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.

On-premises

Why do I recommend this product? As compared with other products we found Solarwinds to be more robust and includes more powerful functions including: -Scheduled scan of the network automatically discovers network devices and monitors the IP of the device, the name, machine type and polling method. -Support multiple vendors so it will support lots of devices to be scanned. -Mobile view for IPHONE, BLACKBERRY and ANDROID -Microsoft active directory integration For the above reasons our company has chosen it instead of Angry IP Scanner or solar winds engineering toolset.

-New, web-based interface lacks some features of traditional GUI. -Increases the processor load if it operated for a period of time. Solarwinds is a strong company in the network monitoring, management and configuration market -- it has a lot of products and one of the most famous is solarwinds TFTP server. Solarwinds engineering toolset is a set of products that include all monitoring and management network programs combined in one software package. Solarwinds network performance monitor is a strong product that combines management (SNMP), monitoring (SYSLOG) and configuration of routers and switches. It is also very effective to analyze the link bandwidth and network device performance such as CPU utilization and memory.

Interface details and the list of interface charts.

Being able to provide a history of interface behavior helps the organization in a multifaceted way. Current productivity and interface forecasting.

Overall speed of the software could be improved... as it is incredibly slow at times. Polling for items that are in a down state seems to take a long time. This affects up time reporting and metrics.

5 years.

Yes at times there are database stability issues.

Yes we did.

Customer Service:

Good. I appreciate not being offshored (at least it wasn't when I called).

Technical Support:

Good.

Yes. SolarWinds offers more detail.

We primarily use the solution for our network.

All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great. 

The UI needs improvement, although in the latest version we installed I've noticed it has gotten better. 

Improvement also is required the monitoring of multiple interfaces from different devices. 

I've been using the solution for ten years.

The solution is stable.

Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing.

We have been very pleased with technical support. They respond quite quickly and the responses are always helpful.

The initial setup was straightforward. We had it up and running pretty quickly. The actual deployment takes a bit of time, but the initial configuration to import a few devices was about a day.

The solution was installed quite a long time ago. We may have used an integrator, but I don't think he did much more than I could have done myself.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We're using it for monitoring network uptime. We were testing it out for applications and for servers, but that didn't work for us. We wanted a different solution, an end-to-end type of monitoring. We wanted to see the end-user experience.

It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network.

The ability to be able to control the network equipment.

It would be helpful if they were tied up with one of the hardware vendors so we wouldn't have so much to set up. Another feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows.

Three to five years.

The stability is good. 

I'm part of the THWAK, a community that uses SolarWinds. They're okay. There are so many configurations there, although they didn't really apply to us.

We didn't have any network monitoring when I started with the company, and SolarWinds was already there.

My most important criteria when selecting a vendor is support, onsite.

It was straightforward. You just install the application.

You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work.

SolarWinds is pretty straightforward. If you're a startup, you want to stand up a solution quickly, then SolarWinds would be good for you because it doesn't have a big learning curve to implement it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. They're pretty good but we really have pretty predominantly Cisco equipment, so Cisco would offer a better free view of the equipment right now.

We are a solution provider and we evaluated this product, amongst others, for one of our clients. This product is used as a network monitoring tool.

This product has a lot of good network monitoring features.

The interface could be made more user-friendly. There are lots of features but using them is a little bit difficult. For somebody doing network monitoring for the first time, it is quite difficult to use. For example, they could add better dashboards.

We evaluated this solution for one month.

It was used on a daily basis during the PoC and it was stable, once the configuration was completed.

We did not test scalability during the PoC. There were four or five network operators and the infrastructure included more than 200 devices.

This product is supported well. The people in technical support are very good.

The setup is a little bit complex and it took me about a week to deploy. It took time to configure everything.

Expertise is required in order to deploy this solution. I received some support during the implementation and deployment.

The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine.

I also tested ManageEngine while I was evaluating SolarWindws, and I prefer ManageEngine so that is what we decided to implement. It was more user-friendly, less expensive, and we didn't need to bring in any help for deployment.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is if they have expertise in SolarWinds then they should implement it. If they do not, then they should look at another option.

Overall, SolarWinds is a very good product. However, compared to ManageEngine, there is room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

On-premises

My primary use case for this is for monitoring router switches, and using the solution to support the collection of this information for us.

It can even support Windows or monitor a Windows server, even on the application level, because they have this module called Server Application Monitor. You have WMI support. You can even monitor performance centers. You can also look at the process monitors, if it is processing or not. It's quite powerful. 

Also it supports IP SLAs, so you can have even more information from a remote site. You
can monitor something like the performance, like mid-latency and other stuff.

When you buy the product, there's a lot of things. You can configure a lot. There's some variable in the report so you can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL. 

Of course, if you have a small team and you have so many sites to monitor, then the
alerts will help you already. Let's say you're monitoring MPRs out there, you know
that the neighbor route could go down, so you know the site is already on a secondary
link instead of primary. You are aware of what's going on, or if things go down, then you
can react quickly.

I think it's a great product. It has ease of use. Just add the IP with the correct credentials or SAS and multistring, and you can already collect all that information including you have NTA, then you're going to have NetFlow. Anything that has an IP that you want to monitor up or down, they can monitor it. If you have SNMP support, they can also collect the information for you.

Also it supports IP SLAs, so you can have even more information from a remote site. You can monitor something like the performance, like mid-latency and the like. You can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible, a flexible solution. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL if you need to.

Also' maybe if SolarWinds would have something you may subscribe to that would be like a polling engine on your site, so all the reporting would go directly to SolarWinds, They could then manage the database and everything else. That would be a nice asset to have.

The only other issue I have is that sometimes when upgrading, it becomes complicated to manage the upgrade.

More than five years.

You sometimes lose some statistics, but if you have HA, then you have a backup that will pick up the monitoring. I think it's going in the right direction.

I only use a single instance at the moment, but I see there are some things there like HA that is quite interesting. Of course, it will cost more to support, but if the company wants it, then maybe yes.

Very seldom. I will contact them directly. Usually, the thing I notice in SolarWinds is you go to the community, it is called THWACK. I never personally contacted tech support.

It's simple. I installed it. You just look at documentation, install a database, install the server and add the NTA. They have some recommendations, a separate database, but we didn't follow them. We just set up with the same server. Yes, it's easy. It's only the upgrade from the older version to the newer version where things start to get complicated.

It's a bit tricky when you go to the cloud already. I don't know what's the right metric myself, what should you be monitoring. Then, the newer trend right now is they don't even have the concept of a virtual machine. Some deployments, they will just have containers, and a container can be on any machine that they can shoot up anytime and deploy the apps there. But, my question is: How do you monitor the performance? What metric are you going to use?

Overall, when considering a new solution, I always consider:

• Ease of use
• Ability for data collection
• Generation of alerts.