SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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.

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.

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.

When it comes to the new features in NPM 11, the most valuable addition for us is the deep packet analysis Quality of Experience dashboard (QoE).

There's so many times where we get a question such as – “Is the network running slow?” It's really helpful being able to configure the deep packet analysis to say we want to look at these servers and just these particular applications - and get rid of the other noise. Before we started using NPM, we could get this info with Wireshark but it was incredibly painful getting it.

From a QoE point of view - I'm really grateful it was released so that we could get started taking advantage of the features. The one thing that would make it even more helpful would be to allow us to define our own applications. But having said that, I posted a feature request on the thwack community and got a response from SolarWinds within a half hour, asking for more details about my feature request.

We started using NPM about a year ago and we’ve been using NPM v11 for about 3 months.

We previously used WhatsUpGold, which has a fraction of the features for a tenth of the price. Moving to SolarWinds was a huge jump for our management since they were moving from a $3,000 - $4,000 solution to something which costs us $30,000 - 40,000 (5 SolarWinds products). I showed management the feature request page for NPM. What they noticed right away was that 50% of the feature requests had a "what we're working on" tag. With SolarWinds, management gets visibility into our infrastructure without them having to ask us questions. They can look themselves, it's all there. The fact that SolarWinds listens to customer feedback and requests makes all the difference.

For NPM 11, it enables management to see all of our infrastructure and gives them a heads up without doing a lot of work of how our systems are doing. To quantify it, I’ll explain it like this: we were looking to upgrade portions of our networks and our CIO suggested spending money to increasing bandwidth in our datacenter. We used NPM 11 and found that our network bandwidth within the datacenter was incredibly underutilized, we could use more bandwidth by our workstations. NPM helped us focus where to spend money on our infrastructure because we can tell where we need to spend, rather than just a gut feeling. We didn't have that visibility with WhatsUpGold. WhatsUpGold is good as an alerting tool but it’s useless for historical reporting. Graphs and easy correlation in SolarWinds are light-years ahead of what we were doing previously. Historical data is also more useful, we can go back 6-months and say ask ourselves what our pain points are and where we should invest more money. NPM paid for itself by allowing us to spend money where it needs to be spent.

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

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

It's quite stable and reliable. 

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

The scaling is quite good.

It's a very easy solution to set up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We did not use a different solution previous to SolarWinds. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most valuable features are language support and technical support.

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

I have been using this solution for seven years.

The initial setup varies but can be quite complex.

This product is priced quite highly. Its licenses are available yearly, and the calculation of costs is quite complex.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

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.

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