SolarWinds NPM Reviews

We primarily use the solution for network health.

The ease of deployment is great. I also would say that it gave us good capabilities to tune alarms. 

I'm overall a huge fan of Solarwinds. To me, it's a top quadrant for a solution and I would be pushing for it internally were it not cost-prohibitive for startups.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

The initial setup is easy.

The downside was the expense. At large, large companies, that's okay. However, at companies like mine where we're building a tech startup, it can be cost-prohibitive.

They've had some issues with security, and confidence in their product is probably down.

Technical support can be slow to respond.

I would like to see more of a focus on edge computing and edge device monitoring.

I've used the solution for several years.

The stability is good. Aside from the very public hack, from a user's standpoint, it's good.

It's easy to scale. I'm probably an avid fan and I'd say it's easy to scale. 

We have around 100 to 150 people using it at our company.

We didn't always get the responsiveness that we needed in terms of the level of urgency. If it was something where it was potentially project-related and very time-sensitive, they didn't match our level of urgency which could be frustrating. 

That said, overall, when it came to deployment or wanting upgrades or improvements or changes, that we would get good support. 

Still, for incidents where you are in a mission-critical and you have an incident that you need assistance with, they weren't always as quick to respond.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and simple. A company wouldn't have any issues with it. It's somewhat easy to deploy, however, I'm not the engineer. I was the business leader. I just know that I never received any complaints.

The solution is expensive and may not be very affordable for startups or smaller companies.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are likely using the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number.

We use both the public and private cloud deployment models. 

I led a team of several hundred engineers who used SolarWinds every day. I would be involved in making the decision of a product to go through. Once they came in and recommended me their top three, I would choose it.

I would advise potential users to first take a look at some of the newer vendors on the market who may be a little bit more nimble and are coming out of the box with a focus on edge and edge devices. SolarWinds has a heavy, heavy background. There are lighter options. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We have been making use of the most recent version.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I did the integration myself. 

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

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

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

I rate SolarWinds NPM as an eight out of ten. 

We 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 use the product for network monitoring. 

SolarWinds NPM provides an overview of network monitoring, extending its capabilities to cover other aspects, such as virtual machines and servers. The platform has features like NetPath, which is particularly beneficial for end-users, offering insights into issues like latency, packet loss, and connectivity problems with routers, switches, or servers. NetPath helps identify where the network path is disrupted or experiencing problems. For instance, if accessing Google services encounters issues, NetPath can pinpoint where the problem lies.  Another valuable feature is that it provides real-time data on device performance, including resource utilization, RAM status, and responsiveness.

The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support. 

I worked with HPE for about six to seven months in 2016. It had similar features to SolarWinds NPM. However, the deployment process was complex.

Deploying SolarWinds NPM is a straightforward process. The deployment steps include extracting the files, mounting them on the server, and deploying them. The documentation provided by SolarWinds is clear. 

While I haven't extensively worked with ManageEngine, I've observed some of its features, and customization stands out as a strong aspect. ManageEngine can be a good option for those with budget constraints, as it offers similar features to SolarWinds NPM at a more affordable price. I rate the solution 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. 

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.