SolarWinds NPM Reviews

Our installation is on-premises on a virtual machine. When we purchased NPM I was particularly interested in the features of Orion. We were going through a maturation process propagating the monitoring of applications throughout the server policy here at the university. It was more to monitor various applications that are primarily used for individual schools. For example, we have the school public health, and we have the school of nursing and they have different needs. You have all these applications like Banner and Canvas and other web-based applications that get used by particular areas. We are working with one application now for COVID-19. There is an application that has been spawned from that, but mostly our monitoring is for up/downtime, space, memory, availability, and those types of things critical for performance analysis. We are just now getting more into monitoring databases and a broader scope of applications as well.  

What I am mostly referring to is not the whole Network Performance Monitor suite. This is the actual operations monitoring piece of it. We have the network and we are responsible for set up and monitoring of those particular tools.  

We identified the five areas that we wanted to have be our key performers, like memory utilization, CPU utilization, and those core components. Just the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they were physical or virtual.  

We were looking at using DPA (Database Performance Analyzer) which is another component of the NPM and that looks like it takes care of an area we had not really dove into yet. But in talking to the DBA, they like another product that they want to use for the database monitoring. It is an Oracle product called OEM (Oracle Enterprise Manager).  

In talking to the DBA's, there was a lot of functionality that they were just used to and they had issues because they did not see some things that they thought were important but missing in the DPA product. That is the only thing I have run into so far with the product that seems to be a shortfall. Everything else is pretty good.  

I do not really have other suggestions for additional features beyond working on the development of DPA to make it a more complete tool. We are still learning the product.  

There may be some things that they could improve in the reporting aspect of the product. You can create custom reports and those types of things. But the product seems to be missing some depth in that area and it leaves a little bit to be desired. For example, the filtering system and formatting reports and things like that seem to have room for improvement. You are a little limited on the information available on that front and the utility could be improved.  

They do have some templates that you can use for report setup. It would be nice if you could maybe make your own. That might make it a little bit more easy to generate other reports that follow the way you like to do things.  

We purchased SolarWinds NPM (Network Performance Monitor) about three years ago.  

SolarWinds is a pretty good, stable product, but we have had some issues with support. That is especially true of the last release we upgraded to. There were some SQL issues that we were looking for them to help us out with and, finally, it took so long that someone on our internal SQL team had figured out what the problem was. So, I would say that the upgrades to the product itself from what we went through can be somewhat of a pain point and maybe there needs to be more rigorous testing.  

Typically, I don't think scalability is an issue. If you are talking about individual users, we have anywhere from 20 to 25 people across the typology. Probably one of the biggest users is a resource/research support group where they have various servers on the Orion Monitoring System. They actually take on their own responsibility and monitoring role for their servers. So, there are some groups that adopted monitoring through Orion, and then there are some other groups that have quite a bit more of a blasé approach to it and do not really think it is important.  

We have not had a lot of opportunities to use technical support. When we did I was not particularly impressed with their response time or expertise.  

The initial setup with Orion was somewhat complex. They do have templates in there that you can utilize, but most of those you are going to have to customize anyways. We found that it was easier just to go ahead and do our own.  

The way that I found it to be complex was that we had to do a lot of our own scripting to collect the data that we needed. Once you have got a template set up, you can pretty much populate that information to the Orion database, but I mean there is some pain to get started off. Overall we got involved in a year-long project where we were meeting on a weekly basis discussing all the issues. I think it took us a little over a year-and-a-half to actually declare success on the project.  

Only after that declaration of success were we able to get on to monitoring and dissemination of information to various users and get started with the monitoring. But our monitoring is a lot better than what it used to be. We were using Homegrown, Nagios, and Check_MK. People were not paying attention to alerts. I think the way we handle it now has really helped users mature in that way. We have still got a lot more work to do though.  

We started out with an implementation strategy, but there were some challenges when our directions got changed on us by senior leadership. We would have a plan and a direction and head down a path to implement those particular types of solutions. We would set up the alerting and monitoring and then three months later somebody would come up from an executive level and say, "Hey, we need to monitor this as well." So, we would have to make some changes just like any project. We had to learn to be flexible with it to meet people's needs, but having clearer goals from the outset would have made it easier and quicker in the long run.  

We did just about all the work on the implementation on our own with an internal team. Right now, I have got one person that is in charge of the actual product itself. They take care of all the changes, releases, upgrades, deployments, the agents, and those types of things. I have another individual who is responsible for creating tickets and disseminating the information to the owners of the server monitoring in various groups to get their alerts fixed. It does require attention but it does not take a large group for maintenance requirements.  

I do not handle the negotiations on pricing, so that is outside my realm of influence. I know that our initial purchase was about $200,000.  

One of the things I would suggest to people considering this product and products like it is having a clear agreement upon targets of what you really want to monitor. If it is applications or servers or whatever it is, it just makes sense to come at your choices with a plan. Implement that on the front end by picking out what is important instead of coming back on the back end and trying to do things after-the-fact.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this solution as about an eight-out-of-ten.  

Our primary use case for SolarWinds is to monitor our server's status, determining if it is down or not, and examining each packet from server to server. 

We also use it for Application Performance Management and Network Performance Management to ensure everything is operating smoothly.

SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason. 

The application performance management, network performance management, and database analyzer tools within SolarWinds are very helpful in preventive maintenance. It effectively reduces costs despite being expensive, and we believe it is worth the investment. 

Everything has been complete and stable for our needs over the past four years.

The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot. It is effective in monitoring network performance.

We have been using SolarWinds for four or five years.

There are no stability issues with SolarWinds. It is stable.

We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.

Positive

We contacted SolarWinds about the implementation.

The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.

The solution is considered expensive. It is deemed worth it for the benefits it provides.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

I work with multiple customers using NPM to monitor the performance and the vital status of network devices, making sure to take care of network security devices by monitoring them with NPM. NPM provides real-time data on the overall CPU and health of network boxes, which is helpful when needing to check specific devices. This includes the interface traffic and vital states of the devices.

NPM helps me by offering a comprehensive view of network device health, supporting the SMS gateway, which allows receiving SMS alerts on my mobile. It also supports Outlook for email alerts, API support, and meets several requirements for financial and ISP environments.

The most valuable feature is the vital states of the devices as it provides overall CPU and device health information. Interface traffic monitoring is also beneficial. NPM is user-friendly and supports the SMS gateway and Outlook for alerts, which are essential in financial and ISP environments.

It would be beneficial if NPM offered support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as currently, it does not support this and we are migrating our services there. Improving customer control for opening and escalating support tickets would also be advantageous.

I have been using NPM for almost seven to eight years.

Initially, there were some stability issues where SolarWinds NPM stopped working with the database, making it difficult to access the interface. However, it has improved and is now more stable.

Scalability is not an issue with NPM, and it is suitable for small, medium, and enterprise environments. It offers reliable scalability.

The current model requiring engagement through a local partner to escalate issues to SolarWinds takes time and could be improved. Customers should have direct access to open and prioritize tickets in the customer portal.

Positive

I have used OpManager and other solutions, but NPM provides accurate data and supports necessary integrations, making it a preferable choice.

The initial setup of NPM is simple and user-friendly, with presentable data and a user-friendly interface.

In Pakistan, the pricing for SolarWinds is high compared to other vendors. Despite this, customers are satisfied with the product because it meets their needs.

I evaluated competing products like Orion and OpManager, but choose NPM for its accuracy and features.

I recommend NPM if the customer has the budget for it, as it is a high-quality solution with comprehensive features.

We've been using SolarWinds for our network monitoring. It's basic advanced network monitoring, up-down of Rogers switches, as well as metrics, latency, wireless metrics, where users are, errors on interfaces, route cables, and things of that nature. We're just pulling as much data from our network devices as possible to present that in an easy pane of glass.

I find the NetPath to be very valuable. It visualizes that traceroute that you can share with anyone in the business. For example, when they say, "Hey, what's going on? The network's slow because my application or my server's having issues" you can show them this nice graph that visualizes where there may be congestion or if there isn't any congestion at all.

Its initial setup is simple. 

So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions.

Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital.

There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.

We've been using the solution for about three years. 

The stability is fantastic. We haven't personally had any issues other than a few gripes about the lack of information. However, as far as it being stable, for me, it's been pretty solid.

It's possible to scale, however, it comes at a cost. You have to go through them and there's a whole nother license piece that costs a large lump sum to grow your polers to start importing more if your initial server is getting towards a limit. It's scalable, with the caveat of it's going to cost you.

We have about ten to 20 users. It's a mix of network analysts, CIS admins, storage administrators, and application administrators.

We do not plan to increase usage at the moment, mainly as we're pretty much utilizing it as much as we need to, however, it is pretty much monitoring our entire environment or maybe couple hundred switches, some routers, couple hundred servers, and applications and things like that. We pretty much monitor our whole environment and our environment's not really growing anymore. We're pretty good right now.

Technical support is pretty good. In the few cases we have reached out for any support, they've been pretty responsive. Also, their online resources and knowledge bases are very extensive as well.

Positive

We actually didn't use anything before this product.

The implementation process is pretty straightforward. They give you an MSI and once you have your servers and databases set up, it's just a couple of clicks and it's set up.

For overall importing of everything may have taken a couple of weeks to have things up and running due to how our organization is structured and how we can gather information to pull into SolarWinds and our implementation strategy. For example,  who set up servers and applications. We start getting with the appropriate aims to get whatever monitor or whatever polling method we need, whether it was S and NP strings or accounts for any server monitoring with administrative access or whatnot. Then we look at the network and do those automatic scans from there. Once we start pulling in that information, we start actually organizing all the nodes in there to properly alert and monitor. It takes maybe a month or so to get it to a baseline.

For deployment and maintenance, honestly, it's just me by myself doing it. It would be easier with a few more people.

The setup was done in-house. We did not use any third party, like an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

As far as assisting in being proactive in our network, it's been a great help in helping us maintain a healthy environment and being proactive and making sure things are up to date and upgraded.

The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing.

There weren't any other options were evaluated. We saw SolarWinds and noted our other sister companies use that. We just went with it to be standardized within our entire conglomerate.

We are a customer and end-user.

I would definitely advise others to do their homework. There are a lot of different modules you can buy with different licensing. You need to understand what you're looking to monitor, and what you're trying to present to your business, and then do the homework on the solution itself and see how that fits your needs before just going and buying it or even talking to a sales representative.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's pretty good at its job. I haven't really delved into too many other things. I've tried to look at other tools recently and in my opinion, solutions like Nagios or Zabbix aren't the best. I haven't really looked into other things like Datadog or LogicMonitor yet, however, I'd say this solution is kind of a leader in the pack for what it's doing. Still, there's definitely room for improvement.

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.

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.

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. 

SolarWinds NPM was used for everything. For interface monitoring, load balancing checking interface uptime and device status. 

We had the full suite of products, not just NPM.

It is simple to use.

It can be agentless.

The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is.

Their IPAM component is severely lacking. The process is extremely manual. It just doesn't get in there if you don't manually enter it. 

It is not particularly DNS-aware. When it comes to DNS names, you pretty much have to configure everything manually. It will not grab anything on its own. 

They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.

I am been using SolarWinds NPM for 15 years.

I believe that we are working with version nine.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution, aside from the fact that they had a major hack a couple of years ago and effectively allowed the Russian government to completely hack their code, making everyone vulnerable.

SolarWinds NPM is not very scalable.

We had 10 users.

There was only an IT engineer that was responsible for upgrading.

There was only one administrator. The rest were read-only.

Technical support is very good. You always got a live person.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to set up.

The initial configuration is simple. Because, they did not use a backend SQL database, their initial setup was extremely simple. 

As they grew, they began to use SQL, which made things a little more complicated. 

It was extremely simple at first.

It probably took me a week to get it all set up and running, and another month to get everything in it. 

The initial configuration to the point where it was up and running took me about a week.

We installed it in a central data center and then began implementing it. We had to manually discover devices, pull them in, and manually add them one at a time.

It was implemented in-house.

We have seen a return on investment.

It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first.

It is significantly less expensive than Infoblox.

I don't recall the exact amount, It was approximately 20 years ago, but I recall it being relatively inexpensive to install. The initial part was really cheap, but the licensing cost became really expensive over time.

I would advise people to only use it for monitoring or viewing traffic flows. Don't use the IPAM section, the DHCP section, or the DNS section.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM a seven out of ten.