SolarWinds NPM Reviews

Our primary use case for the solution is to monitor whether certain devices are up or down, monitor bandwidth utilization and have a network performance monitor.

The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable because we use the solution for monitoring. For example, a map that shows all of our switches, which make up our core infrastructure, and then the small firewalls that connect to the other locations so that we can see how our devices are running. Hence, the monitoring ability to create those maps and monitor everything on warmup is a very valuable feature for us.

The solution works very well for our current use case, but the price of the solution can be improved.

We have been using the solution for a while and are currently using version 12.4, but we are considering upgrading it.

We have not had issues with stability. I rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The solution is scalable, and there is currently only two staff utilizing the solution in our organization, but we have plans to increase usage further.

We have a fairly small environment, but this is because we only have about 15 switches, some servers, and our remote locations, so we're using a couple of hundred nodes altogether, but we can scale up to probably thousands or even tens of thousands because there is room to add additional servers. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

We dealt with customer service and support once for a license issue, and they resolved our concerns swiftly.

Positive

SolarWinds NPM was the first network monitoring solution we used

The initial setup was complex as there was quite a bit of work that had to be done in terms of setting up databases and making sure the database was linked to the application.

We implemented the solution through a vendor team the first time, but further installations were done in-house.

The licensing costs are fairly high. I rate it a five out of ten.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten based on our current version. The solution is a robust and stable product but can be improved by reducing its licensing costs. Therefore, I recommend the solution to users considering implementing it.

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.

We're using SolarWinds NPM for server monitoring, report monitoring, and application monitoring.

I found a lot of valuable features in SolarWinds NPM, such as the customized application monitoring that allows you to customize any monitoring and script customization, and you also have the option to deploy and upgrade SolarWinds NPM online, which is very useful for my organization.

An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data.

SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed.

Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature.

I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.

I've been working with SolarWinds NPM for almost two years now.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution.

My team contacted technical support for SolarWinds NPM a lot of times. On a scale of one to ten, I'd rate support as seven because one of my cases remained open for a year without the perfect answer or resolution, though the SolarWinds development team has been working on it.

Neutral

I've previously worked with HPE and IBM, but that was for another organization. My current organization uses SolarWinds NPM.

The initial setup for SolarWinds NPM is relatively easy, and anyone can do it.

As I deployed SolarWinds NPM in a huge environment, the deployment took almost six to eight hours for fifteen servers.

We deployed SolarWinds NPM in-house.

Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay.

I'm an end-user of SolarWinds NPM.

In the organization, over a hundred people use SolarWinds NPM, with five to six administrators. The solution requires specific maintenance, mainly because it has a lot of DW issues.

My advice to people looking to start working with SolarWinds NPM is that it's the best solution for a medium-scale environment. For a large-scale environment with many requirements, such as a vast number of nodes, for example, more than twenty-five thousand, SolarWinds NPM may not be as scalable, DW-wise. If you have below fifteen thousand to fifteen thousand nodes, then it's okay to use SolarWinds NPM.

My rating for SolarWinds NPM is eight out of ten.

The primary use case is for cybersecurity, as they did not want it on their own personal cloud. 

We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced.

The improvement would be that SolarWinds NPM thoroughly checks its patches before releasing them to the market. Better testing, alpha testing, and then releasing it to the market.

I have been working with SolarWinds NPM for the past one to two years.

The stability is very good and informative.

We were able to quickly expand and include any other active equipment or any new buildings which became requirements. We were able to easily take into consideration everything and set it up.

Technical support is good, however somewhat delayed due to the time difference. We had some troubleshooting issues because new people were working on it, but SolarWinds NPM responded back and it was easy for everyone to go through it.

Positive

Deployment was straightforward and we had an expert of SolarWinds NPM who we employed. The process was completed within a couple of hours.

We had one person from a third party help us through the deployment process.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM a nine out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM is used to monitor our devices' to see uptime, availability, and performance.

SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by proactively indicating if we are low on resources for a particular server.

The most valuable feature of SolarWinds NPM is the performance monitoring to see the memory, and CPU utilization.

SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for approximately 10 years.

SolarWinds NPM is very unstable. We often have website loading issues. We have to call support, and they fix it. Then a month later, we're going to have the same problem.

SolarWinds NPM can be used at multiple locations, and increase the capacity as needed with additional licensing. It's very scalable. 

We have three people using this solution. It's used globally at all our sites and we plan to increase our usage in the future.

SolarWinds NPM technical support is very responsive. They're available by phone, which is a plus.

I did not use a solution previously.

SolarWinds NPM's initial setup was straightforward. It took about a year to complete the full process of the implementation. The strategy we used was we worked on the setup of vCore and Microsoft Azure, and then for each of our sites, we did afterward.

We did the deployment in-house.

I have not seen a substantial return on investment with SolarWinds NPM.

We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees.

I rate the price of SolarWinds NPM a three out of five.

I have evaluated other solutions, such as PRTG Network Monitor and WhatsUp Gold. We choose SolarWinds NPM because it had better licensing and architectural options.

My advice to others is to follow the best practices.

I rate SolarWinds NPM a seven out of ten.

The solution has good support they're constantly improving it.

This solution has many different roles in our company. There is the application support group who configure it for monitoring specific services within applications and our desktop or operations group which monitors toner in laser printers. My group, which is primarily networking and servers, use it for bandwidth monitoring, server processor utilization monitoring, and for disk space monitoring. So we use it for a lot of different things. There are probably 200 services that are being monitored within our financial system to make sure that it is running optimally. I'm an infrastructure supervisor and we're customers of SolarWinds.

The outcome of using this solution is that we've been able to become more proactive on really resolving issues before users know that there's a problem. Outages have reduced by probably around 90% because we're able to take and proactively add space to a disk or add processors to a server before users know there's a problem. It means we can take something down at night and fix it, rather than disrupting work in the middle of the day. 

The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.

This is a complex product to set up and I think it's really too detailed and could be simplified. It's a change from their older product which was very easy to set up and manage. The new one is more difficult because it's far more detailed. The solution does everything we ask of it, but it takes a long time to deploy.

Additional features and improvements would be to simplify initial data gathering so that we can deploy easily and then refine it over time. Ideally, we'd like to be able to get something up and running in a week and then go through and decide, for example, to monitor things on one particular server and not necessarily on others. They could possibly create a generic installation and then let us go back and refine it. We spend a lot of time without having all of our equipment monitored because it takes so long to initially set up each server. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

I think this is a very stable solution.

I think the solution is easy to scale although it does require a lot of resources. When we initially set it up, we had about a quarter of the resources that we currently have and we set it up too conservatively which caused a lot issues. When the consultant reset it, we quadrupled the amount of resources that the system has. We have about 10 people that get alerts and are actively involved with the system. The system requires about 10 staff hours for maintenance, updates and verification that everything is working.

As we refine it to monitor services, we are going to increase the usage. So right now we have it monitoring a database server, but we're not monitoring all of the services within that server. So we might have 30 databases in there. We're not yet monitoring each of the individual databases.

We have very few issues that require technical support, we only contact them a few times a year. They generally resolve things pretty quickly and our issues are generally related to improving deployment. 

We used to use a product called ipMonitor, which is a much simpler solution. It's one-tenth of the cost and we used it strictly for alerting. It would tell us when a server was down, but not that the server was running at 70% utilization for the previous week. ipMonitor was strictly a something is working or a something is not working solution.

The server configuration for installation took about a week. And then another two to three weeks to get it installed across all of our servers. We're making modifications every day. We initially set it up ourselves and then about two years after the initial installation, we hired a consultant to redo the installation and make it more efficient because it wasn't initially configured optimally. It's the amount of detail you need that will determine how much time you spend setting something up.

Our ROI has been in the savings in downtime during business hours.

Our annual maintenance fee is USD $15,000. 

HP had a similar product that we looked at but it wasn't nearly as universal as SolarWinds products. HP has a product to monitor servers and a product to monitor networks, but they don't have one product that does both well, SolarWinds monitors everything very well.

I would recommend taking into consideration that you will need more server resources than you think. Knowing that means you can save on having to rebuild the whole environment later on. We ended up going from one server to four servers and it's running much better now. Don't skimp on the server resources you get with the application.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

• How easy it is to get good metrics out of it.
• How extensible it is.
• There are many different ways to customize it to fit your environment.

Compared to many products, SolarWinds is very simple to use. When you add a node in NPM, it is easy to get it to start monitoring everything it supports and you very quickly see the results of this in the graphs and such. When you want to get some special things out of a box, let's say the number of connections on a ASA firewall, you can very easily add a UnDP, add it as a graph to your screen, and see the results right away. This is a real-world example, because the company I worked with was having Internet problems with our main firewalls due to maxing out the number of connections going through the box. Having it graphically presented makes it easy, though.

That was one way of customizing it, via UnDPs. Another, that I did a bunch of at my previous job, and ended up making generic versions of and posting on THWACK, is the ability to add new resources. Any given page within NPM can be customized by clicking "Customize" and you can add quite a few prepackaged resources to a page or change their order around to better fit you. You might even want to delete some. But, if you get to be a SW geek like myself, you start realizing that SW doesn't always display every bit of info that it has by browsing through the SQL tables and seeing what’s there. Nowadays, you can do this either directly with SQL, or via SWQL, which is a bastardized SQL that has pre-built relationships between the tables set up in a way that is very easy to leverage without complex joins and such in SQL. From that, you can do some very simple to very complex things.

An example of a simple thing I did, was I built a "CDP Neighbor" resource, which, if you click on the Node Details page, it tells you what devices are directly connected to it via the CDP protocol. Plus, SolarWinds made it simple for me to link to those nodes and you can basically traverse from node to node within SolarWinds looking at stuff.

Before NPM, we had to spend quite a bit of time using freeware tools, because there wasn't anything that offered the features we needed at a price point we were willing to pay. Most were far too expensive. Because of this, we only monitored some key devices and links. With SolarWinds, it’s easy to monitor everything and, with a little setup, everyone can help out. NTA brought things up a notch. Rather than seeing there was too much bandwidth being used and trying to guess what it was through diagnostics on the device and guesswork, we can see what is consuming all the bandwidth and easily relate it back to a specific user or device.

The module UIs can have different features based on what module you're in. I'd love to see feature parity between them. Selecting nodes, for instance. In NPM, you can use one criteria for grouping, while in NCM, you can group in multiple levels.

More granular permissions! I'd like to see a role-based system where you can granularly apply permissions for administrative tasks and be able to assign these roles to people. Just because you need to edit a node doesn't mean you should have full admin permissions!

Stability depends on the module/version. In general, it is very stable if you wait a bit before upgrading to the latest version and let some patches come out. There has been a problem in NCM when you deploy compliance remediation jobs to a large number of nodes that use config blocks that has persisted through a couple updates. But this is a pretty advanced feature.

We haven’t had scalability problems so far. The different jobs I've been in have had very different environments in terms of scale and this solution works at any level.

Technical support is very good. It might take a bit of time for initial contact, if you don't classify the severity high enough and don't call them. But a phone call will always rectify that.

At the different jobs I’ve had, it was a mishmash of different freeware tools and things like CiscoWorks/Prime or WhatsUp Gold.

Basic setup is a breeze for most folks!

In general, pricing is pretty good. Although, the jobs I've been at have usually had unlimited licenses. I have heard some people have issues with the pricing and licensing of another module (SAM).

We evaluated WhatsUp Gold and Cisco brand tools.

Download a demo and have fun! It’s easy to use and gives great outcomes.

We use SolarWinds NPM for network monitoring.

The most valuable features of the solution are its graphical interface and reports.

The solution's customer service is not very good because the support takes too long. The solution needs to provide better training videos, especially on creating individual reports. It would be good if reporting were made easier with SolarWinds NPM.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for five years.

SolarWinds NPM is a very stable solution.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for stability.

I am the main user of SolarWinds NPM in our organization.

I rate the solution a five out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s customer support is not very good.

Negative

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

SolarWinds NPM is very expensive, and we pay ten thousand yearly.

The solution’s maintenance is easy. The solution can be easily integrated with other services like Cisco. There are issues with the solution's updates, and our security team has not approved them. So, we are waiting for the new version to be approved.

Overall, I rate the solution a seven out of ten.