SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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.