Observium vs. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

• If you are on a budget, this is one heck of a tool for the price (including the ~$200/year for the Pro subscription).
• If you are OK with maintaining and updating open source tools, this is a great tool.
• If you are afraid of the Linux command line or live in a Windows-centric world, this might not be the tool for you.
• If you can't stand things occasionally not working, this is probably not a good fit.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Automatic device discovery.
• Scalability
• Real-time monitoring.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Documentation
• Community support
• Easy to set up but hard to customise fully

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.

Incentivized

Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.

Incentivized

It's open source. Your mileage may vary. Sometimes the provided documentation is beyond frustrating, other times it's right on the mark.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I haven't used other products that are similar to Observium. Observium is an open tool, with a robust feature set. There are elements of comparable monitoring across other tools, but nothing I've seen that is a complete parallel in terms of feature set and visualizations. If I were asked, I wouldn't have another tool to recommend over Observium.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable

Incentivized

• It is good for DC admin.
• Only positive impact.
• Highly recommended.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized