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SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

Overview

What is SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is a network diagnostic tool, from Austin-based SolarWinds.

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Recent Reviews

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Users have found great value in using SolarWinds Network Device Monitor for various network monitoring tasks. The product allows users to …
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Love my job!

8 out of 10
June 21, 2022
We use it for monitoring each of the nodes in our environment, including premise as well as the cloud. I monitor the various MSSQLSERVER …
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Pricing

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What is SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is a network diagnostic tool, from Austin-based SolarWinds.

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Product Details

What is SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor Technical Details

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Reviews and Ratings

(53)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Users have found great value in using SolarWinds Network Device Monitor for various network monitoring tasks. The product allows users to continuously monitor and report on network device configuration adherence to hardened baseline standards, ensuring compliance with industry best practices. Through email alerts and integration with Jira, users can create tickets on the network team's service desk when a device becomes out of compliance, enabling prompt action and issue resolution.

The product also offers a central console that provides a single-screen view of all network devices, allowing users to easily monitor WAN links, network appliances, and measure performance and uptime. Users have appreciated the option to plot devices on a map, providing a visual representation of their network infrastructure. Additionally, the ability to group devices by site or type makes it convenient for users to quickly identify and address site-specific issues if needed.

For small businesses with low data generation, SolarWinds Network Device Monitor has proven to be a suitable tool. However, some users have reported issues when reaching the data limit after 12 months. Navigation becomes slower, and the database may require fixes and the implementation of a data retention policy. Despite these limitations, the product continues to provide valuable visibility into network resources, helping teams mitigate bottlenecks and troubleshoot issues effectively.

Easy Module Configuration: Many users have found the module configuration to be straightforward and user-friendly, even for those who are new to the software. The ease of setting up and configuring modules has been praised by multiple reviewers.

Flexible Device Grouping: Numerous reviewers appreciate the flexibility offered by the system in terms of grouping devices into different categories. This feature makes it easy for users to organize their network devices and reference reports efficiently. It provides a customizable and intuitive way to manage device groupings.

Customizable Reports: The ability to customize reports has received praise from many users. They find it beneficial as it allows them to generate tailored reports that provide valuable insights into network performance over specific time periods. Users can easily select relevant metrics, timeframes, and presentation formats according to their needs.

Sluggish and Non-Intuitive GUI: Several users have found the GUI to be sluggish and not very intuitive, suggesting that it could benefit from improvement and polishing. The slow performance in the GUI requires significant computing power, leading to frustration among some users.

Unstreamlined Creation of Compliance Policies: Some users have mentioned that the creation of compliance policies is not streamlined and lacks a smooth flow. This lack of efficiency can make the process more time-consuming and cumbersome for users.

Lack of Linux Version: A few users have expressed a desire for a better Linux version of the product. They believe that having a dedicated version for Linux would enhance compatibility and provide a smoother experience for Linux-based environments.

Reviews

(1-19 of 19)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds to monitor over 250 locations and several thousand devices. We use the product to monitor our networks and produce a variety of actionable alerts for our internal IT staff. The visibility gained provides assurance regarding status and monitored events, reducing IT response time to events and MTTR.
  • Monitoring Up/Down status
  • Monitoring for key events
  • Delivering visibility to our IT engineers, across the enterprise
  • Performance can be slow
  • Agents on hosts can be problematic (inexplicable high cpu usage)
  • Interface/GUI could be improved
On its own, it's a solid choice for an SMB or Mid-size Enterprise if you're price sensitive and looking primarily for core functionality. SolarWinds has a large family of products that can also be leveraged in conjunction with SWNDM. Turning the product loose on a very large environment for discovery and mapping should be done with care and concern for a number of reasons but including the performance of the product for this task. If you're looking for an all-in-one product with some presumed supporting features built in (config manager, etc.) you'll need to look elsewhere.
June 21, 2022

Love my job!

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use it for monitoring each of the nodes in our environment, including premise as well as the cloud. I monitor the various MSSQLSERVER instances as well as monitor alerts (e.g., access failure). We need to have our various databases available for students and faculty with as little downtime as possible. We have over 100 nodes and close to 200 databases.
  • Notifications when servers are in a critical or other status
  • Color coded - easy to identify problems
  • Drill down capability to look deeper into the current status
  • I'm happy with the experience to date and have no recommendations at this time
Based on the size and complexity of our environment, I like how it provides very detailed information about each node, including things such as version. This identifies servers that may be reaching their end-of-life date. I think if you have a robust environment, this would be a good product to introduce.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is used as a bandwidth analyzer here at my company. We use it to monitor and measure new and existing network traffic. It definitely helped us be aware of random devices logging into our network. It also allows us to monitor traffic of the current users. It would alert us if a device is down or not connected to the network.
  • Monitor New and Existing Devices
  • Reduce Extraneous Traffic
  • Monitor when Devices go offline
  • User Friendly GUI
  • Dashboard Interface
I would always recommend this software to everyone. It help made monitoring the network a lot more efficient. I was able to monitor a site that was down and contacted an ISP to service the site. The alerts was almost instantaneous with barely any delay. It would keep sending alerts which was nice.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We set up NCM as a way to continuously monitor and report on network device configuration adherence to hardened baselines standards. We also set up alerts to Jira via email such that if a device became out of compliance an email would be sent that would create a ticket on the network team's service desk. The ticket had the necessary detail to define the compliance violation and even suggest the remediation, this included config-line numbers and even some contextual information about where in the config the problem existed. The scope was all our network devices and it solved the business problem of network device compliance to hardening standards which was part of our ISO security program.
  • Monitor for and record network device configuration changes.
  • Allow for the creation, or modification, of hardening standards for multiple vendors' network devices.
  • Automate the creation of alerts that can be sent to owners for correction of compliance violations.
  • Allow you to organize a visualization of your network devices.
  • The GUI is a bit sluggish in my opinion.
  • The GUI is not very intuitive and could use some polishing.
  • The creation of compliance policies needs to be streamlined and allow for better flow.
  • A better Linux version would be nice.
For a network admin or security team, NCM can be very useful in keeping config parameters standardized, this can mean anything from ensuring the timezone setting is standard to ensuring SNMP or logging is set up as you want it. The alerting is good if you want a record of findings for audit purposes so that you can show that you are monitoring configurations, you are alerting when a config goes out of compliance, and a ticket is created to drive remediation. Alternatively one can choose to automate remediation by running a configuration change script but that scares me so we never used it, this is a me-problem and not a tool problem. Where it falls down is in the data storage architecture as we had constant problems with our server running out of disk, this seems to be because it does a lot of basic monitoring of the devices along with storing many, many copies of the configurations. This may have been a user-side issue, though NCM runs under the Orion app which is where the storage issues come from I think.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The network is the highway to all things for the client server communication! If you want to create an app, it will more than likely touch the network, or live there. Whether it’s an sql query or a shared file to a mobile app, you need the network. So why don’t we monitor it? That was my question almost six years ago. Then came Solarwinds and the network device monitoring. From device health to resource utilization and trending. What bandwidth are going out to what port and the type of traffic if the device supports it. I know what is going in and out of the network devices, I can show you.
  • Integrate with disparate and various hardware.
  • View hardware details like fan, psu, cpu utilization.
  • Pull configuration, with appropriate credentials, from network device.
  • Modify configuration, with appropriate credentials, from network device.
  • Move away from Windows as the underlying OS.
  • Not much else.
  • Really had to think about the first one.
Network visibility! Want to know what all your managed network systems are doing? Get this product. Memory and CPU utilization, fan status, power supply status, really cool. You can report on the status and use, daily, weekly or monthly reports. You can even send it in a web format or as a pdf, how good I’d that? If you already have these things, you will see aggregate bandwidth, netflow and other flows. And if you like something you are using and want it monitored, submit a request to the community and you may see it in a future release.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilise SolarWinds to monitor all sorts of network devices that support SNMP from different vendors e.g. Cisco, Juniper, Extreme Networks and other similar infrastructure such as IP phones, etc. The SolarWinds product allows us to quickly get an overview of the state of our network at a glance.
  • Monitoring network devices.
  • Wide vendor compatibility.
  • Customise dashboards and visualizations.
  • Easy on resources.
  • More security put into the product, the Orion hack was not good news.
  • More frequent releases to address small bugs rather than big releases that are rare.
  • More IPv6 related features to make it easier for people familiar with IPv4 to learn IPv6.
  • Ability to edit dashboards using JSON or another similar language.
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is a good, well-rounded product that helps any network admin gain insight into their network and its architecture, no matter how complex/hierarchical or simple/flat their network is; the product delivers where it matters most in terms of monitoring features and provides enough flexibility to allow customisation to suit your organisation. The wide vendor compatibility out of the box is also something most other competing software doesn't offer. Resource consumption is very adequate for the extensive features provided and that's again not true with all other vendors.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We wanted a product to scan our environment to determine all devices on the network, whilst also mapping out the connection paths. This product enabled us to view our network topology and all active/inactive ports on our switches. It also assisted with building a visual representation of our environment.
  • Monitoring.
  • Mapping.
  • Configuring.
  • Kicking off and monitoring network scans
This product is suited for environments where there are a lot of devices on the network to manage. Large enterprise companies will benefit greatly from it. If you have a small environment (i.e.. a couple switches/ firewalls / servers) it may not be as beneficial if you had a larger environment.
Jesse Bridgelal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I manage a large WAN with over 15 geographically dispersed sites, all within the same country. I primarily use this product to monitor my WAN links, network appliances and measure performance, uptime and for alerting. SolarWinds Network Device Monitor provides a central console for viewing all my devices on a single screen and I can also plot these devices on a map if needed. The system allows for devices to be grouped by site, type, etc. This allows me to see site issues at a high level if needed.
  • Monitor device uptime
  • Measure port utilization
  • Provide usable reports on network performance over a time period
  • Provide alerts via email, screen alerts, or SMS
  • Provide flexible options for grouping devices into a category that is usable and easily referenced
  • The device topology mapping could be improved
  • Device configuration database could be included
  • The system could include a TFTP server to allow device configs to be downloaded and saved
SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is best suited for a large network, especially where WAN connections are included. The software can manage a large number of devices and uses different means of network discovery to discover and add devices to be monitored. The software is very flexible and provides a host of reports on various aspects of system performance. It allows for drill downs on device issues and can provide details such as temp, memory usage, CPU usage, etc. for servers. There is even a predictive warning system for alerting set memory, hard drive or CPU thresholds are met. This allows for proactive action before a system begins to degrade. The system works well in a Windows environment but is also flexible and works with VMWARE and other platforms. It is primarily aimed at monitoring network devices and can also monitor network servers using SNMP. It lacks the ability to monitor services and application ports such as web services provided by a web server on Port 80.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The tool is ok for small businesses and low amount of data generated. Once you reach the "limit" which was 12 months after the launch, we got the problems, navigation got slower, DB needed some fixes, data retention policy has to be implemented. Live data is not working as expected. The overall experience gets worst as and data continues to grow. NPM module helps to find network-related bottlenecks, easy to set up and gives a great picture. My experience is ok with this module.
  • reports are customizable fully
  • Module configuration is easy for even beginner users
  • Alerts can be integrated into any chat-ops or incident management tools
  • High-level view on the network, live data is not working as expected
  • DB instance needs too many fixes as data grows
  • The module has an even deeper analytics option
To have real-time data about network performance, when a company has a lot of integrations is a crucial business operation. Quick detection of problems and detailed info for the network team to fix the issue helps businesses to reduce downtime or performance degradation duration. Before purchase you should have a list of what you want to monitor, in every detail, then make a consultation with the vendor and you see what can be covered automatically from the tool and what custom development you will need.
John Abraham | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use SolarWinds Network Device Monitor to provide visibility into our layer 2 and layer 3 network resources. The visibility gives our team tools that help mitigate network issues before they become real problems. It also provides a resource that is scalable and grows with our network and provides advance alerting.
  • Critical Path Visualization
  • Intelligent Mapping
  • Performance Analysis
  • Price
  • EDR
  • and Integration with other tools like AV.
At our organization, we have a wide footprint for wireless users. Our users usually have on average about 3 to four devices. We often worry about saturation and use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to develop a wireless heat map to see bottlenecks on our infrastructure and a WIFI network analyzer to troubleshoot access points.
Ayush Dhawan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds is one monitoring tool that was being actively used by one of our major Petroleum/Mining clients for monitoring Network devices and was configured in each of the critical assets with ease. The interface of Solarwinds is very easy to use and learn the monitoring setup. The alerts were easy to understand and had good integration with ServiceNow.
  • ServiceNow integration.
  • Good interface.
  • Easy to setup and use.
  • Monitoring of New age infra setups
  • Integration with Cloud platforms
  • Price factor.
I will definitely recommend the SolarWinds Network Device Monitors for the people who are having huge infra setups and need monitoring of specific Network devices like F5 or any to be handy and have alerts on the go. It is also suitable for Clients who still have huge setups on traditional infrastructures.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our use of Solarwinds Network Device Monitor is to monitor a single device via SNMP for health status and issues. Issues such as disk space, and network bandwidth. We have alerting thresholds set to email when the respective bandwidth/disk space is exceeded. This enables us to take the appropriate actions before they become a real problem.
  • SNMP
  • Alerting
  • Easy/Quick installation
  • It only works on a single device.
  • You need a good working knowledge of SNMP.
Where you have a specific problem on a single device this tool can be set up to monitor the problem. I have used it on a switch interface to monitor the bandwidth flowing through it and to alert when the traffic is above "normal".
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have offices in many other locations around the world. The Network Device Monitor for SolarWinds works with our other SolarWinds Monitoring and Automation implementations to allow to quickly view and triage any outages or performance degradation. It also helps us keep track of devices that are in use or need to be decommissioned.
  • Monitors our Meraki switches
  • Monitors our AudioCodes telecom devices
  • Logs performance metrics for our multiple sites across the world
  • Performance in the GUI is very slow. It takes a lot of horsepower behind the scenes.
  • Some of the menu and action items are hard to find. It's not incredibly intuitive.
  • The dashboard should tie in to other products more seamlessly.
This software gives me the ability to quickly view all our network devices, their interoperability, and their current performance status. If I have down node in Nivelles, I can see the other nodes and devices that are affected and determine quickly if it is a hardware, infrastructure, or environmental issue.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
SolarWinds NPM, NCM, NTA, etc.. are all Cognizant one of the preferred Monitoring tools and Many of our customers uses this for network performance monitoring.
  • Exceptionally good in Network devices performance and availability monitoring like CPU, Memory, Interfaces throughput, bandwidth utilization, etc...
  • Broad network devices like Routers, Switches, Firewalls, Load Balancers, and vendors coverage like Cisco, Juniper, Avaya, Broadcom, EMC, Fortinet, etc...
  • Good diagnostic and logging method
  • I believe we should have more flexibility in Integration Options with event Management tools and ITSM tools other than SNOW
  • I believe its high time for Solarwinds to come up with good Event Management or AIOPs capability that includes correlation, Anomaly detection, Predictive analysis, and RCA
  • Quick response to the support tickets Irrespective of severity
One of our preferred network monitoring tools is SolarWinds, we recommend these tools for complete network performance and availably monitoring and advanced monitoring like monitoring the network traffic, bandwidth utilization, IPSLA for voice devices, etc... We usually do not recommend if the customer is looking for basic monitoring like only availability. it can be achieved with any monitoring tool.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor to monitor everything from hardware network devices to virtual devices on my network. Knowing when a node goes down, reboots, has latency or simple uptime metrics is extremely valuable and this tool provides all that and more. I have alerts set up to email us when any issues arise.
  • Monitor hardware health
  • monitor virtual infrastructure resource utilization
  • Real-time performance details
  • Historical data
  • Better documentation on how to integrate multiple SolarWinds products and resource requirements
  • US support for US based companies
SolarWinds is great at immediately detecting performance issues and alerting you before the issue gets out of hand. Monitoring can be configured to be very granular and to provide minute-by-minute visibility into real-time performance problems. The analytical tools and historical data can give you a big picture of how your environment has been performing and the direction it is going.
April 06, 2022

Very easy to use

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's very easy to set up and use to monitor devices using SNMP or ICMP. We have alerts sent to us when devices go down and are able to change how often it monitors and the thresholds before sending us an alert. We can also easily add and remove devices from being monitored
  • Easy to setup
  • easy to mantain
  • simple alerts
  • better correlation
For an enterprise company that doesn't have a ton of devices to monitor it is well suited to monitor network equipment and servers and alert on-call engineers when a device goes down or is having an issue. It is very cost effective if you just need simple monitoring on the devices
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it every day and heavily rely upon it for further insight and visibility into our network. It saves a lot of time diagnosing and recognizing what devices are causing bottlenecks or are having problems. Without it, you feel blind to what is going on in the network at a given time.
  • Historic insight
  • Alerting and notifcations
  • Inventory management
  • Visual statistics
  • Some areas of the UI are confusing
  • Needs powerful hardware
  • Better explanations
SolarWinds offers quick access to potential problems and helps to flag devices with issues, immediately. We have alerts set up to inform us of down nodes or even nodes that are at full capacity, this helps us on a daily basis. There are further things that make Solarwinds a fuller package (NTA, NCM, etc) unfortunately these are separate products.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use SolarWinds to help troubleshoot issues with network outages and/or network delays and resource delays. If we receive a call regarding a network outage or network slowness we can easily use Solar Winds to pinpoint what appliance may be down or experiencing an issue and to recommend that it be looked at by our network team.
  • Shows appliances or nodes that may be down
  • Shows a map of entire network and possible problem areas
  • Shows a network availability timeline where issues can be tracked
  • Shows a network latency and packet loss timeline to help assess issues.
  • to me and my team, SolarWinds works well for what we need it for. I don't necessarily have any suggestions for improvement
It's great for getting us an idea of where and why an outage or slowness may be occurring but also can give us a "false positive" so to speak. If a node has been decommissioned or is purposely out of service we may see that as an issue when in reality we just don't have all of the facts regarding why it's out.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Today we use SolarWinds Network Device Monitor to proactively monitor our Network Infrastructure across 2 sites. We use it to Monitor PROD and DR sites. The main problem it helps us address is high availability and reacting in a timely manner to issues that may arise.
  • Hardware health status
  • Power supply status of the Network Devices
  • Transmit/Discard errors
  • High Latency
  • Vulnerability Management
  • Vulnerability Patching
  • Hardware firmware recommendation
I believe that SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is well suited for any business that needs to monitor critical infrastructure to provide high availability. Small business with non critical equipment that can afford to be down for a few hours I would say that it would be less appropriate.
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