SolarWinds NPM Reviews

- Powerful network fault & availability management. - Mature SNMP-based network performance monitor; lets you add wireless, VoIP, and NetFlow monitoring support as needed; provides easily configurable custom alerts and reports. - NPM can also receive Syslog output and SNMP traps for error detection and alerting. - NPM’s alerting system is powerful, flexible, and relatively easy to use. - The product features modular pricing, so you can buy only the features you need.

- New, web-based interface lacks some features of traditional GUI. - One of the problems I've had in the past, is building out a dependency structure.

NPM uses Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) ping requests to gather basic connectivity and response-time information. It allows network devices that support this, to gather additional information, by using SNMP queries and Cisco IOS NetFlow. NPM can also receive Syslog output and SNMP traps for error detection and alerting. Add-on modules let Orion NPM monitor NetFlow devices, wireless appliances, and VoIP networks and also let NPM monitor more devices as your network grows. Whether you want basic enterprise network monitoring or a full suite of network diagnostic tools and monitors, I recommend Orion 9 for its full feature set and ease of use.

We moved from nGenius to Orion NPM about 3 years ago and are very happy with the performance, features, and pricing, The company is very pro-active, as in adding additional features and being responsive to customer requests.

1. The constant flow of new features and re-designing of the product sometimes presents bugs that were not identified. 2. Most of the primary support people in Austin do a good job, but they also have outsourced support that also responds to tickets .. and they can be very frustrating to deal with.

Orion NPM is a mature and reasonably priced product. It is easy to deploy and configure, and has an excellent user and network mapping interface.

Resource utilization is heavy so you need to analyze the server before using it for multiple roles. We are unable to use web console to configure new alerts.

SolarWinds Orion NPM tracks bottlenecks in your network infrastructure and lets you troubleshoot them before a disaster happens. It uses protocols and tools like ICMP, SNMP, Cisco NetFlow, and Syslog to provide you with the alerts and statistics you need to run your network at optimal performance and speed. The product is easy to deploy on top of an IIS and .Net framework. It also has excellent built-in thresholds and alerts available to help you get started, yet provides the option to create custom thresholds and alerts as required by your specific network and infrastructure requirements. A comprehensive web interface is available to identify inconsistencies and trouble spots in your network.

Quick to launch. No agents required. Many configuration options.

Network discovery missed many devices. Network mapping & topology was not accurate and does not update automatically. Alerts can not be configured differently for different device categories (e.g., alert comms guys about routers; network people about switches, etc.). While Orion offers many options, many features must be purchased as separate modules.

It has now been about 3 weeks since we launched the Orion Network Performance Monitor and Netflow Traffic Analyzer. We chose this product based on colleague recommendations.

The most valuable feature is the ability to use a few custom properties to manage multiple nodes and alerts; thus, saving hardware resource usage.

• Improved, more detailed service monitoring and reporting.

Dependencies: Created dependencies are not visible for management/editing by default until some tweaking is done. It would be better if this is enabled by default.

I have used it for months.

We have not encountered any deployment issues.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Customer Service:

Customer service is good.

Technical Support:

Technical support is very good.

We previously used a different solution. We switched for better, more detailed service reporting.

A vendor team implemented it.