SolarWinds NPM Reviews

We use SolarWinds NPM to monitor and manage network devices and infrastructure in our environment.

SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by providing a proactive approach to understanding the current trends in the environment, utilization of the resources, and providing inventory reports of the environment. This has helped us stay ahead of the cost for new infrastructure requirements as well as licenses.

The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for approximately two years.

I have found the stability of SolarWinds NPM to be good.

The scalability has been adequate.

We have multiple users using the solution with various roles, such as network administration, server administration, and reporting users.

We have plans to increase usage. We are currently leveraging the internal infrastructure aspects of the environment. We're going to expand it and we purchased additional infrastructure to expand the visibility across multiple areas.

The technical support offered by SolarWinds NPM is pretty good.

The initial setup was straightforward. We deployed the solution from new and completed the upgrades. 

We coordinate with the vendor to help support the implementation. It can take many days depending on the modules that need to be installed. It took us approximately two days.

We need at least one staff member in each focus area for the implementation of the solution, totaling approximately six, depending on the modules you have.

We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment.

Before choosing SolarWinds NPM we evaluated other solutions such as Splunk and ScienceLogic. The flexibility and the overall breadth of different modules that SolarWinds has to offer were superior to the other solutions evaluated.

I rate SolarWinds NPM an eight out of ten.

It is a good solution, it provides multiple module options, easy to use, and predominantly easy to find people to support it in the industry.

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.

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.

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.

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.

• It is centralized with a dashboard.
• Global network device availability
• Availability alerts via emails and dashboard
• Alerts you when an IP conflict occurs
• Identifies the culprit by MAC address, device type, switch port, and Wi-Fi SSID
• Isolates the offender using a remote port shutdown
• Provides a centralized view on alerts, state, health and performance of the network devices.
• Real time network updates and easy to use
• Monitors packet loss, response time, and performance of devices
• In-depth traffic reports to pinpoint bandwidth issues before it affects end-users.
• Helps administrators to identify and fix bandwidth issues faster.
• Aids in capacity planning
• Auto discovery of devices

The old version was a proprietary system, had limited device visibility, no centralized SysLog, SNMP v2, had per campus monitoring system, no Wi-Fi visibility, and had limited licenses compared to the new version, which is multi-vendor, has a customized dashboard, centralized SysLog, SNMP v3, Centralized Monitoring System, Wi-Fi visibility, and Enterprise Licensing.

We need to investigate technology changes everyday.

Since 2014.

Always stable.

100%. It shows all incidents.

Yes. We still use those as backup: SCOM and Omnivista.

Straightforward, no training needed.

Yes, we did: PRTG and Observer.

The free trial is there to test the product.