SolarWinds NPM Reviews

If there's a connectivity issue, the packets have dropped, or the traffic is going through any of the routers, you can see where that is just stuck.

The individual’s bandwidth we do not know. For monitoring purposes, we can find the exact amounts through this NPM, Network Performance Monitor, and Network Traffic Analyzer. We can see who is using how much bandwidth and where the traffic is stuck. It provides visibility to show what the issue is in our network.

The solution is very good. Previously, in the solution, there was no more option for customizing the reports and the alerts. However, they’ve improved. Now, in the last two years, since 2021, they have had a new release, a new version, and there are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports. 

Over the last couple of years, they have introduced features like NetPath and PerfStack. That is very helpful for any of the admins to troubleshoot issues to know precisely what is going on in nodes.

If we go for the NT license, then we have to purchase the NPM, Network Performance Monitor. That is a dependency. In all of the SolarWinds products now, there are only these products. For example, Net Traffic Analyzer is a product. If we go for the licensing, then we have to purchase a Network Performance Monitor. There's dependency there. If they could combine everything into one product, that would be very helpful.

The NT is the enhanced version of the NPM. They have not put a license on the different monitors of the NT. However, they have to include in the same manner in the NPM itself.

For NetPath services, right now, we have to manually install the events in the nodes. If there was something from the console side, we could post the event to the nodes. If there was automation, that would be helpful. Already there's automation for other types of things or in other features, like for communication of the nodes. However, for the NetPath feature, if we could automatically move the event from the console side to the application side, that would be a great feature.

I’ve been using the solution for the last five years.

It’s stable.

In 2020, as most people know, there was an attack on SolarWinds. At that time, there was a problem. However, in 2021, everything was good. If it wasn’t, we would have been looking for another solution. Everything has been stabilized.

We are using one in five total devices connected to that SolarWinds. We are using an AP, Additional Polling engine that will scale the solution. Scalability is there.

Only the licensing part is different. We have to purchase more licenses on that part. Currently, we are monitoring 12,000 nodes. If we want to go to the 13,000 nodes, then we have to purchase one additional license, the Additional Polling license.

We have about 50 people using the solution. They are system admins. In the North, the solution is used vastly. In the South, the solution is used by the different departments. I'm not part of the South. I'm part of the North.

We do have plans to increase usage.

For L2 or L1 problems, we are giving the support. For the L3 level, if the issue is beyond our reach, then we contact the support team from Solarwinds.

We have an online number. We have to call that number, and we’ll get support. They will support you, for example, if the system is down. Otherwise, you can open a support ticket, and they will help.

Overall, the support is good.

Now we are using Tripwire also for some of our customers. It is also good.

I am not using any other products. However, there are some solutions that are free tools.

The initial setup is straightforward. We have to just go to NetPath and just connect to the database. Once the connection is established to the database, then we will be up on both devices. There are a lot of options for onboarding the devices. It is easy. Anyone can do it.

There's an admin guide. There's a very helpful guide that SolarWinds has provided on their customer portal. There are training options too. You are well prepared.

The deployment took two to three hours to install the product and five to six hours for the entire deployment. It’s pretty fast if you have a good strategy.

While one person is enough to deploy or manage the solution, it would depend on how many devices you are dealing with.

If you are going to monitor 2,000 devices, one person is enough. If you're going to monitor a large number of devices, you might need two managers for all devices.

We are the third-party vendor for the bank. We deploy the solution, and we support them. We provide professional services as well.

The basic ROI is the fact that the client is happy, and that’s all that matters.

I’m only a technical person. I don’t have access to the pricing.

Extra costs come under support and maintenance. Obviously, we always consider support and maintenance under the same licensing cost. They'll only provide one year of support and maintenance.

We had to go for the SolarWinds. We are not able to work with any other solution.

Once the solution is implemented, we'll populate whatever the dashboard is. However, some of the things will not populate. There is a need for services there. We can use the NetPath services feature. We can export that feature to the dashboard. However, it will be easy for any of the system admin to troubleshoot the issue.

I’d rate the solution ten 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.

If a customer is looking for a monitoring box solution, a medium-scale customer, and he's looking for something that can manage servers, routers, storage, applications, basic monitoring for applications, to cover everything, then SolarWinds is the right choice. However, he has to be a mid-tier customer. He cannot be an enterprise customer. If they are an enterprise customer, then SolarWinds is not the right choice as it will start to slow down.

It's a very good tool and a very stable tool. 

For a medium-sized customer, it has everything that you're looking for.

It has all kinds of functionality that any network team or monitoring team is looking for. It's easy to integrate with any other tool, as it has an open database. It's easy to implement and has a very nice user experience.

One of the problems that SolarWinds has is when the data becomes too big, it will start getting slower. 

It's not at all for enterprise customers. I don't recommend enterprises to go for SolarWinds. They should go for a bigger tool.

They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers. 

I've been dealing with the solution for ten years as a partner at least. It's been a long time. I've used it for about a decade at this point in that capacity. I've been dealing with SolarWinds for almost more than 17 or 18 years, personally.

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

We have three to four customers on the solution.

It's best for a mid-tier company, and not a large enterprise. 

Technical support is okay.

The only problem that they have is that last year they had a security hack issue. That is something that was a big problem SolarWinds in the market, as everybody is scared to use SolarWinds. They still have managed customers. Still, I have to say, there are very few customers that they don't have SolarWinds.

Whenever I go for meetings for security or monitoring or anything, I find some engineers still using SolarWinds. They may not be using it a lot, however, they are still using it for more than monitoring. Still, people did lose customers over it. 

The initial setup is very easy and quite straightforward. It's not overly difficult or complex. 

The implementation is fast and doesn't take more than a month or a month and a half. 

We only need one consultant to handle implementation. 

We are able to handle the setup for our clients. 

The licensing process is pretty simple. it's not too complex. 

We've done a couple of implementations at this point. We're actually a partner. 

For a mid-tier customer, I would rate the solution at about an eight.

I'd recommend the solution t a mid-tier customer. I wouldn't if the company was quite sizable. 

• 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'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.

One of my clients is a bank. SolarWinds is primarily used in banking to limit network downtime to less than one or two minutes. All the ATMs are connected with SolarWinds, so the bank can respond quickly when the network is down. You only need about three or four people monitoring this software at a time. SolarWinds is deployed on-premises for security reasons. Banks do not allow cloud solutions for this purpose. 

Network performance is the main issue clients are facing. SolarWinds checks if a node is down, and we can set thresholds for performance metrics. For example, we set it up to get an alert automatically if a value is over 80 percent. It has a full dashboard that covers CP, hard disk, and node monitoring.

Each model has different features, so clients need to purchase a separate model for SQL monitoring, database monitoring, network traffic analyzer, HTTP traffic, etc. So each feature they need is in a different model, but customers would prefer an all-in-one solution.

I have been working with SolarWinds NPM for two years.

SolarWinds is stable. We sometimes have crashes here and there because we are monitoring so many features and routers.

SolarWinds is easy to scale.

We don't use technical support because we handle everything in-house. We already make customized dashboards, reports, notes, etc. ourselves.

I used PRTG, but it's not used in any banks. About 80 percent of banks I know use SolarWinds. PRTG is mostly popular in manufacturing companies. It's cheaper, so manufacturers can easily afford it. 

Setting up SolarWinds is somewhat complex because the data is encrypted and banks require so many policies. The reporting and dashboards are also complex. 

SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost. 

I rate SolarWinds NPM seven out of 10. 

SolarWinds NPM is generally used for network monitoring for all of the switches, networking equipment, as well as physical and virtual servers in the environment.

We use the top 10 dashboards on a frequent basis, as well as the ability to put systems in maintenance mode when we need to perform patching or other maintenance.

Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disk space statistics from servers and volumes.

The interface can be a bit cumbersome at times. There is a steep learning curve if you wanted to get into it in any depth. 

I would say that both the installation and use of it can be complicated initially. It isn't for someone who doesn't have a lot of expertise or knowledge.  It does have a significant learning curve.

After the initial installation, the configuration is where more knowledge is required.

The reporting could be improved. 

I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it easier to create reports or have a larger assortment of canned reports.

I have been working with SolarWinds NPM for eight years. Most recently version 2020.

SolarWinds NPM seems to be stable.

In our environment, scalability wasn't really a factor. The environment we had, and the method we used for the initial install were sufficient.

In our organization, we had about 20 users consistingn of IT server and network engineers as well as business analysts.

This is a tool that we utilize on a regular basis.

Although technical support is adequate, it could be better, but that appears to be the situation in the majority of businesses nowadays.

I would rate them seven out of ten.

The initial setup was somewhere in middle.

This solution is maintained, deployed, and updated by a team of six people, and it is also automated for operating system upgrades. We have one or two server admins that are responsible for actual application upgrades.

I would recommend having a review with a SolarWinds tech first to make sure you understand the system requirements. It would be helpful to work with them also in regards to unique configurations. 

I would rate SolarWinds NPM an eight out of ten.

My team uses SolarWinds to do some of the network monitoring. I look at the reports.

One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives.

False positives or positive falses are a concern because you want to be as accurate as possible and get them down to zero, which is what you want on your network. Once a week with the reports there, is always a false positive or vice versa where it's showing that it's up and really it's down.

We are looking at how we can overcome that issue. Is it a work issue, or does it come from the tool itself? It will show that something is down when it's up and every once in a while if something is down it shows that it is still up.

We would like to be able to pull information from the vendor's OEM. It would be helpful to have crosswalks or if it could have a running list that goes out of models, software, and it can pull out the end of life, or end of service life dates. Also to suggest the recommend current version to use, that way you can do the comparisons without having to do a manual search. That would be beneficial.

Similar to other tools, I would also like to see a graphical map of your network that highlight in green, red, or yellow, and if you see a specific device you can click on it and it will help you drill down on the details of that device.

There are other things that it should be able to do, such as when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure and my server, and there are issues developing like the circuits degrading or latency is increasing it should give you a notification to know what is going on, rather waiting for the device to go down which at that point it would be too late. You want to be able to do proactive monitoring and reaction.

We want to get to a monitoring level where if it is monitoring the server, the CPU, or the storage level you could have presets where it will identify and give you warnings to say that you are at 70% or 80% storage capacity. This would allow you to get ahead of it before you run out. 

It would be the same for the CPU utilization and knowing if it is running 20 or 30% premiums normally or is it running at 90 or 100% and you have to add CPUs.

It could let you know if you have other tools or applications that are running too hot or if they need to be changing out that tool or is it something else.

To have something in place where it can help us to do some analysis and be proactive would be helpful.

I don't use this solution, I oversee a team who uses it.

We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM. 

We had one problem, but it wasn't a stability issue, it was a hack that occurred earlier this year that affected everyone using SolarWinds. After that, it took a bit to get it stabilized to where it is now. 

Our team that has worked with technical support hasn't had any complaints. It goes pretty well. 

I am familiar with several tools.

They will be putting NetScout on their network to look at some of the differences and to look at the pluses and minuses of each of the two tools.

I would rate SolarWinds an eight out of ten.