SolarWinds NPM Reviews

I use NPM for traffic monitoring in my network. It monitors all my traffic.

It is good for notifications and monitoring traffic, especially since most of them are remotely done.

The abnormal traffic notifications are good. Most of them are remote, and it is very good for notifications and monitoring for the traffic.

The price could be better. The maintenance or upgrade system regarding the payment is not good. It must be upgraded and is not related to the additional support payment. 

Also, if I need to make a feature enabled, I have to buy another edition and include support, which is unnecessary for me.

I have been working with the product for six or seven years.

There are points where the system drops, and you need to restart or monitor the system itself. It is not a SaaS system; it is an on-premises system.

It is pretty scalable. I would rate scalability as eight out of ten, with no issues.

Customer service is linked to payments. If you do not have a license or renewal supported, it is not supported for you.

Positive

I also use Microsoft Defender as it is good. However, the user needs a license for any additional user in SolarWinds.

The initial setup is simple. Sometimes I do it by myself, yet at other times, I do it with a consultant from SolarWinds teams.

I did the setup with the help of SolarWinds teams at times and by myself at other times.

The price could be better, and the system has a payment structure linked with upgrades, which I find unnecessary.

I use Microsoft Defender at times due to licensing restrictions with SolarWinds.

I can recommend the product, especially for small or medium-sized companies.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

The primary use case is to to know what nodes or devices are up or down in our environment. I can also provide a performance report, if needed to anyone who asks, by pulling it out from SolarWinds NPM. We have it integrated with other SolarWinds products, like NDM.

I have been using the solution for the last seven years. The company has been using the solution for over nine years now.

This solution provides us with proactive reports.

We use it to understand our historical reports, since we keep these reports for 365 days per our compliance requirements. We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future.

At this moment, we are facing some problem with Zoom and our web content sync. We are having trouble with the quality of our user experience. A lot of users are reporting that their calls and screen shares are getting disconnected, and it is happening very frequently. Therefore, I would like to monitor the Zoom application from SolarWinds NPM. Unfortunately, it doesn't have this capability right now, and I had to find another application for this.

We would like a single application from SolarWinds that incorporates all their products.

It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. While it is very flexible, and you can do lots of things with the SolarWinds, the down side is that the product can be unusable. Also, sometimes, the performance is slow. In comparison, I have tested some Unix-based applications, which are very quick. However, SolarWinds is Windows-based, so we are seeing a lot of performance issues.

The scalability is good.

A number of times, I have contacted SolarWinds technical support. Depending the issue, sometimes they will just ask me for the diagnostic. However, if we call support for critical issues, we expect immediate solutions. However, sometimes in these cases, they still just ask us for the diagnostic report and tell us that they'll get back to us within 12 to 24 hours. But, if we are in the critical state, we need to answer to our management about what is happening. We cannot wait 24 hours. That is too much time for us. There are times that they do resolve issues quickly. Therefore, sometimes they are good, and sometimes they are bad.

We used to be on NetIQ, but were scaling very fast. This product was very scalable and flexible, which is why we went for it.

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex.

The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now.

We are currently exploring New Relic as an alternative product. The Zoom monitoring issue is one of the reasons that we are looking at New Relic and willing to pay their higher price.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support and flexibility.

SolarWinds NPM is used in our organization as a monitoring tool for network devices. As a network administrator, I use this solution to monitor devices like switches, routers, interfaces, and tunnels. 

The tool monitors tunnel utilization, interface status, UBS, data center humidity and temperature. 

It's a highly reliable product. SolarWinds NPM is one of our company's most valuable products. SolarWinds NPM immediately notifies via email in case of any downtime situations. 

The response time of the support team needs to improve. Sometimes, there is a wait time of three or four hours to obtain a response from SolarWinds NPM. The consistency of support also needs to improve, in some cases a quick response can be noticed from the support team of SolarWinds NPM. 

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for one and a half years. 

I would rate the stability a ten out of ten. The solution is highly stable. SolarWinds NPM has showcased the utmost stability for one and a half years of usage in our company. 

I would rate the scalability an eight out of ten. SolarWinds NPM adapts well enough to the workflows in our company. The solution is used in our organization to monitor more than 200 nodes. At our company, we are already using the maximum user license of SolarWinds NPM.  

The customer support is satisfying for SolarWinds NPM. I would rate tech support a six out of ten. Quicker responses are expected from the support team. 

Neutral

I would rate the initial setup a nine out of ten. Our company team effortlessly deployed the solution. Only a few free resources, like YouTube, were utilized by our organization's professionals to learn the product installation process.

The deployment of SolarWinds NPM took one or two hours in our organization. After the primary installation of SolarWinds NPM, every node needs to be restarted, it takes time to add the nodes at the monitoring end. Only one or two professionals from our company were needed to deploy SolarWinds NPM. In the post-deployment monitoring, only one professional is required.  

The product was implemented in-house. 

We have realized ROI in terms of saved time in our organization. The product has also contributed towards ROI through accurate and reliable downtime alerts. For instance, the exact number of down switches is notified by email. I would rate the solution's ROI a ten out of ten. 

The product price can be considered to be affordable in economically strong countries like the US but it appears as a bit expensive in Egypt. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten. Our company pays for the license on a yearly basis. The price of the solution is fixed and can be checked by anyone on the vendor's website. 

I would definitely recommend the solution to others. SolarWinds NPM has also helped improve our organization's network performance. The alerting and reporting capabilities of the tool are impressive and can be customized easily. The alerts or reports can always be obtained via email. I would overall rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

We use the solution for our network. It's for P2P networks or our servers to our network.

It can be a monitoring tool that just monitors for us at the moment, checking what the issue is or where the issue is. It is managed by a third party. Basically, it just gives us a view of what the site is. We can see our server connection and whether it's up or not. It's just checking if the servers are up or not and if the network is up or not. It's not doing too much else.

The solution is very user-friendly. 

When it pinpoints something, I will get an email alert. I'll immediately know what the problem is and be able to do something. 

The pricing is great. 

We were looking for some sort of endpoint monitoring as well. it would be nice if that was covered. We'd like to have more security when it comes to ADR. 

We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future. 

Sometimes, if the problem isn't on our side, it doesn't provide a very clear problem in terms of what the issue is. 

I've been using the solution for about two years. 

It's been very stable and reliable. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs. 

We just have one user on the solution who monitors it. Three of us can cover it at any given time. It's web-based. 

A third party helped with the initial setup, and they handled everything. I'm not sure how the deployment worked. 

The initial setup was done by a third party. 

The pricing is decent. We chose to use it based on the price. I can't speak to the exact cost, however, I can say it is very reasonable. 

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

As a user, I would recommend the solution as it is user-friendly and easily understandable. It will tell you exactly what the issue is and where. It's quite useful. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well.

This product could improve by adding cloud monitoring. I want SolarWinds NPM to do much more integration, and have more involvement in cloud monitoring, like AWS or Google, or Azure. I feel like it requires lots of improvement for cloud monitoring in NPM.

I've been working with this product for almost ten years.

The support could be improved. Within the last two, three years, I would say the support has declined. It has degraded, but not that bad. We are still getting solutions, but sometimes, calls stay on hold. When we try to call the support team, it continues to ring on their side. About half of the time it gets connected very quickly, but the other half takes some time to connect. Sometimes I wait more than 10 minutes. It's not totally bad, as we are still getting support. Nowadays, we prefer to send emails to them, so whenever they have someone available, they can revert back to us and we can schedule a call with them.

The pricing is reasonable. In the last year we tried to look for different applications and those other applications are even more expensive. 

If someone wants to install this application, they need to be very specific what environment they want to monitor, whether they want to monitor in a hybrid environment or just cloud, or just on prem, because the setup is going to be quite different in all aspects. When it comes to installation, someone has to have a better understanding of what they're actually going to monitor, how many nodes they are going to monitor, how many network device they are going to monitor, etc. With respect to that, the licensing changes.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM an eight out of ten.

I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable. The advanced alerting and notifications capabilities are helpful as well. Devices can be discovered automatically on a schedule, and grouped by vendor automatically, which makes it very easy to track down devices. The customizable dashboards and reporting are flexible and tend to come in handy as well.

SolarWinds NPM allowed the IT department to take a more proactive approach to troubleshooting, and gaining insights on device availability. We were able to use the integration with Storage Manager and Virtualization Manager to gain valuable insight into our storage and virtualization environments. We were able to readily pull reports on device availability, and other metrics, to provide to our senior management staff and external security auditors.

The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application. The SolarWinds Orion/NPM installation comes with a few Windows client application “add-ons” that would be better served if they were built into the SolarWinds NPM web application. Another area for improvement would be better integration between Solarwinds NPM and Solarwinds NCM as it seems that Solarwinds NCM installs a separate version of NPM/Orion console.

I used this product for a little over two years in two different companies. I implemented the product for the first organization I was with to gain visibility and performance monitoring for the network and servers within our data center.

Yes, there can be issues with deployment if you try to install/uninstall or re-install under different account types (i.e. Local Administrator vs. Domain Administrator). I would recommend sticking to one or the other and you won’t run into any problems.

I have never had an issue with stability or performance. I recommend following the SolarWinds documentation (which is very detailed) and you can be assured not to encounter a single issue in regards to stability.

We setup a standalone instance of SolarWinds NPM. However, SolarWinds NPM offers a couple of different HA architectures that will allow you to scale locally (within the same data center) or globally (across multiple data centers in different geographic locations).

The customer service experience was always top notch and I don’t recall ever having a bad experience. The customer support staff were friendly, courteous and always there to help you out. It was also very easy to get in touch with a technical support engineer, all who seemed very knowledgeable, within just a couple of minutes or less.

SolarWinds technical support was one of the best support departments I’ve ever dealt with. All of the technicians were very knowledgeable and technically capable. Also, when you call into their technical support number, you don’t have to jump through multiple departments to get to a technician, which is very nice and not the same with other vendors.

No, SolarWinds NPM was the first network/server monitoring product that was brought into the organization. Other network monitoring products were researched, but didn't have the feature set, didn't seem as easy to use or as robust as Solarwinds NPM.

It was very straightforward, as you basically just have to start up a Windows Server, and click through the SolarWinds NPM installation wizard before you are ready to configure. You can configure most of the basic settings using the installation wizard (i.e. the database storage location).

We implemented it using an in-house team. It should not be necessary to use a third-party team unless you are performing a massive roll (5000+ endpoints) out across multiple sites.

I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years.

We also evaluated ManageEngine OpManager and AdRem NetCrunch before deciding to purchase SolarWinds NPM in conjunction with the SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) module.

If you’re looking to get a lot more insight and visibility into your network devices, servers, applications, and other devices, along with real-time alert notifications, SolarWinds NPM should be towards the top of your list. You will be able to view devices by type or by location and poll all sorts of different data using SNMP or WMI or other methods. Out of the box, you will also receive customizable dashboards, alerting, reporting, and Active Directory integration.

We have a lot of “home-grown” apps to handle the interesting and challenging monitoring requests and alerting needs.

This product is extremely flexible and customizable. It will do just about anything you need it to do. Out of the box, there is a significant amount of monitoring you can do with very little setup. Then, with custom properties and some ingenuity, you can get it to do pretty much anything else. Additionally, there are a lot of ideas and support in their forum, Thwack.

With custom properties and the alerting flexibility, we’ve been able to customize the alert trigger and reset logic to meet the needs of our users, as well as eliminate the likelihood of making mistakes in the operations center.

We used to be fraught with scenarios, such as:

• Only call if the alert doesn’t clear after 45 minutes.
• Ignore that alarm.
• Don’t call on that night.

The SAM custom script for running component checks only supports 10 pairs of results. I am not sure whether this is a scalability issue. It would be nice to have the option to do more. We worked around it by doing a component check per pair as much as we needed.

The product is excellent at taking feedback, especially from the Thwack form, and implementing popular feature requests.

We’ve been using it for almost 10 years.

Back in the early days and new major releases, of course, there were some hiccups and gotchas. Bleeding edge, baby! It’s all a matter of risk assessment with new feature needs, etc.

We have not run into scalability issues.

In general, the technical support is great. Around new major releases, you do experience longer waits; and every so often, you get a support technician who is newer. Still, if you call in and it’s critical, they fix your issues in a timely manner. This is to be expected; and you need to take this into account in your risk calculation when you schedule upgrades.

We were previously using HPE OpenView. The biggest reason was its lack of mapping flexibility at the time. The ops part is still very visual with the green/yellow/red color-coding of icons. Our systems side is based on alerts and emails.

I don’t recall any troubles during the initial setup. It was a long time ago. I was enamored by its mapping capabilities.

• The software is structured and priced well. It’s not cheap; but it’s not overly expensive either. You get what you pay for, and they are well positioned.
• You are able to spread the costs out by implementing it in steps. Your team is probably not huge. You don’t need to sit around waiting to install and configure the entire monitoring solution. Start with NPM, and start adding modules and capabilities as your existing implementation matures.

We were required to assess alternatives, but I don’t recall the specifics. When implementing SAM in the last 2 years, we moved from Big Brother and evaluated Nagios.

• Gather the official requirements for a monitoring solution, and alert all the consumers. The consumers here are the owners of the monitored gear and apps, and the engineers in the support and ops teams.
• Set a good chunk of time aside to test drive the solution, and get creative with the custom properties.
• Learn SQL or SWQL, a SolarWinds query language that is easier than SQL. This will expand your potential capabilities for customization significantly.
• I am very active on the forum. I get a bunch of ideas and help; so I like to give back.

I use SolarWinds NPM because no other tool has the capabilities that it does. The solution is user-friendly and has many options for customized monitoring that other tools don't have. SolarWinds NPM is an easy tool because it supports both servers and the network at the same time.

The solution's database performance could be improved. The data performance is a little slow and scattered for clients who use the solution for a bigger infrastructure. You can't keep a hold of one-year data if you want to because it doesn't give you the capacity to hold that much information at your end. You have to keep the retention period very minimal.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for seven years.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

We currently use SolarWinds NPM for bigger clients, and I didn't see any problems with that. It totally depends on how many licenses you can purchase or afford. The solution has options for people with a small budget and enterprise businesses. It completely depends on the client's needs and budget.

Anyone can use the solution to monitor hundreds or thousands of servers in the network, as well as 10,000 to 30,000 servers. The number of servers it can monitor isn't limited.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The solution's technical support doesn't support any customization. If you want a customized script or a customized solution, they don't support that. Otherwise, the technical support team has really good and knowledgeable people.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. You just need to know what you need and, accordingly, use the guide to set up proper hardware for your servers. It's a pretty straight installation, and it is not very complicated.

The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market.

I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten.

The solution's alerting system is fine. However, we face a few challenges that we can see in the alerting system that we cannot modify as per our needs. There are some restrictions, but SolarWinds is working on clarifying those challenges. Apart from that, it seems fine to me.

We are currently using the solution on-premises. However, you can also use it on the cloud as it has both options.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.