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Filter 415 vetted SolarWinds NPM reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 179)
January 18, 2020
NPM is a valuable tool for Network Monitoring
Our organization uses SolarWinds to gain visibility into the performance of the Network and to alert us to problems an outages. This helps us be proactive in identifying issues within the network and quickly address them. NPM offers high visibility into our network with a user-friendly interface. The product offers a high level of customizability allowing us to hone the monitoring and alerting to meet our needs. Getting the product up and running is pretty straightforward. The learning curve comes in when honing your monitoring. Support is responsive and reliable. The Thwack community also offers helps for deployment and management questions. The interface offers loads of charts and graphs allowing you to show how your network and key interfaces are performing. This is especially helpful when you are presenting to senior-level management and team member who may not fully understand Networking.
- Easy to Navigate Interface - The user interface is laid out very clearly and it is intuitive to navigate.
- Highly Customizable Alerts - You have the ability to fine-tune alerts to meet your needs.
- Detailed Graphs and Reports - NPM does a great job of translating raw analytical data in to easy to read graphs and reports.
- Ability to Monitor a Wide Range of Devices - There are built in MIBs for a wide range of device vendors and you have the Ability to configure more.
- Creation of Custom Charts and Reports - Charts and graphs can take a little time to tweak to get the data that's relevant to you. Creating custom reports also isn't intuitive however the SolarWinds support is great at assisting you when needed.
- Licensing Model - You definitely need a good knowledge of what you're trying to see. Licensing is based on the number of elements being monitored (devices and interfaces). This can get costly so you want to have a good understanding of what areas you wish to target if Cost is an issue in your organization.
- No Real Integration with SD WAN Tools - Solarwinds NPM allows you to link with SD WAN APIs but due to API limitations, you only get surface level info. I would like to see them partner with some popular SD WAN vendors.
- Network Atlas - this is the software you use to upload maps into the system. Currently, its a standalone piece of software on the server. I would like to see this integrated into the online console.
We use the Orion Summary page for all senior admins - we get alerts if things are coming down, if servers are running low on disk space, if memory is over utilized. Many different uses. I like the additions of NetPath services. I have also used reports and the network Atlas to create visual representations for our active links. Diving into a node is helpful to establish response time issues, trends and even capacity forecasts. I use this on servers, SANs, switches, Wireless controllers, and alert monitoring services.
- NetPath services are a godsend when you are trying to explain to ISPs, etc. about where traffic is congested or stopping. Sometimes seeing is believing for them.
- The other BIG deal is anticipating disk capacity - when volumes get to full, servers crash. With NPM, we can and create set thresholds for warning us before we run into issues, and then we can add storage, memory, and CPU, (especially on our Virtual environment.)
- Alerts are great - instead of hearing from our users that a server is offline, we are aware of it right away.
- It would be nice to be able to set up SNMP3 for some of our systems in an easier fashion. But it is not a show stopper.
- Sometimes the support refers us to the Knowledge base and Thwack. Not a huge deal, but I only end up putting in a ticket when I have spent a great deal of time searching for a solution.
February 28, 2020
An irreplaceable tool for complex networks
As a network architect consultant, I manage the monitoring and SLAs of the CRIF group's network--a network of over 1000 multi-vendor nodes. SolarWinds Orion NPM allows me to monitor all network devices with proactive managed alarms. It also allows me to analyze traffic in case of network issues thanks to the Live performance feature. Configuration of a new device to monitor is very simple, and it's very easy to create custom detailed reports to help the management have a global view of the network and traffic status.
- Simple discovery of multiple nodes to monitor
- A lot of graphical snippets to represent data
- Customization of dashboard
- Missing the ability to create a partition to give separate customizable environments to different groups
- Traps triggered alerts can be done only on the TrapTools, not in the web interface
- Custom maps can be done only on the Atlas tool, not in the web interface
I am responsible for the network, security, performance and overall data network for my organization. I have used NPM to achieve several objectives, along with overall daily performance monitoring. When I first implemented it 7 years ago, we had multiple encrypted tunnels running over T1's which degraded the performance for the end-users. I used SolarWinds NPM to draw a baseline (in red), which eventually went away with a better-configured piece of hardware.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor points our discrepancies; I feel like NPM is my left hand at work. it has definitely paid for itself many times over. It allows you to take baselines and look at performance in real-time and historically. I find hardware that is going to fail before it fails due to the statistics. The saying, you get what you pay for? You get more with NPM! I will say, you get out of the tool what you put into it! I have a standard for every device so it is very easy to see anomalies on the NOC!
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor points our discrepancies; I feel like NPM is my left hand at work. it has definitely paid for itself many times over. It allows you to take baselines and look at performance in real-time and historically. I find hardware that is going to fail before it fails due to the statistics. The saying, you get what you pay for? You get more with NPM! I will say, you get out of the tool what you put into it! I have a standard for every device so it is very easy to see anomalies on the NOC!
- Every network has a notorious piece of equipment that runs outside of normal thresholds! You can set up individual thresholds for alert notification. It is very important to find the right balance of notifications from your monitoring tools. You can tweak NPM or run with the defaults. I run the defaults until hardware indicates that it needs individual configuration.
- You can add nodes individually or in bulk. You can have NPM discover your network!
- NPM can set up a wireless heat map - you need to input a floor plan - massage the map with Network Atlas; before you know it you will have a live heat map of your wireless network!
- I love the top XX options to view in the NOC - I have the top 100 network events, the top 100 interfaces showing in the NOC. You can detail the NOC pages to show just about anything you are collecting in NPM. Unbelievable information when looking for anomalies!
- NPM is being driven by the user group THWACK! I love the fact that they just added Network Insight for the Palo Alto Firewalls: site-to-site VPNs: discovery, status, bandwidth, failures reason, and protocols. GlobalProtect VPNs: username, public IP, virtual IP, and status
- I can't complain or really say that SolarWinds Network Performance monitor has any particular flaw to report! I am pleased how Solarwinds used the THWACK community to add additional features to the product.
- I would like to be able to reclassify the Unknown nodes - the LINUX flavored servers running my virtual Avaya phone network are not classified at all. I did name and manage all the nodes. All nodes are properly identified, I just don't like that group called Unknown .. .but am glad it is there to catch unidentified objects!
- Demo NPM from Solarwinds Web site. You will not be disappointed!
January 24, 2020
Solarwinds NPM - Single pane network visibility
We utilize NPM primarily for monitoring cisco switches. However, we also use it heavily to monitor other network devices as a means to first alert us of an outage or an issue. Our support team lives within the NPM dashboards throughout their work day.
- NPM does a great job of alerting us to outages, latency, connectivity issues etc...
- NPM provides historical data for monitored devices to the port level.
- NPM provides our customers (we are an MSP) with real-time network information for their environment.
- NPM is ideal for installations where systems are monitored on a local LAN. If you are monitoring over a WAN connection a lot of false positives can be generated based on latency and outages unrelated to the monitored environment.
- The cost to add additional NPM polling engines is high in my opinion. If I could I would have a polling engine local to each LAN but it is cost prohibitive.
- Upgrades of NPM in our case have presented some challenged, likely due to the age of our installation. Solarwinds tech support has been helpful in recommending an upgrade path forward.
January 17, 2020
SolarWinds NPM - "Nice, Practical, Modular"
As a consultant SolarWinds NPM allows me to recommend and implement a quick, industry standard solution for my customers that adds value immediately. With an ever increasing number of add-on modules it is scalable to meet the needs of a variety of businesses/organizations.
- Ease of configuration. SolarWinds NPM is easily configured initially with discovery auto-populating the majority of equipment.
- Ease of management/use. SolarWinds NPM is easily understood by those with less training, allowing them to gain visibility in to and troubleshoot problems that would otherwise require additional assistance.
- Pricing. While there are alternate solutions to SolarWinds NPM, this offering sits in a well-priced space easily adding more value than the sticker price. With the module-based approach the product offering often scales well with company size as well.
- Ease of modification. It is sometimes difficult to understand how to properly modify the details of individual components. This comes with the territory given the constraints of SNMP, etc. but I feel that SolarWinds could streamline the end-user experience.
- Dials. For some things dials are a good indication for system status but I've never liked them for network monitoring as they take up a lot of real estate where a simple color-coded number would suffice in most cases.
January 14, 2020
SolarWinds NPM - the backbone of network monitoring
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is our backbone for monitoring all network infrastructure for our company. We use it for all devices currently deployed in the field, as well as all data center device monitoring. The ability of NPM to monitor large scale environments such as ours, and the integration with other SW products such as NCM and SAM work very well with NPM.
- NPM polls devices consistently for status
- NPM gathers statistical data for logging
- NPM also has reporting and alerting features that aid in logging historical data and diagnosing issues
- NPM can be a bit hard to tame on resources in a large scaled environment
- NPM needs some finesse when running large scaled jobs/reports
- NPM could stand to be more efficient on the back end. It can be a hog.
December 10, 2019
SolarWinds NPM is a great tool to make IT admins look good!
We use SolarWinds NPM to monitor everything in our environment (routers, switches, servers, VOIP speakers, cameras, etc.). We monitor and know the moment any important device loses connectivity, and it is documented and emailed to the admins. We also monitor bandwidth and health environments of our equipment, giving us a warning if anything could give us a future problem.
- Alert configurations have mulitple options, giving us the ability to get notified for any defined event we choose.
- Monitors all of our devices in one interface where even the average user can be granted access and take a look at our overall environment.
- Integration with VMWare in the past has been difficult to get working properly.
- In the latest version, it seems to get slow frequently until I reboot the services on the application server.
November 20, 2019
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
AVOXI uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor across the organization. It is used by the Customer Support and Productions Ops departments. Production Ops uses it internally to monitor the uptime and performance of all network objects in our environment. Customer Support uses it primarily to prove the availability of resources and also to monitor some customer equipment and proactively alert customers to problems on their end.
- Monitor performance. Receiving alerts for latency issues in real-time enables us to track down the root cause more quickly. Recently it helped us discover that an off-site backup copy was not being properly throttled, thereby causing call quality issues weekly at 3 AM.
- Drill down to find details. In the previous example (weekly performance hit) we started at an edge device, saw the traffic spike, traced it to the access switch, and then the switch port. That made it easy to correlate the source of the traffic with the perceived symptom.
- Graphs over time. Again, using the previous example, we were able to use the graphs and look back over the history of the two ports involved (inbound to the edge of one datacenter and outbound from the offending application) to prove correlation as opposed to a one-time coincidence.
- The hardware resources are a bit steep. We have had to restart services a few times when website performance deteriorated over time.
- Being tied to Microsoft is a negative for us. It just seems wrong to have to run one MS SQL Server along with a few dozen MySQL boxes.
March 07, 2020
Great product, and I hope they never stop making better.
We mainly use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to have a visibility on the load of our servers and network bandwidth. We use it to monitor all of our network devices and servers across all of our 4 sites. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor helps us to know if anything goes wrong within the environment. Also, the alerts feature adds a great value for us to handle the problem quickly. For example, when a critical server CPU utilization goes high, we get an immediate alert to check the issue. Another example is that when VPN connection is lost to a remote site, we instantly receive an alert that the remote router is down so we can act fast to get the service back.
- Pre-stack live monitoring
- EMA alerts feature
- History timelines for each sensor
- Web portal is sometimes slow
- Reporting is difficult and not intuitive
January 17, 2020
SolarWinds- makes going home easy
We use it to monitor network equipment and servers throughout the whole school district. It lets us easily see outages and heavy load issues. And it was recently set up to monitor certain stations used by security personnel to make sure they are up and running.
- Notification of equipment down before the user usually even notices there is a problem.
- Insight into processor and memory loads on equipment to allow adjustments before failure.
- Better tools to clean up database bloat.
January 16, 2020
NPM watches our servers and switches so we don't have to
We use SolarWinds NPM to monitor performance statistics and status (up/down) of over 250 servers and hundreds of switch and router interfaces enterprise-wide. Custom alerts are used to notify application or server owners when a system is down or degraded.
- Adding nodes is easy.
- Status monitoring is efficient and timely (assuming your polling and alert settings are appropriate).
- Dashboards are useful and highly customizeable.
- It's a big animal and takes time and expertise to keep it running smoothly and maintain the monitored nodes. Don't assume some IT tech is going to use this in their spare time.
- Because it is very complex, there can be a steep learning curve. Get some training from Loop1.
- The web interface is slow. Probably can't be helped, but it is frustrating at times.
January 14, 2020
SolarWinds NPM is the magic bullet!
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, for us, is used for the monitoring of servers, networking equipment and other devices. The only department that uses it is information technology. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor helps us manage what's going on in the environment and also keeps an eye for any machines that go offline anytime during the day or night. Before SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor it was all hit and miss as to when we knew devices were in trouble.
- The software is very in-depth. You will be able to get metrics and data on things you never thought possible.
- SolarWinds has a vast array of products in its database so we have yet to add anything that wasn't already included.
- The reporting is wonderful. It is in-depth and allows us to provide documents to business partners when asked.
- Sometimes there are too many things to look at. It may be hard to find just what you are looking for. I would prefer a more dumbed down interface or even a guided wizard.
- It may be our implementation but it seems a little sluggish at times.
- Upgrading it can be a pain since there may be multiple updates needed to get current.
March 14, 2020
Review of SolarWinds NPM. Great product!!
It’s is being used across the whole organization. We use it to monitor all of our devices. We added our servers, switch bridges, and access points. SolarWinds NPM helps us monitor our infrastructure and are able to fix an issue quickly if the device slows down. A really great product.
- Great at monitoring devices.
- Shows great statistics on your devices.
- Check bandwidth on a switch port.
- Able to check disk space easily.
- Not sure.
- It just works really well.
March 06, 2020
SolarWinds NPM: Good, but not great
Solarwinds NPM is being used in our department to monitor over 1000 network devices. They monitor all ports and routing statuses. The problems that it addresses is visibility into network device health and status. With other network add-ons such as Network Configuration Manager, configuration backup is also possible. What NPM has helped us with is identifying when devices become unresponsive or when certain routing adjacencies fail. This can help us identify issues in the network without relying on our customer to tell us they are having performance or reachability issues. We also rely on NPM to identify link errors in our environment. We were able to identify many links where CRC/input errors were occurring. Without NPM, it would have been a monumental task to identify that as a possible performance issue point.
- Identifying down nodes in network.
- Identifying neighbor adjacency changes.
- Graphing feature to give a quick look at interface bandwidth trends.
- "Network Top 10" to identify issues in the network.
- Support is almost non-existent. Almost always solved by Googling for a solution.
- Care and feeding sometimes requires direct database interaction. For example, when neighbor adjacencies are removed, they will show up on the alerts page. But deleting them from alerts won't work. Changing the auto delete timeout is not a workable solution as sometimes real links are down for extended periods of time. One needs to go into the database to delete the routing neighbors that are no longer valid to permanently remove them.
- Upgrades almost always have unforeseen issues. Whether a package isn't installed/ configured correctly to additional polling engines not able to be simultaneously upgraded, etc.
- No Linux version. Windows requires many patches that required reboots on a monthly basis.
Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, we monitor our core network and all customer circuits and CPE equipment to proactively plan repair when links degrade or respond to service outages. We also create logins for our customers to monitor their circuit usage and performance. We use reports to upsell customers who are consistently saturating their bandwidth.
- Good aesthetics in graph-rendering, etc.
- Handles a large number of monitored elements
- Fine-grained control of user permissions
- Polling engine requires windows
- Database only accepts MSSQL--requires license
- No templating of user permissions
February 12, 2020
Solarwinds NPM - Well worth your time
NPM does a great job of establishing baselines and creating reporting that I can show to my management to prove we are out of bandwidth. I like to think of NPM and NCM as one product because they essentially do all the functions you need together.
- Graphing is fantastic. Trend lines and 95th percentile really make the grade when showing off what your network can do, or where it's limitations are.
- Alerting works flawlessly.
- The sales team is relentless and will never stop bothering you. Ever.
- More vendor MIB's can be put into the standard offering.
Something that can be measured can be managed. In addition, you can't manage something effectively if you aren't monitoring. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor allows us to monitor and measure out network infrastructure allowing more effectively. NPM often alerts us of issues before the end-user does, allowing us to resolve problems before they become problems.
- Device and port availability.
- Metrics of network port utilization.
- Can be heavy on hardware requirements.
- UI takes some getting used to.
February 11, 2020
8 Years using the product. Have tried others but still recommend it.
NPM monitors all the organization's network assets and datacenter servers. We use it to have insight and real-time status of all the essential devices. It provides us a way to centralize network management and visualization. We also heavily rely on it to analyze traffic trends and traffic patterns. It is also the way we have to prevent issues or be proactively utilizing the advance alerting processes.
- Alerting
- Device health
- Custom maps
- Custom graphs
January 31, 2020
NPM: The Heart and Soul of SolarWinds
We use NPM across our entire IT department. Our network engineers use it to proactively identify network configuration issues and hardware health problems. Our incident management team uses it to hone in on the problem when an outage is reported to the Help Desk. Our IT field support staff use it to get a sense of what is at their site and if the WAN bandwidth is getting saturated. IT leadership even peeks in on NPM to get a simple dashboard on the network. It's the heart of our SolarWinds server cluster.
- Easy-to-configure NOC-style dashboards for almost anything on a network you want to monitor.
- Customizable reports for any network metric.
- Customizable email alerts on dozens of different network issues.
- Centralized discovery and inventory for routers, switches, analog gateways, UPSs, access points, and other network hardware.
- SolarWinds is slow to integrate features that users suggest, even when dozens of users have made the same suggestion over time.
- The charts aren't as customizable as we would like (y-scale, plot size, etc.).
- The reports feature has a combination of legacy ReportWriter reports and new reports. They should all be migrated to the new style. The old reports are hard to modify and the output is less usable than the new style.
January 31, 2020
My go-to performance monitor is SolarWinds.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is being used by the network team to monitor our network equipment world wide. We monitor over 600 devices in SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, most of them Cisco switches and routers. Performance charts and reports are our primary use for SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, but we also get alerts for network outages or failures as well.
- Alerting
- Reporting
- Easy navigation
- Page load speed
It is being used across the whole organization. The product helps the IT department monitor systems and applications, which would allow IT to respond and address issues more timely and in a proactive manner.
- System monitoring
- Application monitoring
- Update node properties
- Certain query functions in reporting
January 14, 2020
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a Great Tool
We use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to monitor all of our network infrastructure here in our head office as well as at our colocation, executive office, and a couple remote call center sites. We have hundreds of devices and it helps us to monitor for performance and down issues and has been reliable in doing such.
- Easy to maintain
- Highly customizable interface
- Easy to setup alerts
- Every now and then the web interface starts getting really slow and the server needs reboot
- Licensing needs to be simplified, there are so many moving parts and so many different licenses to maintain
- Has a bug where interfaces show in "unknown" state and you have to remove/re-add the interfaces to make that stop or just ignore them
We use Orion to monitor servers and network devices across our 3 offices and microwave network. I like how it can email alerts when there is a stop in communication across the network. I wish it would let you set a hierarchy so if one thing stops you don’t get emails about everything downstream as well.
- Email alerts
- Domain integration
- Not subscription
- Hierarchy settings
- Limit email alerts. I don’t like getting 256 alerts on Monday morning
- Web page interface is very slow
January 13, 2020
SolarWinds has been helpful in managing our infrastructure
We use NPM to monitor our various nodes across the company.
- The Dashboard features quickly enable us to evaluate where we are for the day and give a quick look into how clients feel about both the service they receive.
- SolarWinds features a pooling system that lets you install SolarWinds in as many servers as you want besides SolarWinds. You never restrict yourself to the database with this pooling method.
- I dislike its licensing and is a little bit costly as compared to other monitoring tools.
- Not really fair but there is a lot to configure. That is because there is a lot it can do. It is important to spend the time and get full use of it. It can be overwhelming in the beginning while you are setting things up and very time-consuming.
SolarWinds NPM Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About SolarWinds NPM
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) delivers comprehensive network fault monitoring and performance management that scales and expands with a company's network monitoring needs. Users can collect and view availability, real-time and historical statistics from routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and any other SNMP-, ICMP-, or WMI-enabled devices directly from a web browser.
The vendor states that SolarWinds users can get a full NPM installation up and running the same day they download, and that implementation does not require a team of consultants. NPM provides visibility into the health of network devices and servers on the network, ensuring that users have needed real-time information to keep their network running at peak performance.
Network Performance Monitor helps IT Pros:
- Quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and avoid downtime
- Respond to multiple condition checks, correlated events, and device dependencies
- Automatically calculate capacity exhaustion dates using customizable thresholds based on peak and average usage
- Streamline network troubleshooting with an easy-to-use Web interface
- View paths to critical business services hop-by-hop, even into the cloud, with the NetPath™ feature
- Get deeper visibility into complex network devices with Network Insight™ features for Cisco ASA firewalls, Cisco Nexus switches, and F5 BIG-IP load balancers
SolarWinds NPM Screenshots
SolarWinds NPM Video
Network Performance Monitor overview
SolarWinds NPM Downloadables
SolarWinds NPM Integrations
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, Solarwinds® Storage Resource Monitor, Solarwinds Web Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Web Help Desk, SolarWinds IP Address Manager, SolarWinds User Device Tracker, SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager
SolarWinds NPM Competitors
ManageEngine OpManager, Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, Nagios Core, DX Infrastructure Manager (formerly CA Unified Infrastructure Management), Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (formerly HP Network Node Manager), Paessler PRTG
Pricing
- Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
- Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
- Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
- Entry-level set up fee?Optional
SolarWinds NPM Support Options
| Free Version | Paid Version | |
|---|---|---|
| Phone | ||
| Forum/Community | ||
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | ||
| Video Tutorials / Webinar |
SolarWinds NPM Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, Windows® Server 2016; SQL Server 2016 SQL Server 2016 SP1 SQL Server 2017 (including installations on Linux) |
| Mobile Application: | No |