Likelihood to Recommend It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.
Read full review Solarwinds NPM is well suited for medium to large networks, it may be a bit heavy for the SOHO environment as most of the tools and reports are designed for monitoring KPIs which may not be critical for a small shop. NPM can handle large networks with several sites and mixed technologies ranging from networks, server systems, storage devices and SLA reporting.
Read full review Pros ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.). Change orders. Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders. Read full review Out of the Monitoring of almost all Network Devices. Build custom pollers to monitor which is not supported out of the box. Further you can alert on these custom metrics and Out of the box metrics. It provides you great dashboards, Reports features. You can integrate it with any MoM layer tools either using its API or sending out traps. Out of the box Integration with Service Now ITSM Tool. Read full review Cons The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind. It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly. It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed. Read full review The software upgrade process is a little hairy and has caused me trouble on occasion. The server that it needs to run is a bit of a resource hog along with the SQL server. Some additional features like the network map are a bit clunky compared to some other products that we use. Read full review Likelihood to Renew The entire IT staff relies on NPM in its daily operations. It would be impossible for us to maintain our level of service without it. If SolarWinds gets to proud of their product and begins to over charge for it, we would be forced to reconsider and use a different product. But as it stands it is worth the price to renew it.
Read full review Usability SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is quite an extensive product, covering all our bases and requirements. There are a lot of customizable options and features which you can work with for their alerting which is really useful. I haven't found anything yet which I thought SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) could do, but it actually couldn't so overall it works nicely and does the job.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
Read full review Performance Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
Read full review Support Rating We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.
Read full review In all of the times that we called support, someone at SolarWinds had the answer for us in a timely manner. Through thwack and other internet searching, we have been able to resolve all of our issues that arose to our satisfaction. The support staff have always been knowledgeable of their products or had a fellow support staff member to rely on to get the needed answers.
Read full review Online Training The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.
Read full review Implementation Rating Make sure your inventory is accurate. Stand up some virtual machines for testing prior to installation. Make sure your database and its credentials are setup. Think about things you want to monitor that may not be obvious - UPS units, Door hardware, PBX systems, Fabric Channel switches, firewalls, routers, switches. Try to setup SNMP on these devices and have an IP that you will assign to the new server. If you do that it will go well.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to
ServiceNow . The user interface on
ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With
ServiceNow , the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.
Read full review We selected SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor because of the capabilities of the product versus the price. The tools also work well with their other products and support is fairly good. We have never had a problem when we needed to make a call.
Read full review Scalability From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable
Read full review Return on Investment It helped make us an ITIL shop. It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues. Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk. Read full review SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server. SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time. We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds NPM Screenshots