath is amazing.

Since NetPath came out, I use it to basically check that my internet is working as it should be by adding in, through NetPath, paths to my cloud-based applications, to things like Amazon, and also to things that we use quite often in the office, and make sure that there's nothing wrong with our ISP. That's actually been quite useful because we have seen an issue with their networks and they have resolved. It's just having visibility of the entire networking estate for myself and for my clients; that's the main benefit of it and it's probably the best product out there.

It’s tough to find areas with room for improvement, because they are always improving on it. I guess making the universal device pollers and the custom pollers a little bit more user friendly to the complete beginner would be useful. An awful lot of my clients don't have an awful lot of experience with SNMP. Going through the wizard to create these new pollers is quite cumbersome if you don't understand what you're doing. A lot of people just give up and not use it. Making them a little bit easier to understand for those who don't understand SNMP would be ideal. It would be a lot of work but that would useful.

I'm a SolarWinds consultant. Not only do I use it in labs to actually get the best out of it, I obviously support a lot of customers who also use it. I've been using it for on and off for about three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues; it's solid.

It's really useful that you can have additional pollers. I think you can have up to four, but I can't remember off the top of my head. It's great to be able to add in pollers, if you get to the point where your existing poling engine – that you have when you install the product the first time – is swamped.

They are going to be releasing in the future branch, smaller pollers, which would be really handy for people who have lots of little branches but don't want to go to the expense of paying for a complete new poling engine for each site. That's going to be cool, so I know they're building on additional bits. It's as scalable as you need it to be.

Technical support is excellent. This is a review of NPM and therefore the SolarWinds Orion support is great. If I was reviewing SolarWinds N-able, it would not be so great. I’m not, so, it has great technical support.

I personally did not previously use a different solution. A lot of my customers do use other stuff, such as Paessler’s PRTG and so on, but I wasn't.

The installation of it is simple. Getting the best of the product is where my consultant-level knowledge comes in. The average Joe tends to go as far as getting it installed and working, and then says, “Get lost.” Well, “Get lost” to get the extra bits and pieces to make it a little bit more flexible.

It's easy to get it in and install.

The way the SolarWinds does their licensing can be quite difficult, especially if you're a managed service provider and you want to use the Orion product, because, obviously, you buy the big chunk of licenses and the unlimited licenses are quite expensive. You don't have a subscription model, where you can say, "Right, OK. Mr. customer, you've got 25 devices; we'll charge you X amount." Then, you can obviously go to SolarWinds and say, "This customer needs this many licenses. Can I buy this many please?"

It's literally tiers, which is fine for most people, who just have their own individual installs. If you have lots of little customers and you want to use a central system, it can be quite expensive for you personally to get it set up and licensed. Then, trying to monetize that to the customers can be quite hard.

Join Thwack. The Thwack community that is free for anybody to join, whether they actually have a SolarWinds license or not, is quite possibly the unique selling point that SolarWinds has. It's without doubt the best technical community that I've ever been a member of. A number of big vendors like Cisco have tried to recreate it and failed. It is a one off and it is perfect for what it does.

While the forums are one of the best things about the product in general, the most valuable feature of the product itself is the customization. We can make it do whatever it is we want it to do. The basics pretty much work for us, but sometimes we have devices that are a little bit different, I guess, so we have to look at them a different way. We're not just confined to what came out of the box. We can build our own monitoring pages; our own pretty much anything.

It has improved my organization’s efficiency, as far as our awareness. We add something new in our network, and we can start to monitor it within a few seconds. We can be alerted on it any time after that. It's pretty easy to not be caught off guard.

The price is probably an area with room for improvement. It's not the least expensive option out there, but it's a decent balance. I'm pretty certain my supervisors would say that.

As odd as it might be, I'd like it to not be as advanced. I'd like a text mode, almost.

I have probably used it for a total of 10 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues; nothing that we could point our finger to SolarWinds about. There were server issues, so whatever was on the server was going to happen anyway.

We had scalability issues. We have several additional servers, too, so upgrading is kind of a pain, but that's with all the other modules, too. NPM alone is pretty quick.

Overall, since we've been using it until now, I'd say technical support is pretty good. On a scale of 1-10, I'd probably give it a seven or so. The biggest problem is probably getting a hold of someone, but once you get someone, they're pretty decent about figuring it out.

We were actually previously using SolarWinds. Then, we stopped and used another vendor for a similar purpose. Then, we stopped using them and went back to SolarWinds.

We switched back to SolarWinds because of ease of use. It was just so completely simple and easy to use. Everyone voted for it, and we got it.

I was involved in the initial setup when we re-purchased it. It was very straightforward.

Pricing and licensing is good. I'd rather pay a little bit more and have it easy, efficient and effective, than pay a little bit less and miss something.

We only considered the other vendor that we previously used.

Get on their Thwack forums. That’s the best thing about the product; all the people on there, all the users. If NPM doesn’t do something, you can probably find someone to make NPM do it.

• Ease of use
• Ease of training for others
• Good reporting
• Nice dashboard customization options
• Good map building capabilities
• Good integration with other SolarWinds tools to provide a “single pane of glass”
• Great support
• Great online community, “Thwack”

We were able to unify our entire company under one monitoring solution that works for everybody, saving a ton of time and significantly speeding up problem-resolution time.

• More automation around node additions and management

With regard to this I am looking for a faster way to add nodes. Currently we deploy nodes in bulk into different environments for our clients and having the ability to have monitoring deploy equally fast would be helpful versus having to spend a significant amount of time manually adding each system. I did recently open a Feature Request for this HERE

• Adding multi-tenancy into the product

We are a hosting provider and we give our clients access to Orion to see their nodes. Orion is not a multi-tenancy platform by design so I am continually challenged to provide clients access in a way that limits them to only see their stuff. In a more true multi-tenancy platform, it would be easy to choose what a client sees and what they don’t and not have to worry if there is a way to work around or break free of the limitations.

• Providing more monitoring capabilities for public cloud such as Azure, AWS, etc.

We are a Hybrid Cloud service provider and we work very closely with Microsoft and Azure. Currently, I am able to monitor nodes in Azure just fine, but I don’t have a good way to monitor PaaS based services.

I have used it for about 10 years.

There have been some versions that have had stability issues, but the current version seems pretty stable.

Technical support is fantastic.

We previously used HPE OpenView, OpenNMS and Zenoss.

The initial setup is very straightforward; you can have it running in about an hour.

Compared to other solutions on the market, the pricing is very good. The licensing is a bit confusing, though.

We evaluated:

• OpenNMS
• ScienceLogic EM7
• Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold
• A few others that either no longer exist or were consumed by other companies

Take advantage of their free, 30-day demo.

Definitely leverage the online community, “Thwack”.

• 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.

The features I find most valuable are--

• Reliability
• Security
• High-tech development
• Collateral
• Essentially they deliver what they promise for the end-user

We use it to create guides for end-users. We install SolarWinds on cloned virtual machines and offer free access to partners of my company.

I've used it for four years.

I had a customer who had a problem adding to a database for DAP-end integration with Orion. Simple details were needed to resolve with correct passwords and the release of ports on a firewall. Also, a deployment problem was failing in some versions of Windows and Meso. After all updates were performed, the Orion installation package did not work. We restarted it and worked.

I have no problems with the support of SolarWinds. When my client has a problem, our support always uses the documentation immediately. As we also have a lot of training and always test a lot of tools in our environment, when the client asks for something we know exactly where to go. Our SLA is five minutes for the first call, and to solve problems one-and-a-half hours.

We did, and we switched because the interface is more user friendly and easier to configure.

It's very simple. Anyone can install and configure SolarWinds with a step-by-step guide, even if that person is a layman when it comes to IT.

We used a vendor team.

It's the best of platform for IT management. It shows statistical data in a very detailed manner, where the user can customize the entire platform and input any information from the database through a fully-customized report.

CRC monitoring for each port is a valuable feature for us.

Today, the webapps are getting worse for showing all items. Sometimes your browser will not respond.

My recommendation is to create separate console-based applications, especially for network operation centers.

The security information and event management could be improved.

I used it for five months, then removed it from my system.

I had issues with the SQL database, and I would suggest they add MySQL.

There was slow performance after adding 100 devices with 400-500 elements with 10 second interval pooling.

There were issues with scaling it.

0/10 as there were no knowledge base articles when I used it, and every new patch required customer login to apply.

The product I am still using, PRTG, was very simple, so I never had experience with technical support.

I am still using PRTG.

Initial setup was a simple process.

I worked with the partner, and honestly, we did not require any support after the initial installation.

For small customers, it's good.

• PRTG
• Nagios

They should change the database and OS.

Alerts, reports, overview of network, graphical picture of WAN for support team, port level visibility, and ease of use.

By finding out about problems or potential problems quickly and having a great view of my entire network.

The admin web site could be a lot faster.

8 years

No issues encountered.

Yes, but that was due to using just a recommend server size. Moved to a better server and all was well.

Yes, the more items I added the slower it became. But this was corrected once I split the servers apart. I had NPM and NCM on the same server.

10 out of 10

Any time I contacted support they were knowledgeable and fast.

No other solution used before, but looked at many.

Pretty straight forward if you know your environment.

In-house implementation.

I never put a dollar amount on it, but it sure saved me some big heartaches!

Setup cost and ongoing was just my time.

Yes, HP, Nagios, Cisco, Spiceworks, GFI, and Manage Engine.

SolarWinds makes a great product and their support is second to none! They continue to acquire/develop new software that rolls in nicely with their entire solution.

It gives us an insight on what we need to monitor on our network. We get granulated data on where issues are occurring in regards to traffic latency and bandwidth utilization. Also we can monitor the health and functionality of our nodes on the MPLS.

Both the NPM and the NTA modules. We are able to track down information in regards what kind of traffic is being generated on our network and also help us determine what applications we can allow and what not to allow.

We were able to determine if end users were using the network to do work related stuff or otherwise and reduce bandwidth hogging for non-business related activities on the network.

So far I am satisfied with the result but I am still learning how it works.

One year

No it was very straight forward. You have understand the concept of networking to apply the tool. If you do then implementing it is easy. There were some version releases that had stability issues but the support team was very good at letting us know what we needed to do to fix the issues.

There were some version releases that had stability issues but the support team was very good at letting us know what we needed to do to fix the issues.

Scalability was not a problem. We only monitor nodes that matter most on the environment. This makes managing the environment easier. Less is more`

They have always been helpful when we needed support I have no complaint at all.

I would rate it at an 8 out of 10

We used network instruments. For what we were trying to accomplish it was not just doing it to the level we needed and it was not very straight forward to use either.

The initial set up was very straight forward. I think complication comes with differences in environment.

It was an in house implementation and I did it myself.

ROI on this has been fantastic. It was supposed to be a very expensive investment. We got a good deal and the product did not disappoint it has definitely help us dodge several bullets on several occasions.

Product including support was about $6000 but I would say for what its able to help us do its more than that.

Yes I was able to go through a whole bunch of options such as managed engine but I was not very impressed with the licensing scheme. Also most products were SAAS and we wanted independence and ownership over the product.

I would say understand your environment and what you want to see. Also know what you deem important to your business and policies that guide your network usage. Not everyone one would find this particular product to their liking but for those who want to get to the granular level of assessment this is definitely a product to look at.

Also they have now added a feature where the traditional style of setting up monitoring reports is no longer necessary. Initially you had to create complex alerting to know what happened at a particular time. Now you just have to filter by date and time and you can choose what network protocols to filter by to see what happened at a particular point and time in real time stats.

• Overall simplicity
• Solarwinds development of the product line

• It's provided us with a quicker turn around time for diagnosing and remedying a failure or issue
• The pre-built templates for Windows are outstanding
• If you're new, they tell you what the metrics mean and the possible solutions
• You can also modify baselines it to your environment.

It needs group views with performance metrics. They do certain ones well, but not filters to a custom group view.

I've used NPM and SAM for five years.

No issues encountered.

Data collection can be an issue so you have to maintain that accordingly.

None yet.

Customer service is pretty good.

Tier 3 is excellent they know how to repair a problem.

We had Openview for the network side but the cost forced us to switch and it has actually ended up better for us in the long term.

It's very straightforward and super easy to deploy, 15 minutes tops. It's documented well what you need, or there's an option you can do if you're on a limited budget. Also, the support engineers are always there to help with specific questions.

We implemented it in-house.

It paid for itself within six months, when compared to our previous solution.

We did not track it but it was less than four hours worth of total effort. Day to day cost of using the product US$273 given our current licensing model.

No other options evaluated.

Get the trial download to use its all the features for 30 days. Its automation/DevOps is outstanding for its software development kit.

• Polling
• Automatic ticket creation of server resources (CPU, Memory, Reboots etc.)

We can sometimes fix a problem before it is even recognized by our user community based on the thresholds we set up for various resources on a production server.

They could make the process of adding various devices easier and more intuitive.

I've used it for nine months.

No issues encountered.

It's very scalable and customizable.

They have good customer service.

They have good technical support.

I haven't used another solution like NPM before.

It's significant in my opinion.

You can and should put the not so obvious devices onto SolarWinds. An example would be a server's back-up power supply. Otherwise you won't realize when the back-up is not functioning until the main power supply goes down and it's too late at that point.

• Polling engines
• Alerts
• Backup configuration

Basically, it helps in monitoring the device status. It helps locate in which region the network is down so that we take immediate action to restore it.

All the software has room for improvement, nothing is perfect.

I've used it for about five to six years alongside NCM v7.0.2.

We do see issues, but not so many major ones.

No issues encountered yet.

At least an 8/10.

At least a 7/10.

We implemented with a mix of an in-house team and a vendor one.

If your infrastructure is big, and requires a good kind of reporting tool, then SolarWinds fulfills all these requirements.