SolarWinds NPM Reviews, Competitors and Pricing

Works with 51-200 employees

Mar 6, 2013

Feature rich, nice interface, and relatively inexpensive

What is most valuable?

Feature rich produce suite that addresses many aspects of BSM. Thwack community is constantly making suggestions and improvements.

What needs improvement?

There isn't a great deal of flexibility to create custom metrics that can be discovered easily or custom aggregation schemes.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user3876Database Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees

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Sep 13, 2013

NPM offers comprehensive tools for robust network performance. It provides a unified view into the performance of thousands of nodes and interfaces in a network. Performance management matrices can be monitored from any SNMP-enabled device, including routers, switches, firewalls, servers, bandwidth utilization, packet loss, latency, errors, discards, and quality of service.

it_user608529

CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 5, 2017

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Provides instant visibility to our support team across all the networks we monitor.

What is most valuable?

Interactive network map dashboard.

How has it helped my organization?

Provides instant visibility to our support team across all the networks we monitor, allowing us to zero in on the most urgent issues and easily identify root causes of problems.

For how long have I used the solution?

7 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There are some issues when trying to monitor multiple networks with the same IP ranges. The solution for this is to purchase additional modules.

How was the initial setup?

Initial setup was straightforward, but this is s big system, ans we've spent years customising and tailoring the software to work the way we like it.

What was our ROI?

Significantly reduced support costs, and faster response times when there is an issue.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Its not the cheapest on the market, but its certainly among the best.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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it_user168066

Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

Dec 31, 2014

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Awesome product with a lot of info available and great support team.

What is most valuable?

Multicast

How has it helped my organization?

We are a small ISP in FL. Having this tool has been helping us a lot with time responds critical outages and troubleshooting.

What needs improvement?

Map section and Bandwidth.

For how long have I used the solution?

Been using Solarwinds now for 4 years and happy with the system.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Yes

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

9 out of 10

Technical Support:

10 out of 10

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Netcool was just an outdated system.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

Vendor team - I'd rate them a 10 out of 10

What other advice do I have?

Awesome product with a lot of info available and great support team.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user2979

Network Engineer at a tech consulting company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 15, 2012

Solid monitoring tool with lots of extra features and highly customizable

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a powerful, scalable network monitoring tool. It has a vast range of features, and a large number of expansion plugins that can add functionality for almost any need.

Some of the main features of the Network Performance Monitor include:

Great UI – SolarWinds has consistently good UI design that makes it easy for administrators to manage the network. Customizable dashboards make it easy to view status of key services. If a problem arises simply click and drill-down to view devices and their components like network interfaces, CPU, etc.

Monitoring – SNMP or WMI monitoring is SolarWinds’ big strength. But NPM also can function as a Syslog server (see also What is Syslog' - http://www.networkmanagementsoftware.com/what-is-syslog), and also adds native support for VMware, as well as ability to monitor VSANs. Unfortunately there’s no native support for Hyper-V yet.

Alerting – send messages to administrators when pre-specified thresholds are exceeded (e.g. low memory, high CPU) or if devices fail. Or, events could trigger a script to run.

Reporting – The NPM reporting center includes a large number of pre-canned reports that can be run ad-hoc, or scheduled to run automatically. It also has a custom report writer module that allows users to design their own reports. However I found the stock reports to be a little basic and would love to see this area of the product improved in the future.

SolarWinds has great integration across their entire product range. Nearly every plugin and additional product (think NetFlow monitoring, application monitoring, DDI management, etc) seamlessly integrates with the rest of their Orion suite, streamlining access and reporting.

Surprisingly, one of Solarwinds other strengths comes from their customers. Thwack is the name of the Solarwinds user community, a place where both users and Solarwinds staff go to exchange ideas and support – and also product extensions and customizations. Need to customize NPM for a specific need, add a custom report, or poll a custom device' Odds are good that someone else has already figured out a way to do it, and posted it on Thwack.

NPM is priced on a per-interface model, so that could add up quickly depending on your requirements. This is a little different from most of their competitors who price their software on a per-device basis. Make sure you do the math to understand the total cost of the product.

Overall, I’m consistently impressed with the power of NPM, ease of use, and quality of this product, and would have no trouble recommending it for most networks. SolarWinds offers fully-functioning, free 30-day trials of Network Performance Manager so you can test it out in your own environment.

Pros
SolarWinds Orion NPM has one of the best user interfaces in the business.
The NPM product does an all-round great job at automatically discovering network devices.
Support for other features: Syslog, virtualization, VSANs.
Thwack (SolarWinds User community) integration.

Cons
Some administration tasks can't be completed through the web UI and require the old windows application consoles.
Stock reporting feels limited - would like to see simpler ways of generating my own reports.
No native support for Hyper-V - though can poll with SNMP.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user110553Works at a recruiting/HR firm

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May 4, 2014

Awesome article. I have been searching for this type of valuable information for a long time now. Thanks for providing this info.

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it_user1290390

Network Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Apr 27, 2020

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Feature-rich with good technical support

Pros and Cons

"The people in technical support are very good."

"The interface could be made more user-friendly."

What is our primary use case?

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.

What is most valuable?

This product has a lot of good network monitoring features.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

We evaluated this solution for one month.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What about the implementation team?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

technica379896

Technical Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 26, 2018

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Gives us a single console where we can see the entire network

Pros and Cons

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

"A feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

The ability to be able to control the network equipment.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

Three to five years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is good.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward. You just install the application.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user1012662

Information Technology Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 24, 2019

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Good equipment monitoring, very good technical support and reliable stability

Pros and Cons

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

"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."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for our network.

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for ten years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What other advice do I have?

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.

it_user8427

Network Manager at a consultancy with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 6, 2013

The latest iteration is an extremely powerful tool

I have used Solarwinds NPM since it was Orion. I have found that with a little effort, the latest iteration is an extremely powerful tool. I leaves Openview in the dust. The reports can be customized with either a simple interface with a complex SQL query. Alerting is superb. You can even set the alerts so that you will not get flooded when key components fail (as in WAN links) The licencing is not actually per node, but three levels of maximun and an unlimited. Either way, the pricing is extremely reasonable and the anual is for supporty and upgrades. The people at Solarwinds have always been very responsive.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user4401Developer at a transportation company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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Nov 26, 2013

You are right and I would like to add other features that Network Performance Monitor has: first is ConnectNow Topology Mapping. It allows the environment to be mapped in real time automatically, which provides graphical visibility into the network. Second is Integrated Wireless Poller, which monitors wireless devices for security and other issues to allow more widespread use of wireless technologies by reducing the pain to manage these items. The third one is Report Writer, which gives the administrator the ability to create his own custom reports detailing things within his environment.