ExtraHop in Seattle, Washington offers an IT operations analytics platform via the ExtraHop Performance Platform, providing a dynamic, real-time view of all transactions in the IT environment, every team from NetOps to SecOps can spot and solve problems fast.
$5.04
Per Hour
SolarWinds NPM
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.
SolarWinds NPM is a good entry tool for smaller companies as it provides you a decent baseline to monitor your network. To unlock the full potential you need to add agents and it falls pretty quick. It is not as good as enterprise tools like ExtraHop. Also it is not as easy to …
One very big use is the ability to resolve performance issues. One example used was with the performance of sql issues. ExtraHop [Performance Platform] gave us the packet tracing ability to see the database was being queried incorrectly. A programmer has written a query that would bring the database information local and one the queries instead of allowing the sql server itself to do the work and push out the information.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is excellent on node monitoring, for servers, switches, voice routers, etc. It also provides quick information on the dashboard, so you can take a look an in a few seconds determine is an entire site is down, if portions are down, and what may be causing the issue. We have experienced some difficulty when working with our wireless environment. It is less than natural when attempting to determine if a wireless access point is down itself, or if the switch feeding the access point is down, either port or switch. It does a very good job telling you if a switch is down, but troubleshooting the devices (specifically access points) it struggles.
Some person like me who want to see Extrahop can integrate better with other network analysis tools like Wireshark or TCPdump. The desired functionality I've been looking for is to program a kind of specific criteria to trigger the probe starts to run Wireshark or TCPdump to save the trace of a specific problematic session. Sometimes I want to see the evidence in a packet trace layer rather than just have the warning or error only presented in the dashboard.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We use ExtraHop specifically to monitor network traffic. It does many other things very well also, but it is the best network traffic analysis tool that we currently have in house. The fact that it is agentless also makes it more reliable and not dependent on agents running on devices throughout our enterprise.
We use NPM along with PRTG Network Monitor. While NPM is great at monitoring network devices and network links and some aspects of the servers, PRTG provides more in-depth monitoring for Server systems, applications and application ports such as Web Ports etc. PRTG also provides a more comprehensive Root cause analysis.
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.
