What needs improvement with SolarWinds NPM?

The solution works very well for our current use case, but the price of the solution can be improved.

We were looking for some sort of endpoint monitoring as well. it would be nice if that was covered. We'd like to have more security when it comes to ADR. We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future. Sometimes, if the problem isn't on our side, it doesn't provide a very clear problem in terms of what the issue is.

An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.

SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license. If we want to have more polling engines it will cost an additional 20 Indian rupees.

SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot. At the same time, some tools don't have the ability to customize, so SolarWinds is ahead of the competition, in that regard. I would also like to see more support for software-defined network platforms and enhanced API monitoring capacity.

The improvement would be that SolarWinds NPM thoroughly checks its patches before releasing them to the market. Better testing, alpha testing, and then releasing it to the market.

KPIs should correlate and combine in one simple report. The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible.

The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.

The evaluation time for the product is too short especially for large corporations.

It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately.

Their IPAM component is severely lacking. The process is extremely manual. It just doesn't get in there if you don't manually enter it. It is not particularly DNS-aware. When it comes to DNS names, you pretty much have to configure everything manually. It will not grab anything on its own. They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.

The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network. We would also like to show the number of devices which we need to improve our service.

The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved.

SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery.

The time monitoring could be improved from every five seconds to every second. If they can move to an every-second basis, then it will improve the monitoring analysis. I would also like to see the security system updated to prevent virus attacks.

There are modules in SolarWinds NPM which are better than other competitive tools. However, some areas require new releases or updates. For example, there have not been many updates to cloud monitoring, containerization or serverless environments. In that regard, SolarWinds NPM is not as good as other solutions in the market.

The solution could be enhanced. It currently lacks integration with SMS services which is something we need. A cloud-based option would also be helpful so we can monitor at any time and from anywhere; for now, we need to VPN to our environment.

If we go for the NT license, then we have to purchase the NPM, Network Performance Monitor. That is a dependency. In all of the SolarWinds products now, there are only these products. For example, Net Traffic Analyzer is a product. If we go for the licensing, then we have to purchase a Network Performance Monitor. There's dependency there. If they could combine everything into one product, that would be very helpful. The NT is the enhanced version of the NPM. They have not put a license on the different monitors of the NT. However, they have to include in the same manner in the NPM itself. For NetPath services, right now, we have to manually install the events in the nodes. If there was something from the console side, we could post the event to the nodes. If there was automation, that would be helpful. Already there's automation for other types of things or in other features, like for communication of the nodes. However, for the NetPath feature, if we could automatically move the event from the console side to the application side, that would be a great feature.

Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier.

So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions. Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital. There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.

SolarWinds NPM could improve the graphics of the interface and more customized reporting.

The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation. There's not a way to turn me off from alerts easily. There really hasn't been anything that we've needed that it hasn't been able to provide.

I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility.

Each model has different features, so clients need to purchase a separate model for SQL monitoring, database monitoring, network traffic analyzer, HTTP traffic, etc. So each feature they need is in a different model, but customers would prefer an all-in-one solution.

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

SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance.

There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NPM. One is that their dashboard needs to be friendlier. We want them to take their dashboard to another level. For example: with our databases, we develop services and we want to put those on the dashboard, while making them more visual. This would be good to improve in the tool. The integration of SolarWinds NPM with other tools is also another area for improvement. For example, we'd like to have the ability to manage the unit with other tools, because we need to have better control to manage the alerts. How can you load that capacity with only that kind of information? We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure. You have to do a test, find what needs to be improved, then make the corrections on SolarWinds NPM. You have to be very attentive when using the tool, but it's an area to improve not just in SolarWinds NPM, but for any tool.

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

One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives. False positives or positive falses are a concern because you want to be as accurate as possible and get them down to zero, which is what you want on your network. Once a week with the reports there, is always a false positive or vice versa where it's showing that it's up and really it's down. We are looking at how we can overcome that issue. Is it a work issue, or does it come from the tool itself? It will show that something is down when it's up and every once in a while if something is down it shows that it is still up. We would like to be able to pull information from the vendor's OEM. It would be helpful to have crosswalks or if it could have a running list that goes out of models, software, and it can pull out the end of life, or end of service life dates. Also to suggest the recommend current version to use, that way you can do the comparisons without having to do a manual search. That would be beneficial. Similar to other tools, I would also like to see a graphical map of your network that highlight in green, red, or yellow, and if you see a specific device you can click on it and it will help you drill down on the details of that device. There are other things that it should be able to do, such as when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure and my server, and there are issues developing like the circuits degrading or latency is increasing it should give you a notification to know what is going on, rather waiting for the device to go down which at that point it would be too late. You want to be able to do proactive monitoring and reaction. We want to get to a monitoring level where if it is monitoring the server, the CPU, or the storage level you could have presets where it will identify and give you warnings to say that you are at 70% or 80% storage capacity. This would allow you to get ahead of it before you run out. It would be the same for the CPU utilization and knowing if it is running 20 or 30% premiums normally or is it running at 90 or 100% and you have to add CPUs. It could let you know if you have other tools or applications that are running too hot or if they need to be changing out that tool or is it something else. To have something in place where it can help us to do some analysis and be proactive would be helpful.

If SolarWinds integrated with other solutions, for example, something like in a SIEM, security operations system, it would be more useful for customers. It would be ideal if they could integrate more with security solutions down the line. There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country.

The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear.

With regards to suggested areas of improvement for the product, I would like to see the price come down, and in addition I think the network element mapping tool is not as robust as it should be.

An area for improvement would be the use of modular licenses, which are not practical for big clients.

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

The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications.

This product could improve by adding cloud monitoring. I want SolarWinds NPM to do much more integration, and have more involvement in cloud monitoring, like AWS or Google, or Azure. I feel like it requires lots of improvement for cloud monitoring in NPM.

The interface can be a bit cumbersome at times. There is a steep learning curve if you wanted to get into it in any depth. I would say that both the installation and use of it can be complicated initially. It isn't for someone who doesn't have a lot of expertise or knowledge. It does have a significant learning curve. After the initial installation, the configuration is where more knowledge is required. The reporting could be improved. I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it easier to create reports or have a larger assortment of canned reports.

If they did some type of synthetic monitoring, it would have been better.

One of the problems that SolarWinds has is when the data becomes too big, it will start getting slower. It's not at all for enterprise customers. I don't recommend enterprises to go for SolarWinds. They should go for a bigger tool. They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers.

The solution could be more secure.

We have replaced SolarWinds with LogicMonitor.

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

The downside was the expense. At large, large companies, that's okay. However, at companies like mine where we're building a tech startup, it can be cost-prohibitive. They've had some issues with security, and confidence in their product is probably down. Technical support can be slow to respond. I would like to see more of a focus on edge computing and edge device monitoring.

I think the graphical environment, the GUI still has to be improved. Other tools like Power BI provide a more graphical dashboard for executives to show what's going on with operations. SolarWinds has the data but the representation needs to be enhanced for an executive view. It requires a large amount of customization to get to a point where you are able to have something concrete for the upper management team. For additional features, I'd like to see something more in automations, the graphical interface, and some dynamic dashboards or at least the ability for integration with some dashboard tools.

The solution should make things easier to set up on a node by node basis. When turning on the network scanning to try to set up nodes, it has a tendency to grab everything in site, every port on a firewall, for example. One should have the option of picking through these before they're automatically added, so that there should be no need to go through them manually and delete them. The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work. Once the nodes have been added, there is a need to go in and delete them manually. I cannot think of additional improvements that are worth mentioning. The solution does a pretty good job all around.

It would be good to have high security. This is a concern after the attacks. They also need to focus more on the application side.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

More MIBs.

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

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.

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.

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

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.