SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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 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 However, it was not configured to replicate all throughout the domain so the IP address database and allocation is outdated and we are not sure if this is still active or not.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.

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.

With admin-level permissions, the "Manage Node" feature is the most valuable to me since my preference is to search via strings. It provides a quick visual representation based on searched strings but a lot of false-positives as well with certain vendors – Cisco being one of them, e.g. reporting “critical/warning" states on things that don't really matter to us such as voltages on line cards or in the backplane of devices.

It improved the way our organization functions by being a consolidated product which I was able to do a lot of the initial data entry and organization with – unfortunately I have not had time to dedicate to figure out every bell-and-whistle with the NPM product. I’ve deployed rules for SNMP traps, syslog alerts, and other advanced alerts to send emails based on certain parameters – sadly these have been on an “as-needed and as-time-permitted” basis which has been lacking lately.

I honestly haven’t given thought to areas that need improvement since I spend a lot more time monitoring the network than optimizing NPM and features; nowhere enough time-wise to nit-pick and test every little thing. So far for what I have done with it, it has worked, getting there wasn’t always the easiest – usually a lot of trial and error based on research.

In our network we've used Solarwinds NPM product for a little over 3 years.

I wasn’t part of the deployment for it; our systems team was responsible for initial deployment.

Yes, plenty of those that our systems team has spent hours on the phone with Solarwinds support with trying to rectify. Especially after moving to later NPM releases; this has made our systems team weary of moving to later NPM releases due to past occurrences following.

Yes, polling more frequently yields a near exponential increase in resource utilization which becomes a problem on virtualized platforms resulting in excessive queueing on poller engine(s). While Solarwinds support virtualization they prefer dedicated hardware by some of their documentation; pretty expensive when you consider Solarwinds software, licensing, and then dedicated hardware to boot. Virtualized deployments also seems to yield a slower experience when browsing the web front-end, this could be due to the uniqueness of our corporate network though.

Customer Service:

I haven’t worked with their customer service probably since the beginning, any problems with the platform our systems team would usually be in contact with Solarwinds customer service and technical support.

Technical Support:

I haven’t worked with their customer service probably since the beginning, any problems with the platform our systems team would usually be in contact with Solarwinds customer service and technical support.

Older systems that were part of a legacy network and platform that were not well kept and didn’t have many features we were looking for. During RFP’s we narrowed it down to a couple of vendors with Solarwinds at the time taking the lead.

I wasn’t part of initial setup/deployment of product itself.

I don’t recall, was over 3 years ago and we have undergone major transformations as a company since then.

Solarwinds is highly modular regarding products and services so it is important to keep in mind that most other modules have a separate price and licensing tag and that it can become very expensive very quickly. When looking for features try to narrow it down to only the critical ones you need, I prefer simplicity and functionality over complexity – as a company I imagine the complexities came from catering to as many customers’ needs as possible. Lastly prepare to spend a lot of time working and tending to NPM, the biggest time taker I’ve had with NPM personally was getting Overview, Node, and Interface views setup that were useful and speedy – their default views are not recommended and “noisy.”

We use this product to monitor our performance. It gives us visibility of our environment, especially for software.

The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less.

The agent that we use is also light and does not block server memory.

SolarWinds makes it easy for us to monitor our environment.

The reports that it generates are useful for creating documentation.

The integration needs to be improved. SolarWinds has many modules for things like application monitoring and network performance monitoring, but sometimes they are not as good as others that are being used. This means that we use other tools and eventually, we want to integrate them into SolarWinds. It might also be the case that we have other tools, like Splunk and Windows Event Collector, and we want to integrate them but can't.

We began dealing with SolarWinds NPM about two years ago, in 2018

SolarWinds is quite stable. In the last couple of weeks, I have heard that they have a bug or a security hold in the RMM platform. Luckily, we do not use it, but instead, just use NPM. Nevertheless, we contacted the supplier and asked them to help us update to patch the security hole.

I think that it is easy to scale.

We receive our support from the local vendor and it is good. When we call and ask for support, the response is very good.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It was easy for us to install and the deployment took about one month to complete. In the first week, we gathered the software that we wanted to install. From there, it took us another week to do the different installations. After that, we deployed the agent and the tools for working with it.

We use BigFix to deploy, so it's easy for us. 

The product is updated regularly.

Overall, this is a good product and I can recommend it, especially if you have a Windows environment and network. That would not be complex. My only issue is with the integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Server and network monitoring.

• Single pane for monitoring
• Scalable
• Creates new business opportunities.
  

Monitoring.

More MIBs.

One to three years.

SolarWinds NPM is useful for any company that has business-critical applications running over a network and they want to monitor the network behavior.

The solution could be more secure.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for approximately eight years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. 

We have many large global customers using this solution.

The support could improve by being quicker.

The solution is easy to install and it takes a couple of hours.

To do the implementation you need to be at an engineering level. 

I can do the implementation of this solution myself.

There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair.

I would strongly recommend this solution for others.

I rate SolarWinds NPM a nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud