SolarWinds NPM Reviews

I find there to be three areas in which this suite provides significant value.

It integrates well as an ‘everything’ tool. We all understand the concept of “jack of all trades, master of none”, but SolarWinds tends to cover 80-95% of everything across every module they have. This means that if I have vendor A for product A and vendor B for product B, there’s a pretty good chance they can integrate it with the rest of their suite.

For example, they have a network monitoring (NPM) core module that integrates with SAM (Server and Application Monitor) and NTA (Netflow Traffic Analyzer). This gives you a very good first view of an environment. It’s very analogous to SCOM in how complete it is with Microsoft products, but with none of the limitations. For example, SCOM doesn’t handle network equipment very well.

With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server. They can all:

• Be monitored as if they are on-premise
• Handle syslogs/traps/logs
• Monitor most applications out-of-the-box with a lot of flexibility
• See who sends traffic to whom via NTA.

All of this tends to display on a single page for each node that I choose to monitor. Every tool tends to build on one another and SolarWinds does tend to highlight where the tools integrate and how.

With staff that has some technical knowledge, this tool is pretty intuitive out-of-the-box. Getting people to look at it may be one thing, but getting those that are at least at a helpdesk level of knowledge serves to take them very little time to orient, if the tool is set up properly.

They have a THWACK support forum that is incredibly useful. I remember the days of trying to search for Microsoft problems and running into support forum posts that range from "useless" to “actually something that would harm your environment” with an extremely high noise ratio.

With THWACK, the developers will often reply directly in the forums with helpful replies. The community is also extremely helpful and fairly loyal. I’d consider it to be more like how I imagine that the Splunk community functions.

In a more recent example, we rely on this tool to let us know when a site is about to go down, before it does so.

We do this by monitoring when interfaces drop (multiple connections to a site) or when interfaces have received errors. Both typically occur before a site goes down entirely. It has helped us a ton to actually be proactive and not simply wait for customers to call.

I feel there are two areas of improvement. One of which SolarWinds employees will probably roll their eyes about and the other one that maybe they didn’t realize:

• If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools.
  
• For example, if you don’t have the storage module, you won’t be able to even do the basic monitoring (interface, memory, CPU, etc.) for a NetApp device that you can do for other device types that are covered in other modules. Install SRM and suddenly it works, like magic!
• I’m OK with the concept of “you have to pay for the storage monitoring if you want to do storage monitoring”, but this becomes an issue in certain areas depending on what modules you license. This is also something that people may run into the hard way if they didn’t realize that this was the case.
• Some of the older components are in need of updating, which is something they’re focusing on more and more. But there are some areas where new tools work this way and old tools work that way. Some of these have gone away little by little, like classic report writer (which was on the server itself requiring RDP) and the old “advanced alert manager” which required the same. In today’s environment, having to RDP to the server just to do things that you’d do on the front end doesn’t quite make sense. There are some that still exist, though they are lacking some modern features.

I have used SolarWinds for almost five years.

There are a few things to watch out for regarding stability. All of them are basic administration issues. For example:

• Do run configuration wizard after EVERY single module update
• Do not give every user of the tool view rights and report rights, etc., where people are going to be messing with everyone else’s views and reports (or creating reports that kill the DB).
• Do create custom views so that people aren’t seeing everything and stressing the web client, etc.

In older module versions, there were issues where upgrading from module version A to module version B could sometimes carry over old things that had a performance impact on the app servers themselves. But these days, you can blow away the install and do a clean one to fix that.

On new installs, as of the latest few releases, they upgrade everything for you and/or have smart installers to make this significantly easier.

Scalability is something that isn’t quite straightforward for new admins. But, you can either:

• Install an additional poling engine on a second server for more scalability
• Install an additional polling engine on the PRIMARY app server for more scalability (stacking)

I rate technical support everywhere from poor to great. Lately, it’s been getting better and better. But in the past, it was very hit or miss.

I’ve used SCOM and CA before. We switched off of both because they were awful. CA cost a boatload and had a very limited feature set.

SCOM requires too many people to be dedicated to SCOM to be of actual use.

Plus, the aforementioned scope limitations and the requirement of having to go through *every* monitoring pack with every affected group in detail, takes up way too much time.

The initial installation is super simple. Pretty much you install SQL on one server, the app on another, and then you’re done.

I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers. Sales will negotiate on new product purchases as well as upgrades. Also, remember you can always run a 30 day trial of any tool you want to consider without committing any money.

We’ve evaluated PRTG, CA, SCOM, and Splunk.

It’s a super easy tool to use, but you need to make sure you have a plan for what you want to do with it.

• Ease of use
• Ease of training for others
• Good reporting
• Nice dashboard customization options
• Good map building capabilities
• Good integration with other SolarWinds tools to provide a “single pane of glass”
• Great support
• Great online community, “Thwack”

We were able to unify our entire company under one monitoring solution that works for everybody, saving a ton of time and significantly speeding up problem-resolution time.

• More automation around node additions and management

With regard to this I am looking for a faster way to add nodes. Currently we deploy nodes in bulk into different environments for our clients and having the ability to have monitoring deploy equally fast would be helpful versus having to spend a significant amount of time manually adding each system. I did recently open a Feature Request for this HERE

• Adding multi-tenancy into the product

We are a hosting provider and we give our clients access to Orion to see their nodes. Orion is not a multi-tenancy platform by design so I am continually challenged to provide clients access in a way that limits them to only see their stuff. In a more true multi-tenancy platform, it would be easy to choose what a client sees and what they don’t and not have to worry if there is a way to work around or break free of the limitations.

• Providing more monitoring capabilities for public cloud such as Azure, AWS, etc.

We are a Hybrid Cloud service provider and we work very closely with Microsoft and Azure. Currently, I am able to monitor nodes in Azure just fine, but I don’t have a good way to monitor PaaS based services.

I have used it for about 10 years.

There have been some versions that have had stability issues, but the current version seems pretty stable.

Technical support is fantastic.

We previously used HPE OpenView, OpenNMS and Zenoss.

The initial setup is very straightforward; you can have it running in about an hour.

Compared to other solutions on the market, the pricing is very good. The licensing is a bit confusing, though.

We evaluated:

• OpenNMS
• ScienceLogic EM7
• Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold
• A few others that either no longer exist or were consumed by other companies

Take advantage of their free, 30-day demo.

Definitely leverage the online community, “Thwack”.

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. 

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.

We use the solution for our network. It's for P2P networks or our servers to our network.

It can be a monitoring tool that just monitors for us at the moment, checking what the issue is or where the issue is. It is managed by a third party. Basically, it just gives us a view of what the site is. We can see our server connection and whether it's up or not. It's just checking if the servers are up or not and if the network is up or not. It's not doing too much else.

The solution is very user-friendly. 

When it pinpoints something, I will get an email alert. I'll immediately know what the problem is and be able to do something. 

The pricing is great. 

We were looking for some sort of endpoint monitoring as well. it would be nice if that was covered. We'd like to have more security when it comes to ADR. 

We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future. 

Sometimes, if the problem isn't on our side, it doesn't provide a very clear problem in terms of what the issue is. 

I've been using the solution for about two years. 

It's been very stable and reliable. I'd rate the stability ten out of ten. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs. 

We just have one user on the solution who monitors it. Three of us can cover it at any given time. It's web-based. 

A third party helped with the initial setup, and they handled everything. I'm not sure how the deployment worked. 

The initial setup was done by a third party. 

The pricing is decent. We chose to use it based on the price. I can't speak to the exact cost, however, I can say it is very reasonable. 

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. 

As a user, I would recommend the solution as it is user-friendly and easily understandable. It will tell you exactly what the issue is and where. It's quite useful. 

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We were using it to monitor network devices and the monitoring of certain servers.

It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations.

They were pretty good at keeping up with things.

We have replaced SolarWinds with LogicMonitor. 

I had been working with SolarWinds NPM for five years. We stopped using SolarWinds in December of last year when it was revealed that they had been hacked with the supply chain hack and we turned it off. We began a fast-track process of trying to find something else that we could use to replace SolarWinds. We decided that we were no longer going to trust that their products have not been compromised.

At the time, we were using the latest version.

We experienced the typical ones that happen when a parameter is not well understood and that it is implemented, you end up causing issues.

The scalability was complex. 

We had 99 facilities that were a hospital holding company, and we have some 90 other facilities that we are the corporate headquarters of. In monitoring each of those different hospitals, there would be challenges with getting to all of those devices because of firewall rules.

The faculty would use it on a regular basis. There were approximately 90 users.

We contacted technical support all of the time. They were fine.

At the time I had been with the company for just over six years. They had only been using SolarWinds.

I have also been using VMware for a long time, and we are implementing vROps for alerting and monitoring.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It seemed that they nickeled and dimed you for everything that you were doing. There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price.

I would not recommend implementing SolarWinds because of the hacks, it is just not trusted.

Before they had the hack, the intrusion process I would have rated them a six or a seven but after the compromise, I would rate SolarWinds NPM a zero or one out of ten.

I work as a technical consultant, and I suggest customers use SolarWinds NPM for cybersecurity monitoring purposes. We deploy it to monitor all network equipment, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and NetFlow within the network.

SolarWinds NPM is a very effective solution for monitoring. The interface is user-friendly, deployment is easy, and the support from SolarWinds is great, especially within India.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface and the ease of deployment. Additionally, the support from SolarWinds has been very helpful.

SolarWinds NPM should be more flexible to accommodate specific customer requirements quickly. It would be beneficial if their development team could develop solutions within a limited time, like three to five months. This flexibility is sometimes missing compared to local developers in India.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for two years.

The stability of SolarWinds NPM is very good; I would rate it 7.5 out of ten.

The scalability of the solution could be more flexible. I would rate it around 6.5 to seven out of ten.

Customer service is good, but there is room for improvement. Sometimes, customers look for on-premises support directly from SolarWinds rather than through third parties or partners.

Neutral

The initial setup is relatively easy. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it eight to 8.5.

I'd rate the solution 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.