SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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

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

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

KPIs should correlate and combine in one simple report.

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

I have been using the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable.

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

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

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

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

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

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. 

We use SolarWinds for network monitoring. It's suitable for mid-sized or enterprise-scale companies. It can work for a small business, too, because it's not too expensive. 

SolarWinds' network and server application monitoring features are strong.

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.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for more than five years.

SolarWinds offers some options for scalability, but there is a bottleneck on some features. I hope the scale of NetFlow can be increased. Also, SolarWinds uses the Microsoft SQL database, which doesn't allow distributed architecture or scaling options.

I rate SolarWinds support seven out of 10. The quality varies depending on who picks up the phone.

In most cases, setting up SolarWinds is simple. However, when customers have some special requirements, the deployment can become highly complex.

I rate SolarWinds NPM six out of 10 for pricing. It isn't the cheapest solution, but it's still affordable.

I rate SolarWinds NPM eight out of 10. I would recommend this product for medium-sized and enterprise-scale companies.

I primarily use it in the OT environment. We use it for important equipment, voice equipment, safety devices, and to alarm and report on.

Solarwind NPM gives you a quick overview of the OT environment. This greatly  improves response times on down equipment.

The solution is quite customizable. 

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution is stable.

We have had a good experience with technical support.

The product is scalable.

So far, we have found the pricing to be reasonable. 

It meets expectations. With a bit of SQL knowledge, you do manage to get a lot out of your reports.

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

I've been using the solution for five or six years. I've been using it for a while. 

The stability is great and any issues we face are addressed very quickly by technical support.

The scalability is there. If you need to scale the solution, you can. 

Technical support is good. All of the issues I had were addressed by the support team within hours. They are helpful and responsive and I am satisfied with the level of support.

The initial setup is not difficult or complex. It's quite simple and straightforward.

We have an internal team that can handle any maintenance we need.

In-house

As we monitor safety equipment and underground phones, the first incident you can prevent and save a life, the ROI is instantaneous. 

The product compares well against all the other monitoring software out there. It is not overpriced at all.

We're just customers and end-users.

The solution is easy to use and customization is possible. It is extremely powerful when set up correctly.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've been pleased with its capabilities, although its level of security is still worrisome.

We have been making use of the most recent version.

We use it for monitoring our uplink ports on our routers and switches. We also use it to monitor our servers and we utilize its disc space and processor memory. We do the same thing for the routers and switches.

An improvement the solution has brought to our organization is that it enables us to track down what I call brown outs in a multi-host, multi-guest virtual environment. It allows us to see why and when this occurred and to know what else was transpiring at the time that we had received an end-user complaint of the system running slowly. 

As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service. 

The solution should make things easier to set up on a node by node basis. When turning on the network scanning to try to set up nodes, it has a tendency to grab everything in site, every port on a firewall, for example. One should have the option of picking through these before they're automatically added, so that there should be no need to go through them manually and delete them. The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work. Once the nodes have been added, there is a need to go in and delete them manually. 

I cannot think of additional improvements that are worth mentioning. The solution does a pretty good job all around. 

We have been using some version of SolarWinds for 20 years.

The solution is very stable. We don't see many outages of the actual platform. The sole exception would concern us taking a process in which we would be restarting it on a monthly basis. 

The solution is very scalable. I've never seen a problem with this.

I don't have any plans to increase the usage in the future. I would not say that the solution is being extensively used, as we're not necessarily monitoring everything that we could, there being no need for some of this in our environment. I would make use of the performance monitor should I wish to dive deeper into a running system for detailed analysis.

As I have been using the solution for so long, I have not had any need for technical support. 

I have used other products prior to SolarWinds NPM. I switched because the solution provides a consolidated view of everything. 

A moderate level of knowledge of the product's use is required for installation. 

The initial installation occurred a long time ago. While, for me, this process would not take long, somebody who is new and who has never used the solution may take a day or two to do installation and to become fully up to speed of what is being added, the reason for doing so and how the solution should be configured. 

Installation is not easy for a person who lacks the requisite experience. 

I did the integration myself. 

I renewed the licenses around two-and-a-half to three years ago and do not have the relevant numbers off the top of my head. 

I would estimate there are three insfrastructure managers, with myself as the head of the IT department. There is at least one other technician working on the wide area, local area network.

My advice to others is to add their nodes manually, not to let the network discovery and auto ad run.

I rate SolarWinds NPM as an eight out of ten. 

We use this solution for one of our very big customers. We are consultants and I'm the technical specialist and consultant. The company is a customer of SolarWinds. 

SolarWinds core data is organized in a very good way. The solution can easily be interconnected with other management systems to get information not only from networking devices but also applications and servers.

I think the graphical environment, the GUI still has to be improved. Other tools like Power BI provide a more graphical dashboard for executives to show what's going on with operations. SolarWinds has the data but the representation needs to be enhanced for an executive view. It requires a large amount of customization to get to a point where you are able to have something concrete for the upper management team.

For additional features, I'd like to see something more in automations, the graphical interface, and some dynamic dashboards or at least the ability for integration with some dashboard tools. 

I think it's a pretty stable solution although we have identified some security gaps around it. I think it's more about managing it correctly and having the security hot fixes and patches up to date. It's generally stable and we haven't had many issues. 

Technical support is pretty good, they are very keen to help. There are some options which provide premier support and that enables access to direct SolarWinds support and upgrades. 

I think the initial setup is pretty simple, the challenge is more about trying to generate all the dependencies, setting the rules and actually setting up internals, ENBB. Our deployment was staggered and took five to six months. We started with a pilot in a region with the most number of users and complexity in order to test and configure the rules we needed. We then went global, starting with the big operations and then moving to the smaller ones which would be easier and take less time. Implementation required a couple of consultants who were familiar with the application and a team that managed the whole operation. The deployment probably involved around 10 people.

Any WAN or LAN environment will benefit from this sort of solution because it consolidates not only the monitoring but also the operation. You can actually trigger some actions based on the conditional threshold that you set in the tool.

I rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

This solution provides one standardized platform for network device monitoring.

This solution allows us to monitor physical and virtual devices and applications.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the alerts.

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

We have been using this solution for more than ten years.

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.