SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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. 

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.

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.

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.

We use SolarWinds as a monitoring platform.

It monitors all of our network gears for up-down status, for the most part. We can also see utilization being high at a given location.

The alerting has been the biggest aspect we appreciate. In regards to utilization, it can be proactive in regards to addressing situations before some cases arise before the users even see them.

The initial setup is simple.

It integrates really well with the Cisco platform. We are a Cisco shop. I don't know how well it's going to integrate with us moving to Aruba or going with other vendor hardware, how well it's going to integrate, I guess we'll find out.

It is scalable.

Technical support is helpful.

The stability is good. 

The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation. There's not a way to turn me off from alerts easily.

There really hasn't been anything that we've needed that it hasn't been able to provide. 

I've used the solution for at least 17 years. 

The solution is stable. there are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We've got about nine different Sys admins that use it on a day-to-day basis, at different locations, to check on different things.

Contact support was great. They're very knowledgeable. They knew what we needed, once we explained our problem. In some cases, they helped us figure out a different solution than what we were looking at. They knew the product pretty well for everybody that we've dealt with.

Positive

We didn't use a different solution. That's what was here when I started 17 years ago and that's what we've stayed with.

The setup was pretty straightforward. We just went through a complete redeployment part of upgrading to the latest and greatest as we upgraded servers and databases and the whole nine yards. We just simply did a fresh install. It was pretty easy.

It probably took us about a couple of days. We had to go back in and once we re-added the location, we had to go back and tweak what we wanted to monitor, and that kind of stuff. We didn't simply just do a migration. It was a little bit of doing the network re-discovery and then going in and tweaking the individual locations. 

The one thing we did migrate over was the alerts. We didn't have to recreate alerts from scratch, however, it took us a while. We've got 400-plus devices that we monitor. It took a little while to get all of the devices back in the way they originally were.

We did everything in-house. We did not use consultants or integrators. 

I don't know anything about pricing. It's not an aspect I deal with.

We deal directly with Solarwinds. 

We have been keeping the solution updated. 

I would recommend the solution. A lot of our colleagues use it and we like the way it works. I'd rate it ten out of ten. 

I'd advise potential new users to give it a good rundown and see if it really fits what they need. Don't just try it with one or two things. Do the 30-day evaluation. I have folks that have used it and try to find some way to break it really. Load it up the way that you want to run it and actually take time to dig down into it. So far, there hasn't been anything that it hasn't been able to do for us. However, it's designed for that Cisco environment and that's what we've always been. I can't really talk about it outside of the box.

We are customers of SolarWinds and I'm the corporate IT infrastructure manager.

SolarWinds provides a good enterprise level of tools and covers the essential components. I like the new GUI. 

The solution could be enhanced. It currently lacks integration with SMS services which is something we need. A cloud-based option would also be helpful so we can monitor at any time and from anywhere; for now, we need to VPN to our environment. 

I've been using this solution for six years. 

The solution is generally stable although there are occasional bugs when updating to the latest version. 

The scalability is good, we currently have around 2,000 users. 

The initial setup is simple.

Compared to other products, SolarWinds is not expensive. 

We evaluated Zabbix and Nagios but SolarWinds is better for enterprise organizations. Other solutions are on a smaller scale and only provide basic monitoring; SolarWinds has a better engine.

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

• Extensible REST API
• Excellent technical support
• Mature product, strong brand, Gartner awards
• Custom MSSQL scripting support in both alerting and reporting.
• Support for a wide variety of makes and models of network equipment/appliances.
• Support for monitoring Windows, Linux, Unix, and some other server OSes.
• Consistent and constant application improvements.

• Our ability to locate the source of a network issue has dramatically reduced our mean-time-to-resolve.
• Helped us to consolidate different network and server monitoring needs under one product.
• Low administrative maintenance compared to alternatives. The system simply 'works' most of the time. Our previous tools required constant maintenance by admins just to keep them running.

• Failover functionality does not exist without the purchase of the "Fail Over Engine (FoE)" license.
• Software upgrade and installation procedures are time consuming, especially for large/multiple site installations. Consulting the support matrix for software versions and modules is critical.
• Multiple server software upgrades still require a planned downtime outage window for the entire NPM instance regardless of the size of installation even if using the Failover Engine module.
• Each NPM polling server require a full Windows Server with GUI operating system to install and administer.

5 years

Yes. Remember to do your homework on required ports, especially for when installing a polling engine server across the WAN in a different domain.

Yes, multiple times. Some of the areas of stability had to do with 'monitoring capacity' per polling server several versions ago. Official documentation claimed each server can handle monitoring for up-to 10,000 elements (i.e. ports, volumes, nodes, etc.). In reality this number was more like 5,000. However, monitoring capacity improvements have been made with each software release and we are now back up to the 10,000 element.

Another area of stability issues we have experienced are with the dependency on MS SQL. There were a few times where we had stability issues with SQL server, which in turn impacted NPM performance. When there are issues with the SQL database NPM doesn't make this known and is up to the admin to figure it out.

Yes, every once in a while. SolarWinds defines 'scalability' in the same manner as 'monitoring capacity' --- which is incorrect. This is a huge issue and is one of the hits against the rating I gave NPM.

Excellent. Customer support is knowledgeable about the product line and will engage with technical resources if needed.

Excellent. Technical support is responsive, knowledgeable, and friendly. My team and I do not hesitate to contact support if we have a question or need immediate assistance. They will also escalate to a higher support tier if the issue is not resolved in a timely manner, or if we request them to do so.

Yes, multiple products were used previously including Microsoft MOM 2005 (current versions are System Center Operations Manager) and What's Up Gold. Switch was made to attempt to consolidate various monitoring tools into a single space.

Initial setup of the application servers were very straightforward. It is possible to get started with one app server and the main SQL server then add more polling engine servers as your monitoring needs increase.

In-house installation was done. The product is designed for self-installation and self-maintenance in an on-premise mode.

Unknown at this point.

Always contact your sales rep for best pricing. There are multiple times per year where the vendor will make special licensing offers that you can take advantage of.

The official North America pricing list is available at solarwinds.com. Use that as your pricing baseline for your monitoring project.

NPM licenses by "element" you want to monitor, not by device as a whole. Take this into account while you evaluate monitoring software vendors.

Yes. We looked into Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2012 R2, What's Up Gold, ManageEngine, AppDynamics, NewRelic, and Nagios.

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.