SolarWinds Network Device Monitor Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.4 out of 10

Score

8.4 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SolarWinds Network Device Monitor are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

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.

Reviews

19 Reviews

Cost effective Network Monitoring with relative ease of adoption and ongoing operation

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

July 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Monitoring Up/Down status
Monitoring for key events
Delivering visibility to our IT engineers, across the enterprise

Cons

Performance can be slow
Agents on hosts can be problematic (inexplicable high cpu usage)
Interface/GUI could be improved

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Director in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Love my job!

Rating: 8 out of 10

June 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

I'm happy with the experience to date and have no recommendations at this time

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Best Network Monitoring Software

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 13, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Monitor New and Existing Devices
Reduce Extraneous Traffic
Monitor when Devices go offline

Cons

User Friendly GUI
Dashboard Interface

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Analyst in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

My review of SolarWinds NCM

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 12, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

holt archer

senior security engineer in Information Technology at infobip (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Solarwinds unveiled what my network was doing.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 12, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

Move away from Windows as the underlying OS.
Not much else.
Really had to think about the first one.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

SolarWinds is a reliable, lightweight and up-to-date solution for your network monitoring needs that's also backed by a great support team

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

April 12, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Monitoring network devices.
Wide vendor compatibility.
Customise dashboards and visualizations.
Easy on resources.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Engineer in Engineering (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Benefits of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 11, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Monitoring.
Mapping.
Configuring.

Cons

Kicking off and monitoring network scans

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Verified User

Account Manager in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Solarwinds Network Monitoring Toolset, a great addition to your Network Toolkit

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 11, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Jesse Bridgelal

Network Architect in Information Technology at MOH (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Good Network Performance Monitoring Tool

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

April 7, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

reports are customizable fully
Module configuration is easy for even beginner users
Alerts can be integrated into any chat-ops or incident management tools

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Dipak Patel

Sr DBA in Information Technology at evicore (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

SolarWinds, What's in your toolbox!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Critical Path Visualization
Intelligent Mapping
Performance Analysis

Cons

Price
EDR
and Integration with other tools like AV.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

John Abraham

Director of Information Systems - ACOM in Information Technology at Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

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