What needs improvement with SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer?

One of the weaknesses I have observed for years is slowness, especially when customer database & data reaches the reasonable size limit. Customers always complain that they experience slowness while accessing the data via the SolarWinds portal as the reporting engine. But all in all its a great product.

SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features. Additionally, the complexity of installation and operation is a drawback.

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.

It would be beneficial if NPM offered support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as currently, it does not support this and we are migrating our services there. Improving customer control for opening and escalating support tickets would also be advantageous.

The solution's database performance could be improved. The data performance is a little slow and scattered for clients who use the solution for a bigger infrastructure. You can't keep a hold of one-year data if you want to because it doesn't give you the capacity to hold that much information at your end. You have to keep the retention period very minimal.

SolarWinds NPM offers limited customization options. Users and developers may find restrictions in modifying or customizing the dashboard and adjusting monitoring features such as polling intervals or SLAs for different nodes. These limitations can be seen as areas for improvement, particularly in providing more extensive customization capabilities for administrators.

SolarWinds is always up to date with the latest versions and firmware. The earlier challenge of increasing resources has been solved since moving to the cloud. We can now increase resources anytime and reduce downtime for monitoring services. With around 10,000 devices and 30,000+ elements, manual monitoring during downtime was a headache. But now there is no problem, as we can increase the underlying infrastructure resources in real-time, and performance is increased on the SolarWinds cloud. We lack database monitoring. I have proposed that the DPA license be onboarded for database monitoring. In the current infrastructure, database monitoring is done manually. I have proposed this enhancement to the client, but there are some commercial constraints. It is in process, and maybe next year, they will budget for it. The market is changing, and people are expecting automation. I think that's a disadvantage, but it's temporary because SolarWinds is continuously pushing clients to onboard the observability AI feature. They have already worked on it, and people only need to invest in it and onboard to meet the current market requirement, which is AI-driven automation for monitoring and decision-making.

The response time of the support team needs to improve. Sometimes, there is a wait time of three or four hours to obtain a response from SolarWinds NPM. The consistency of support also needs to improve, in some cases a quick response can be noticed from the support team of SolarWinds NPM.

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.

The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support.

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.

The integration with video apps could be better.

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

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.

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.

SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license. If we want to have more polling engines it will cost an additional 20 Indian rupees.

SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot. At the same time, some tools don't have the ability to customize, so SolarWinds is ahead of the competition, in that regard. I would also like to see more support for software-defined network platforms and enhanced API monitoring capacity.

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.

KPIs should correlate and combine in one simple report. The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible.

The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.

The evaluation time for the product is too short especially for large corporations.

It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately.

Their IPAM component is severely lacking. The process is extremely manual. It just doesn't get in there if you don't manually enter it. It is not particularly DNS-aware. When it comes to DNS names, you pretty much have to configure everything manually. It will not grab anything on its own. They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.

The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network. We would also like to show the number of devices which we need to improve our service.

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

SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery.

The time monitoring could be improved from every five seconds to every second. If they can move to an every-second basis, then it will improve the monitoring analysis. I would also like to see the security system updated to prevent virus attacks.

There are modules in SolarWinds NPM which are better than other competitive tools. However, some areas require new releases or updates. For example, there have not been many updates to cloud monitoring, containerization or serverless environments. In that regard, SolarWinds NPM is not as good as other solutions in the market.

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.

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.

Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier.

So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions. Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital. There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.

SolarWinds NPM could improve the graphics of the interface and more customized reporting.

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 think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility.

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.

The console could be more user-friendly. It would be better if SolarWinds updated the user interface.

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

There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NPM. One is that their dashboard needs to be friendlier. We want them to take their dashboard to another level. For example: with our databases, we develop services and we want to put those on the dashboard, while making them more visual. This would be good to improve in the tool. The integration of SolarWinds NPM with other tools is also another area for improvement. For example, we'd like to have the ability to manage the unit with other tools, because we need to have better control to manage the alerts. How can you load that capacity with only that kind of information? We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure. You have to do a test, find what needs to be improved, then make the corrections on SolarWinds NPM. You have to be very attentive when using the tool, but it's an area to improve not just in SolarWinds NPM, but for any tool.

If SolarWinds integrated with other solutions, for example, something like in a SIEM, security operations system, it would be more useful for customers. It would be ideal if they could integrate more with security solutions down the line. There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country.

The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear.

With regards to suggested areas of improvement for the product, I would like to see the price come down, and in addition I think the network element mapping tool is not as robust as it should be.

I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better.

An area for improvement would be the use of modular licenses, which are not practical for big clients.

An area of the solution that needs improvement is the multitenancy. I'd like to see more features that deal with multitenancy in the next release.

The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications.

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.

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.

If they did some type of synthetic monitoring, it would have been better.

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.

The solution could be more secure.

We have replaced SolarWinds with LogicMonitor.

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.

There are still huge concerns about security. The image of Solarwinds NPM took a huge knock due to SUNBURST and SUPERNOVA. Security experts are still concerned. I would suggest that Solarwinds put more effort into rebuilding trust with the customers and the market.

The downside was the expense. At large, large companies, that's okay. However, at companies like mine where we're building a tech startup, it can be cost-prohibitive. They've had some issues with security, and confidence in their product is probably down. Technical support can be slow to respond. I would like to see more of a focus on edge computing and edge device monitoring.

I think the graphical environment, the GUI still has to be improved. Other tools like Power BI provide a more graphical dashboard for executives to show what's going on with operations. SolarWinds has the data but the representation needs to be enhanced for an executive view. It requires a large amount of customization to get to a point where you are able to have something concrete for the upper management team. For additional features, I'd like to see something more in automations, the graphical interface, and some dynamic dashboards or at least the ability for integration with some dashboard tools.

The solution should make things easier to set up on a node by node basis. When turning on the network scanning to try to set up nodes, it has a tendency to grab everything in site, every port on a firewall, for example. One should have the option of picking through these before they're automatically added, so that there should be no need to go through them manually and delete them. The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work. Once the nodes have been added, there is a need to go in and delete them manually. I cannot think of additional improvements that are worth mentioning. The solution does a pretty good job all around.

It would be good to have high security. This is a concern after the attacks. They also need to focus more on the application side.

The pricing is expensive.

The interface could be made more user-friendly. There are lots of features but using them is a little bit difficult. For somebody doing network monitoring for the first time, it is quite difficult to use. For example, they could add better dashboards.

The licensing should be improved. I don't like the licensing because it is geared to the interface and not the device, which increases the cost. The Atlas module that is used for building the network map is very bad. I would like to see improvements made to the dashboard configuration. They should provide more templates for the vendors.

It would be nice if SolarWinds added some technical protocols like Modbus. The market needs a simple solution for monitoring a technical device.

I can say that SolarWinds is good on the market, but it's also expensive. The price is an issue. It would be nice to have the device tracking software as part of the Network Monitoring suite. If you go with Spiceworks, which a free shareware product, they will give you all of that type of information. They will tell you that this is all of the features you have and this is what is up and what is down, and they will tell you if the device is a laptop or if this computer is plugged into this port, which is handy. SolarWinds has that tool, but it's an additional license. Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product. The market is always changing, but one thing that would add value would be analytics. Many put that into a SIEM-type solution, but from a network point of view, if I had analytics on my network to expand with then it would be helpful. I would say normally this port does this much traffic and over the last six months it's doing that much traffic, and then all of a sudden, today, it's doing an amount that isn't normal. It means that something is wrong in your environment and you can start an investigation. When you are dealing with a large network, there is a lot of information coming through. If you had a system that did some sort of analysis and collating of information into smaller blocks, you could quickly look at a dashboard and say these are ten points I need to go and look at because these are things that are not 100% correct in the environment.

I see a tendency in the industry that a lot of software is going into the cloud. Customers now have to install it on-premises or they could install on-premises software in the cloud. That is also possible. So I see a tendency that software is becoming more cloud-related and I think that it is valuable for customers. SolarWinds should continue in this direction. As far as areas that can be improved, we already have NetPath functionality. Maybe that can be improved even more to add more options for visualization.

This solution does not do a very good job when I am trying to look deeper into my internal network, in particular with respect to individual ports.

My team has had a lot of issues with support. The solution should offering monitoring for the database and for the TC (traffic controller).

The UI needs improvement, although in the latest version we installed I've noticed it has gotten better. Improvement also is required the monitoring of multiple interfaces from different devices.

This pricing for this solution needs to be better. I would like to see integration with antivirus or other security endpoint solutions. There are only one or two solutions that they integrate with.