SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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.

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.

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.

Single page view of all the servers lets me monitor them at a glance. I can expand and see all the details at as single click expand. I can capture real-time visibility into network performance issues to quickly determine who, where and what is impacting the network. Very easy to set alerts for unusual happening. Highly configurable. Graphical view lets us compare the values within a particular time frame.

User Interface needs improvement as it is not very attractive. I was not able to properly monitor my SNMP based online UPS.

Our company needed a highly reliable network and bandwidth manager/monitor as we were unable to monitor all servers /networks manually. Our search finally ended at this Orion’s NPM tool which has great scalability and reliability.

• Simplicity of Use, instinctive, lots of attributes, simple to Install and keep, economical, and makes network management easier. • Sturdy network error and accessibility management. • Well established SNMP based network performance check, which allows for adding wireless, Voice over Internet Protocols, and Net Flow checking support as required. It also offers simple and configurable custom attentive and reports. • Network Performance Monitor can also receive Syslog output and SNMP traps for fault discovery and alerting. • Alerting system of Network Performance Monitor is strong, supple, and comparatively simple. • The product has module based pricing, meaning that you only have to purchase the required features.

• Bulk Node attach is chaos • TCP Service Monitoring • Unable to perform stop or edit for several events • Slightly costly • Latest web based interface does not have some characteristics of the traditional Graphic User Interface. • I am having a problem with putting up a reliance structure.

The monitoring system of Orion is powerful and has become a positive feature in the company. Latest versions need no extra training, further software installation, added licensing, and no other exertion. Updates are flawless and consistent. The application is highly self documented and sufficiently instinctive and competent, reasonably priced, and flexible. For basic enterprise network monitoring or a complete set of network diagnostic tools and monitors, Orion is the best option for its complete attribute set and simplicity of use.

• Polling
• Automatic ticket creation of server resources (CPU, Memory, Reboots etc.)

We can sometimes fix a problem before it is even recognized by our user community based on the thresholds we set up for various resources on a production server.

They could make the process of adding various devices easier and more intuitive.

I've used it for nine months.

No issues encountered.

It's very scalable and customizable.

Customer Service:

They have good customer service.

Technical Support:

They have good technical support.

I haven't used another solution like NPM before.

It's significant in my opinion.

You can and should put the not so obvious devices onto SolarWinds. An example would be a server's back-up power supply. Otherwise you won't realize when the back-up is not functioning until the main power supply goes down and it's too late at that point.

It would be nice if SolarWinds added some technical protocols like Modbus. The market needs a simple solution for monitoring a technical device.

I have been using SolarWinds for two years. 

It is an absolutely stable platform.

It's very easy to scale. The scalability is brilliant. If you need additional monitoring resources or if you need to plug in your secondary data center, it takes thirty minutes. It's easy to use.

I like SolarWinds support because it's 24/7. You describe your issues, your situation and maybe two or three hours later you can discuss a solution with a technical engineer.

The setup took approximately two to three hours. You need about two hours for tuning. If you use only two or three modules like network performance monitors or network traffic analyzers, you need two or three hours, not more.

The setup required two staff members. One network administrator who needs to pre-configure the network infrastructure and one administrator. You need only two administrators.

You pay for the license you need. You buy it and use. The next year you will have to buy a renewal.

I would recommend this solution to someone considering it. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

On-premises

SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy to use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install.

It would be good to have high security. This is a concern after the attacks. 

They also need to focus more on the application side.

I've been using it for nearly six months.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

It was easy to set up.

We compared it to Zabbix. You can do a lot of parameters in Zabbix, but you have to configure them all. Also, it is not as easy to install.

It's good to go for SolarWinds NPM, but make sure that you do all the upgrades on time.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM at seven on a scale from one to ten.