SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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. 

The most valuable features are ease of implementation, strong out-of-the-box reporting, and the ability to customize the GUI.

From a platform standpoint, the integration of NPM with the other SolarWinds modules is very strong, seamless, and valuable in presenting a single pane of glass for network, application, and database performance and availability.

We're a small enough company that it would be difficult for a single person, or even a small team, to attempt to tie data together from different software products in the way that SolarWinds does.

We no longer have to ask questions about who is using bandwidth/CPU, what application is driving that usage, and how our databases perform as a result of that usage. We have completely eliminated any blind spots in the operation of our core networks, applications, and platforms.

I would like to see stronger integration with SolarWinds LEM. This would be a nice-to-have integration at this point. This is really the only product with which it is not integrated.

When one looks at the entire suite of SolarWinds products, what we've seen
over the past several years is an ongoing theme of integration - as
modules like SAM, NCM, IPAM, VMAN, DPA, and others benefit full integration
into the base NPM product - allowing a user to leverage
application/database-specific performance metrics into views, reports, and
alerts.

When I say that LEM would be a nice addition, that's precisely what I mean is
- right now, there is no method for view integration, correlation, or cross-platform data sharing between the LEM appliance and our NPM
installation.

In other words, say I'm looking at the Node Details view on one of my domain controllers. It would be excellent to have one of the
widgets in that node details page pull in the last XX events LEM has on
the node in question.

I have used NPM since 2004 and have leveraged it at multiple workplaces since.

We have not had any stability issues. It's been a predictably solid platform across software revisions, even with the jump from 11.x to 12.x. That upgrade also included a complete graphical update for the console.

We did not have any scalability issues. We're monitoring thousands of elements across three continents with one poller and we have had no scalability issues.

I would give technical support a rating of 7 out of 10. When I get on the phone with a support engineer, I'm usually impressed with their level of knowledge in providing a timely resolution to customer issues. The secret is to get on the phone first if you need something solved the same day.

I've used HPE OpenView and PRTG in the past. My reason for switching was a combination of ease of use, customizability, and integration between network/application/DB monitoring and measurement.

The setup is straightforward almost to a fault. If you can follow directions, you can set this platform up in a day and start getting usable information.

It's not as cheap as some solutions, but the value you get is excellent. Licensing increases are largely painless and are easy to accomplish.

Identify the business/organizational problems you're looking to solve. Build your graphs and reports with an eye toward those problems. This creates business value almost immediately.

The SolarWinds product is easy to deploy and the product features are quite granular. We can dig deep into the infrastructure and at the data level, or we can aggregate and come higher up and look at all the trends and analysis of what it provides.

The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved.

I've been using the solution for three years. 

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

It is a highly scalable product. Users can use something like F5 or load balancing. That gives you failover and similar infrastructure for disaster recovery as well. It's very, very scalable and stable product.

Usually, NPM users will be fewer as they're all network engineers. The solution doesn't require hundreds of users. We have about eight to nine. However, we deploy SolarWinds with a lot of clients. If you look at our clientele and our own user base in NPM, we must have had more than 100 users on this product between clients.

Technical support is excellent. 

SolarWinds wants its partners and resellers to succeed. They give you all the support, all the training for free. It's really, really, really good.

One of the competing products for this solution is Cisco SecureX. We have used it in the past.

The setup and deployment are quite simple. 

It's straightforward, however, you need to have networking knowledge. If you have knowledge of the network, then it's straightforward. It's a great product.

On a medium-sized enterprise, for one of our clients, we deployed it in three hours.

We've got our own engineers to handle the setup. However, whether we set IP up or not all depends on the client. If they define everything properly, the delays are not with the product. The product actually answers a lot of the client's questions and helps the client determine what they should be doing.

You've got the annual license, and then you've got a perpetual license as well. The pricing is very affordable.

There is no extra cost beyond the licensing. 

It is the latest version. The latest version comes with observability as part of the package. It's SolarWinds attempt to bring all its products under one platform. We've kind of become quite an expert in the area.

We are a provider of SolarWinds. We are an MSSP and also a reseller. It depends on what the client wants. 

We want to launch it as an MSSP for SMEs, and small companies who can't really afford a full install. We just doing a SaaS model so they can deploy it at cost to SMEs.

I'd advise potential users to use the one-month free trial and get a company like us to do a proof of concept and then do the NPM, application monitoring, log monitoring, et cetera. One by one, pick up all the products and integrate them.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

My company uses SolarWinds NPM for interface monitoring because we are not required to put in any keywords and do the manual thing, making it easy to onboard. In our company, we just export the device and download the configuration, while the NCM part can be enabled by going to the settings and changing the configuration. The solution becomes easy if you use everything on a single dashboard.

My customers have experienced benefits from SolarWinds NPM since it supports Akamai Guardicore, Akamai Synthetic Monitoring, and VMware-based device monitoring. In general, SolarWinds NPM integrates smoothly with every solution. The integration part of the solution might not be as easy as it seems since one may have to enter some commands in JSON format in the integer part. The templates are already set in the solution, but there is a need to change the parameters, values, and IPs. After the aforementioned steps are followed, integrating the solution with tools like Tableau, Power BI, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Teams for notifications and alerting an incident becomes easy.

Though in SolarWinds NPM, there is no need to go into other interfaces and set up some settings with other parameters, SolarWinds NCM allows you to do so more easily. We just put the configuration and execute the particular IP, or you can just put the Excel sheet, where once the import is done, it shows all the IPs there, and so you just need to do the configuration and execute the IPs. The solution provides you with real-time data, including details like how many devices are completed, how many are left, and how many are getting errors.

The dashboard of the solution is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement. Having all the features and parameters under a single tab in the solution would be good. For knowledge-related purposes, SolarWinds needs to consider adding documentation to its portal to provide users with the upgrade command if they want to upgrade the solution and how to carry out the onboarding procedure.

I would like to see real-time visualization and monitoring, especially when attempting to connect globally where one router is in the USA and the other is in the UK. With real-time visualization, all the interfaces can be made visible properly, while the users also get more visibility and their network. If an interface goes down, then one can monitor the interface directly with the help of the dashboard provided in the solution.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for nine to ten months. I operate as a system integrator for SolarWinds. I use the open-source version of the tool.

It is a stable and good solution.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users. When I joined my current organization, I saw SolarWinds NPM handling 10,000 devices, including the backup, storage, and everything else. SolarWinds NPM never had any performance problems, like hanging or lagging issues, and this may be because the solution only has a few features in it.

For SolarWinds, my company needs to send an email to the customer support of SolarWinds, after which they will reply back to us with their incident number, and then work on it. If required, the customer support of SolarWinds will set up a call with our company to understand the real-time situation at our end.

I rate the support team an eight out of ten.

Positive

Though I wasn't involved in the deployment process of SolarWinds NPM, I was involved in Fortinet FortiCloud's deployment. With the deployment part, my customers have deployed SolarWinds NPM and Fortinet FortiCloud on the same server.

My company's current customers plan to replace SolarWinds NPM with Fortinet FortiCloud.

In comparison to other tools in the market, SolarWinds NPM hasn't been upgraded yet. I believe SolarWinds NPM plans to upgrade itself in the future and have more features, like the ability to support other devices or vendors, like Arista, Juniper, Guardicore, or Akamai. In terms of the advantages provided by SolarWinds NPM, I would say that the solution is easy to use, easy to onboard, easy to set up, easy to delete, easy to configure, easy to get the report on a single interface, and one can also apply a filter to get what is required.

In the last four years, I have deployed three tools in Avaya and another four in my current organization.

The maintenance of SolarWinds NPM is not difficult.

SolarWinds NPM is one of the easiest and most flexible tools, but I would say that SolarWinds NCM is a better tool. I rate SolarWinds NCM a nine out of ten.

I don't know if there have been any upgrades in SolarWinds NPM. Considering the performance graph, one will see a clear visualization in SolarWinds and not in Fortinet FortiCloud.

I 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.

In my opinion, one of the most valuable features of this product is the level of customization. From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization.

It has helped to provide a user friendly interface for support to drill down and see where the issue lies and remediate issues quickly. We have other solutions that might have features NPM does not but the front end could look confusing to an inexperienced user. With NPM, we are able to fine-tune what the support accounts look like so users only see the things they need to do their jobs effectively.

Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers (which have no connection to the public internet). Also, if you add a new license and don’t remove the old one first, NPM will recognize only the expired one and ignore the new one, which prompts an additional call to support.

Personally I have been actively using this product for a little over a year but our organization has been using NPM for many years.

We had some issues with getting failover polling engines working properly and were forced to abandon the effort. So we’re currently backing up data to a warehouse database but we currently don’t have any redundancy with our polling engines.

On the whole, NPM is a very stable product. Occasionally, we might have a poller that stops communicating with the mother ship but usually a little bit of basic troubleshooting is able to resolve the issue with minimal downtime.

This is one of the strengths of NPM. As our infrastructure grows, NPM is able to grow organically to accommodate it. Scalability is as simple as spinning up another VM, installing the product, and ensuring connectivity to the primary instance of NPM.

Customer service at SolarWinds is great. I have had several issues in the past and they were prompt, helpful, and were able to resolve these issues quickly. SolarWinds also cares about what their customers want from a network monitoring standpoint. Rather than release a new version and hope that this is what customers want, they hold regular sessions to show customers what they’re currently working on and can fine tune future releases of NPM based on the feedback.

As a company, SolarWinds goes out of its way to put a human face to their technical support staff. The main way they’ve accomplished this is by creating a community out of their customer base. Using their forum, Thwack, customers are able to interact with SolarWinds staff from numerous departments, including from support, development and marketing. I’ve been a member a short while and I’ve already been blown away with how tight knit this forum can be.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It’s installed via a wizard and walks you through the steps, installing the extras it needs to function along the way. Then, it’s just a matter of activating your license and configuring the front end web page to look the way you want it. Most of the complexity of the initial setup and configuration is from custom modifications done by us on the back end. We had to modify the database to get NPM to hook into our in-house alert management system. But, for other companies' environments where this level of customization is not needed, NPM has an excellent amount of alerting methods that work right out of the box.

We do all of our NPM implementations using an in-house team. I am one of the engineers responsible for setting up new environments when new data centers come online. I’m not sure if SolarWinds has vendor teams available that can do this function but as I’ve stated, NPM is designed to be unboxed and up and running in an hour or less depending on how much customization is needed.

Due to the large size and scope of our organization, our cost of using this product is comparatively high. Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines. Pricing differs if the NPM server is a primary or secondary polling engine and how many elements (nodes and interfaces) will need to be monitored by it (e.g. 250, 2000, or unlimited).

My advice to others before implementing this, is to attend one of their webcasts to get a feel for what NPM can do for you. The presenters are technical people who understand the product well and can answer a wide range of questions. Secondly, I’d make an account on their forum, Thwack, so if you’re ever stumped on an issue, you can pose a question to the community and glean information from other NPM users or from one of SolarWinds’ resident “Head Geeks.” Lastly, from personal experience, I would make sure you’re on good working terms with your network engineers before considering implementation. Like any other network management tool, you will likely run into firewall or connectivity related issues when adding nodes and having a good network engineer on your side can really make a big difference .

I use SolarWinds for monitoring. We have around 300 people at my company. 

I like the NPM and SAM features. 

The integration with video apps could be better.

I have used SolarWinds NPM for one year. 

SolarWinds NPM is stable.

SolarWinds NPM is scalable.

I rate SolarWinds support nine out of 10. SolarWinds support is excellent. 

Positive

The SolarWinds deployment was straightforward and took about two weeks. One support engineer can handle it. 

SolarWinds is reasonably priced. 

We considered Dotcom-Monitor, but we went with SolarWinds for financial reasons. 

I rate SolarWinds NPM eight out of 10. Before implementing SolarWinds, do your homework and compare it with other products. Contact the technical accounts manager and find out the latest features so you can see the pros and cons.