SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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.

Alerts, reports, overview of network, graphical picture of WAN for support team, port level visibility, and ease of use.

By finding out about problems or potential problems quickly and having a great view of my entire network.

The admin web site could be a lot faster.

8 years

No issues encountered.

Yes, but that was due to using just a recommend server size. Moved to a better server and all was well.

Yes, the more items I added the slower it became. But this was corrected once I split the servers apart. I had NPM and NCM on the same server.

Customer Service:

10 out of 10

Technical Support:

Any time I contacted support they were knowledgeable and fast.

No other solution used before, but looked at many.

Pretty straight forward if you know your environment.

In-house implementation.

I never put a dollar amount on it, but it sure saved me some big heartaches!

Setup cost and ongoing was just my time.

Yes, HP, Nagios, Cisco, Spiceworks, GFI, and Manage Engine.

SolarWinds makes a great product and their support is second to none! They continue to acquire/develop new software that rolls in nicely with their entire solution.

* Link utilization graphs

* Top-10 charts

* Node/link status monitoring and alerting

* Historical reports

This product was used by our 24/7 NOC engineers and helped them in quick response to network status changes, investigation and narrowing down of performance degradation incidents. It was also used to report customer bandwidth utilization and provide evidence in customer queries and claims.

Better support and integration for vendors other than Cisco.

4 years experience with two different employers and both Internet hosting companies.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

Customer Service:

Excellent support

Technical Support:

Excellent support

Setup is straightforward and smooth, just need to follow the installation wizard. Having worked with various open source and vendor specific NMS solutions, among vendor independent solutions such as WhatsUP, OpManager and Solarwinds NPM I always preferred NPM.

Setup is straightforward and smooth just need to follow the installation wizard.

In-house team.

I have seen various products over the years from open source (Cacti, Nagios, Zenoss) and commercial (whatsup, Manageengine, etc) but Solarwinds NPM was always the one that could check most of the monitoring requirements.

The email and GUI alert system that it has is the most valuable for me. It also features the IP address management with manages your IP subnets internally and externally all in one place. Also the customizable alert feature is really helpful if you want a specific monitoring and alerting to configure.

Before we were using the Microsoft DHCP server to manage our IP addresses. However, it was not configured to replicate all throughout the domain so the IP address database and allocation is outdated and we are not sure if this is still active or not. Upon using the IPAM feature of Solarwinds we manage all IP addresses centrally in one location and it is cloud based so we can access it wherever we are in our intranet. I also liked the customizable alert feature because i was appointed to configure and monitor alerts for all the power supply on Cisco devices only. I made series of testing and research and I was successfully able to configure and implement an alert specifying the monitoring of power supplies of Cisco devices only, ie, excluding any other devices.

Perhaps they could hire more tech support for this awesome product. I had a difficult experience in their support, not technically but the availability of the engineers. Since they are so little and the bulk of demands for their support is huge, I would have to wait in line to get a response because my ticket is not network down impacting. It took me about 3 months to finish this customization.

5 years now.

Yes. During the test, I encountered troubles because the specific MIBs could not focus on certain power supplies only. I needed to find help from their product tech support.

There are minimal issues of stability for the NPM of Solarwinds. This is the reason you need to update the version as often as they release to address the minute bugs of this product

No issues with scalability. It can accommodate as much nodes so long as you update your hardware all together.

Customer Service: I would say 7 out of 10 stars. They really know their product technically. However, the response time for non impacting tickets is very slow.Technical Support: 4 out 5 stars. They know their product so well that you could count on a bug fix update yearly.

I used Concord before and it is limited to monitoring network devices. Well, I think that's the only license that my previous company had with it. I did not switch because I liked the product, I simply switched companies that already is using the product.

I wasn't the one who set this product up. it was already there when I transferred.

It will cost you to buy additional license for additional features. However, there is not day-to-day cost in using this.

No. Like I said, I just moved to a different companies that were already using the product.

Utilize this product to its full potential, NOC will find it very useful and easy to manage.

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.

On-premises

Its GUI is very user-friendly. No special training is required to use this product. It is very simple to use and has rich GUI performance reports.

They should increase its accuracy rate as SolarWinds's monitoring accuracy is not good if you compare it with other tools, like NNM/ScienceLogic/Zenoss.

I have used the following versions of SolarWinds: NPM, SAM, NTA, and IPAM for two years.

SolarWinds tools are very stable.

No issues in the tools. 

It is fully depends on the costing, customer, and architect.

It is straightforward.

It fully depends on what the customer wants.

Before choosing a product, I would want to evaluate it and check all requirements. Then before implementation, clear all the customer requirements accordingly. 

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.

While the forums are one of the best things about the product in general, the most valuable feature of the product itself is the customization. We can make it do whatever it is we want it to do. The basics pretty much work for us, but sometimes we have devices that are a little bit different, I guess, so we have to look at them a different way. We're not just confined to what came out of the box. We can build our own monitoring pages; our own pretty much anything.

It has improved my organization’s efficiency, as far as our awareness. We add something new in our network, and we can start to monitor it within a few seconds. We can be alerted on it any time after that. It's pretty easy to not be caught off guard.

The price is probably an area with room for improvement. It's not the least expensive option out there, but it's a decent balance. I'm pretty certain my supervisors would say that.

As odd as it might be, I'd like it to not be as advanced. I'd like a text mode, almost.

I have probably used it for a total of 10 years.

I have not encountered any stability issues; nothing that we could point our finger to SolarWinds about. There were server issues, so whatever was on the server was going to happen anyway.

We had scalability issues. We have several additional servers, too, so upgrading is kind of a pain, but that's with all the other modules, too. NPM alone is pretty quick.

Overall, since we've been using it until now, I'd say technical support is pretty good. On a scale of 1-10, I'd probably give it a seven or so. The biggest problem is probably getting a hold of someone, but once you get someone, they're pretty decent about figuring it out.

We were actually previously using SolarWinds. Then, we stopped and used another vendor for a similar purpose. Then, we stopped using them and went back to SolarWinds.

We switched back to SolarWinds because of ease of use. It was just so completely simple and easy to use. Everyone voted for it, and we got it.

I was involved in the initial setup when we re-purchased it. It was very straightforward.

Pricing and licensing is good. I'd rather pay a little bit more and have it easy, efficient and effective, than pay a little bit less and miss something.

We only considered the other vendor that we previously used.

Get on their Thwack forums. That’s the best thing about the product; all the people on there, all the users. If NPM doesn’t do something, you can probably find someone to make NPM do it.