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Single Window Network Performance Monitoring
May 31, 2022

Single Window Network Performance Monitoring

Ravi Khanchandani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is used in various ways for us as well as other organizations that we support. Various use cases are as follows - Network availability during business hours Network utilization reports to review all Service provider WAN links Device health monitoring Capacity planning reports for a proactive approach NetPath - very widely used for identifying network issues like latencies, packet drops, config issues, traffic issues using a hop by hop path analysis
  • Device Health Monitoring
  • NetPath - network path analysis
  • Performance monitoring of devices - utilization of resources like CPU, Mem, Interfaces
  • Specific vendor monitoring with Network Insight - Cisco, F5, Palo Alto
  • NetPath scaling for very large environments like Banks
  • Drag and drop functionality in Reporting
  • Drag and drop functionality in Dashboards
  • Capacity Planning helps us plan in advance when we need to have bandwidths enhanced for crucial network links. We now plan 2 months ahead on the future bandwidth needs, keeping our network healthy and available with capacity.
  • NetPath has helped cut down drastically on support resolution timelines. Instead of having blame games between network and server teams, we have bridged that gap.
  • Scheduled Reports provide us with automated reports of network availability and performance data.
  • Comprehensive alerting functions have helped us reduce "alert noise". We now use custom properties to direct specific alerts to specific team members.
PRTG has been a very old tool that was good for plotting the utilization graphs of interfaces but lacked comprehensive device views, overall end-to-end dashboards, comprehensive reports, and alerting functions. WhatsUpGold lacked comprehensive Dashboards, Alerts, and Reporting - a very crucial factor for a Monitoring platform. WUG also had limitations on device health visibility and was mainly restricted to SNMP information.

Do you think SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)'s feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) again?

Yes

SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA), SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is most appropriate in environments where the traditional network gear like routers, switches, wireless controllers, and firewalls are in place and you need to do monitoring for availability, performance, health, and path analysis - basically all monitoring aspects. In environments where you have more of the recent network components like SD-WAN solutions, no real value add comes in from deploying SolarWinds, though SolarWinds claims that more and more SDWAN vendors will be added to the monitoring bandwagon. Currently, there are only a limited set of SDWAN vendors that are supported directly.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
8.3
Automated network device discovery
9
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
9
Alerts
8
Network capacity planning
9
Network mapping
6
Customizable reports
8
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
8
Hardware health monitoring
8