TrustRadius
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, from Austin-based SolarWinds, is a network monitoring option.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/Qn/7Y/GFXR292JE2EE.PNGSolarWindsSolarWinds: Not just a piece of dust in the wind for monitoring2019-04-27T17:10:02.486ZBeing a media company there is a large amount of broadcast network traffic between production control rooms throughout the local TV stations. The Network Performance Monitor 12, allows a comprehensive toolset and a single pane of glass to view, troubleshoot, monitor and map my network to be the most efficient. The tool is not being used throughout the entire environment as of today but since the capabilities are superior to most other products on the market, the adoption factor is catching on and we will expand the tool on a large scale across our multiple domestics datacenters.,Using SNMP to automatically discover my network devices, while collecting the network information to produce a detailed network inventory.
The automatic discovery of the connection between L2 and L3 devices.
Using NetPath across the hybrid clouds is a time saver and pinpoints where to focus resources to fix issues.,Many of the functionality are Cisco-centric and in a mixed vendor environment, this causes some issues.
Limitation of the SD WAN tools.
The database of NPM should really run on Oracle not SQL.,7,The reduction in licensing cost by eliminating other tools by using SolarWinds.
Reduced annual support costs by 50% over a 3-year basis on our prior solution.
Negative impact was the initial setup did cost a significant amount in training and professional services.,SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
SolarWinds Virtualization Manager,Splunk Insights for InfrastructureJAMEY TITONESolarWinds for K-122019-04-27T15:11:48.205ZWe are a K-12 school district that has 11 schools and 2 administrative buildings. We have around 80 logical switch stacks and around 9000 physical ports in addition to almost 600 access points. We use NPM extensively to monitor all of our infrastructure equipment as well as our servers and IT appliances. NPM gives us a single pane of glass to quickly be alerted to any issues that our equipment may have.,Single pane of glass for my entire infrastructure.
Configurable text and email notifications if systems go down or have errors.
Port Utilization with errors and discards.,It would be nice if there was a way the interface details could give you a report of ports not in use based on the life of the switch, not the last reboot.,8,We use NetPath to monitor the route of our Office 365 cloud as well as our hosted SIS. It keeps us informed of a clean path to essential services and alerts us right away if there are potential issues. This allows us to get ahead of an issue before it becomes a major problem for end users.,We have greatly benefited from the visibility and information Network Insights gives us for our Cisco Nexus devices. It easily puts critical information about our pair of Nexus switches at our fingertips. It allows us to easily identify and troubleshoot issues if they arise.,We create text message alerts to our phones anytime a switch goes down or comes back up. This alerts us immediately and allows us to instantly respond to issues to minimize downtime. We have customized several other alerts for email to notify us of less critical issues as well.,NPM definitely reduces the amount of time necessary for my two man staff to monitor, and troubleshoot our network.,SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager
SolarWinds Netflow Traffic AnalyzerJason ButtacavoliThe best set of tools for your network monitoring needs.2019-04-23T18:50:25.994ZWe currently use NPM in addition to other SolarWinds modules to manage all of the devices for the MDOT Intelligent Transportation Systems statewide. It is being used by our staff and other agencies to assist with construction projects, network planning and integration, and reporting to compare against systems utilizing the devices.,Ease of identifying network issues
Alerting and Notifications
Customizable Reporting,Cost
Hardware Requirements
Licensing Renewals,10,NetPath has been a valuable asset and a good addition to NPM. It has helped save a lot of time to identify connectivity issues visually in a single path which has led to quicker resolution to issues. This has been beneficial for us to identify issues particularly with the ISP's at our remote locations.,Network Insights is part of what makes NPM such a good tool. It provides a great visual representation of the health and performance in addition to being another troubleshooting tool.,The alert manager has been a resourceful tool within NPM for alerting. With the proper dependencies set to the network devices and the ability to set up conditional alerts and trigger actions, it has benefited my email inbox during router outages by reducing the amount of alerts received for all of the devices that sit behind the router during the outage.,NPM has had a positive impact on the Network Health.
NPM has provided additional visibility into the network traffic.
Remote monitoring has cut down on our cost to maintain the devices by identifying the root cause of issues before deploying technicians to the sites.Mike MozolaSolarWinds NPM - Good product, but watch out for the add ons2019-04-15T19:46:12.564ZWe utilize NPM to monitor our global network and server infrastructure. It provides us with basic monitoring and alerting capability, as well as historical trends. Until recently, it was used exclusively for our network environment (and sparingly) because we did not have the license capacity to do more. Once we upgraded the licensing, we were able to leverage it for our server environment, monitoring Windows and Linux VMs, as well as our vSphere hosts.,Generally speaking, NPM does alerting very well. It has a lot of flexibility in how to build and deliver the alerts.
Being able to do HTTP POST on alerts helps integrate it with modern tools like Slack and OpsGenie, even if it's not a baked-in integration.
The ability to get all relevant device data from one page (and a couple of tabs) is nice, and there is customization available within that view.,What I deem as some of the better features in NPM come from integration with other paid SolarWinds tools, such as NTA, NCM, etc. It can be a bit disappointing to look at the marketing material, find something you really want to do, only to discover it requires buying yet another product.
SolarWinds licensing isn't great. Some of the caveats around "you need x number of interfaces licensed for NPM, so you need that many for this other product" make the suite less and less attractive and the total cost continues to climb.
There's essentially 3 generations of User Interface built into the current product. Some tools, like syslog, still exist on the old Windows-application-run-from-the-server model and are in the web interface, most things are in the web interface that's been around for a while, and now they are integrating new features only in the newer-style web UI. There's no consistency to those UIs, so it looks and feels like 3 different products.
The Universal Device Poller is a great way to get functionality out of NPM for products without baked-in support. But there are still some things that seem like table stakes that require the Universal Device Poller - monitoring APC UPS devices for example. Other products (including open source) do this really well since just about everybody needs to monitor stuff like that. Years later, NPM still relies on the pollers.
Sorry, but I hate the graphs. I prefer rrdtool-style graphs, and there is some hope for the future in the new style web UI.,5,I've used this feature a little, but I've found its usefulness limited. It's ICMP-based, so if you're filtering traceroute on your firewall (which we are), you won't have an accurate picture of paths traversing the Internet.
In all honesty, it's probably another NPM feature that I would use more if I actually sat through the free training they provide for all their products.,I have only used this in demo, and at least for the Cisco ASA firewall, it requires the Network Configuration Manager tool (another paid tool). It looks very useful, and I'm looking forward to using it once we can purchase NCM.,We have seen both pros and cons from the pre-defined alerts. For us, we found the Cisco wireless controller monitoring a bit flaky, so the built in alerts flooded our emails with false positive down alerts for hundreds of access points. Some of the other pre-defined alerts have shined a light on issues we didn't know we had, so that was quite useful.
We used some conditions to prioritize alerts from certain devices, which cut down on-call alert noise significantly.,We really did not get a lot of ROI from the product for the first few years, but that was our own fault for not 1) licensing properly, 2) getting training, and 3) generally not looking at the data it was generating.,PRTG Network Monitor, Observium, Icinga, Nagios and OP5 MonitorDerek DolanNPM - not just another tool.2019-03-29T19:31:39.267ZNPM is currently being used by the IT deparment only, I'd say the Helpdesk and Network teams are the heavy users. It's mainly used on all of our Cisco devices in our Data Center as well as our Branch offices across the globe. We leverage the NCM and NTA as well. The main objective today is to monitor uptime and bandwidth utilization at our branch offices by sending NTA data back to our DC so we can review top talkers at each location when bandwidth usage is at its peak. It's also a great place to backup and store all of our Network devices configurations, we take daily and monthly backups of all devices globally. We actually have the Worldwide map displayed at a giant display in our IT office so Helpdesk team can quickly identify when an office went down and act on it.,Monitoring uptime of devices, being that you can tailor how often you want to poll the device or by simply doing ICMP you know in seconds when a device went down.
Configuration compares features for network devices easily and allows us to spot any config difference that might have occurred after a device went down unexpectedly after a power outage.
Inventory collection, you can quickly create a report to poll for inventory within your organization but you can edit it in ways that you can get exactly what you are looking for, its very flexible when it comes down to playing with the MIBs on Cisco devices.
Node management is very easy as well, you can filter by a number of different parameters, some of them are out of the box and you can even create your own. In our organization we created a custom property called "Region" so that way we can see devices based on the region they are located at (Americas, EMEA, APAC),Wireless heat maps are pretty hard to deploy, we managed to make one of them work but it's not an easy task.
Filtering on syslog server could be improved, maybe adding command line capability to it.
It would be nice to make it easier to execute custom scripts from Alerts action pane.,8,We have deployed Netpath up to some extent but haven't really leveraged this one yet. Our organization has many offices across the globe, not really big offices but too many of them all spread out so in many of them we choose a server and use netpath to monitor the path back to our DC as well as to O365. In some specific scenarios where we have many issues with the ISP we use it to monitor and collect data on the path and have been able to show actual proof to the ISP where we could see their devices actually loosing packets, this one was great although ISP stil wouldn't recognize it after a lot of back and forth.,I'm not aware of this one, not sure in which release this was added but I'm guessing we might be behind and the Network Insights capability is not yet enabled for us. I've just gone in and checked but I was not able to find this feature in our NCM deployment.,In my opinion this is a very powerful capability when used properly because of the flexibility and amount of options you have when creating custom alerts. Like I was saying before not only being alerted about an incident but the amount of information that you can collect before receiving the alert is amazing because it's not a simple email or SMS letting you know that something is down or having issues but already providing you with a lot of details that can greatly reduce the troubleshooting time required to fix the issue. That combined with all the options you have for actions can get you to the point where you can actually automate incident response to a 100% in some cases by automatically triggering an action.,Unfortunately I was not here when the product was actually purchased so can't really comment on hard numbers.
But If I had to guess it was definitely positive since I know that deploying it was fairly easy and quick. I myself have done a lot around NTA, like deploying it globally so we would have visibility across all our office worldwide and have tailored alerts that have reduced greatly the amount of troubleshooting time.
The NCM templates have also greatly helped in user onboarding process to get them up to speed with Cisco CLI and being able to push config to devices. Scheduled jobs have helped tremendously when having to apply a global policy.,Cisco Data Center Network ManagerMariano AlfonsoSolarWinds works well for us!2019-02-22T15:24:14.845ZWe use Solarwinds NPM to monitor our internal IT infrastructure including servers, switching, etc. We also use it to monitor our SCADA networks including wireless links and endpoint devices. We also monitor temperatures of outdoor cabinets, wireless signal strengths for metrics, and internet connectivity from each of our respective sites.,NPM works very well for a standard up/down monitoring using with SNMP or their agent packages.
NPM works well for customized SNMP polling of devices. For example, we use it for polling specific MIBs to pull temperatures from various devices so they can be graphed.
NPM makes network mapping very easy.,Annual maintenance is brutal.
We used to have LEM, but we found we could only get implementation support or troubleshooting when we were up for renewal. Otherwise, we would just get told to go to the Knowledge Base and figure it out for ourselves or pay a third party contractor.
Backward compatibility for old versions of SQL and Windows Server are not supported. This causes some hiccups. Right now, we don't want to upgrade even though we have problems because it's not inside the support model.,9,We do not use NetPath at this time.,Seeing the internal workings of our switches and firewalls is always extremely helpful. SolarWinds has done a great job of giving us a better view of our network at the conceptual level.,We use extensive alerting through NPM. The out of the box alerts work very well and are easily customizable for some of our more obscure requirements. Creating custom alerts that require multiple triggers and thresholds were complicated to understand at first, but now are working wonderfully.,Within months of fully implementing NPM, we were able to stop some planned upgrades because we realized they weren't going to help us fix our actual issues. This saved the company approximately $30,000.
We are now able to visually view outages to more quickly determine their causes and more effectively triage and correct.,WhatsUp GoldMax BakerSolarwidns NPM2019-02-08T18:41:00.379ZWe use SolarWinds NPM internally to monitor uptime and latency between our network segments. We are able to easily isolate and find errors in individual switch ports as well as be alerted in real time of any latency issues above thresholds.
We also use NetPath at our customer sites to provide real time tracking of network hops to various endpoints, which allows for better troubleshooting and isolation of routing or other network issues.,Response time threshold and alerting
Network tracing over public connections
Individual switch port error and discard reporting,NetPath alerts can be improved for changing conditions. The "Unknown" state alerts aren't very useful
Better categories of internal resources to isolate and track specific segments,8,We use NetPath to create probes across the country to measure response times to our data centers. This allows us to keep an eye on geographic latency and alert us to potential issues. We also use NetPath at individual client sites to troubleshoot latency or connectivity issues. These two allow us to create an extensive network map and track the network responsiveness of our connections.,We use Network Insights to keep track of our core switches and firewalls. This allows us to track resource utilization to ensure that we are not oversubscribed and to avoid issues in the future.,We haven't done much with custom alerts. The built in alerts have worked well for us, and we get the most use out of increased latency or loss of ping alerts. We also use at lot of the default NetPath alerts for connectivity issues such as loss of connectivity or reduced performance of the link.,NetPath has allowed us to be proactive with regional network issues to avoid large numbers of client issues at once.
Default alerts have allowed us to know when a network link has dropped or gone below a service threshold.
Insights has allowed us to track switch resources to ensure that we are growing our equipment properly.Chris ShortThe All Seeing Eye - Another Fantasic SolarWinds Product (NPM)2019-01-17T17:31:03.662ZPreviously we used Nagios XI to monitor our network. We were constrained by the basic and sometimes crude measurements and graphing of Nagios, and on top of this we were only able to actually monitor a selection of network equipment across our estate and the metrics were basic at that. After purchasing NPM, we're now able to obtain a wide variety of metrics out of the box with very little configuration needed. The level of customization of the checks built-in is second to none, and it's made a huge difference for the IT department and visibility of the estate.,The out of the box features and alerting makes getting NPM up and running incredibly easy.
The number of widgets available and customization to view aspects of network devices.
The ability to create a wide variety of NOC dashboard and views to suit the user base. The dashboard can be rotated on a timer, giving fantastic visibility.,One element we would like to see is a full stack view integration, which includes network devices within NPM. Currently, the stack view will only provide server, host and application stacks only.
We have UniFi wireless access points across our organization and at the time of writing this, support for them within Network Performance Monitor is currently not native and we have had to raise a feature request to get the MIBS included as a result, we cannot see the same metrics you would, for example, if you had Cisco APs,9,Our infrastructure environment is currently a hybrid (AWS/Azure and On-Prem) and we have found NetPath to be extremely beneficial. We had no visibility of the paths between our cloud and on-premise environments with our previous monitoring system. Now we can see the latency and paths between our networks, applications, and instances, which in turn has allowed us to re-design some aspects to provide a better user experience for our users.,We currently deploy multiple Cisco ASA and Cisco Nexus switches across our estate. Network Insights allows us to manage our VPC's and VDC's with extreme ease. Having all of the components under a single pane of glass has made managing these devices more manageable. We used to endure frequent VPN tunnel drops without being able to pinpoint the cause. We can now view all of the VPN tunnels and also alert when a tunnel is torn down and we can even monitor user VPN sessions now.,The alerting aspect of NPM is absolutely fantastic. Daunting at first but once you have got your head around the triggers conditions it becomes very easy to deploy a vast variety of alerts detailing all aspects of your network equipment from hardware through to connectivity issues. We now have multiple NOC screens deployed, which focus purely on our network equipment. The triggers feature the ability for multiple escalation actions, too. This is great, as we use this for our out of hours alerting.,The initial cost of SolarWinds NPM is steep, and we had to take an SLX unlimited license model due to the size of our estate. However, the ROI in terms of improvement in what we can now see has been second to none. The renewal cost is also a fraction of the up front cost, which certainly takes the sting out of the front costs.
Impact wise, our IT department spends much less time digging around on the actual equipment. They can now view nearly every aspect of the equipment in one place.,Nagios, PRTG Network Monitor and Site24x7Rob BatesMy SolarWinds Monitor2019-04-30T15:14:32.313ZSolarWinds NPM was introduced into my environment recently and exclusively for virtual machines, especially our two data centers located in different states with domains to troubleshoot network slowness, major bottlenecks, the average response time, and latency between the data access between two data centers. Currently, it is implemented in some of the data centers in the network which are critical to day to day life. It addresses the network latency, the response time between the data centers, memory usage, and the bandwidth. Our team generates reports based on data collected from the logs.,In the organization, our team basically monitors the data centers response time, the nodes in the cluster environment, and how they are performing from time to time.
These are production environments and very critical about data flow across the network and we also collect performance statistics from time to time and the data latency between two data centers and create reports.
Our VM wares placed across different data centers located in different states. Network communication is very critical to transfer data in no time. For this, we need a powerful network monitoring tool to pinpoint all the networking issues and troubleshoot various devices connected between the data centers. For achieving this, SolarWinds NPM is critical to give such information.
In our organization, we need information such as how much data is transferred/sec, data latency, total transactions time in a given period. Because of such environments and timelines sometimes we have a very extreme volume transferred between clustered nodes in data centers and the total number of logins increases in certain working hours. We need to track it down and generate custom reports to enhance productivity, hence this tool is critical.,Sometimes it gives more verbose information if some of the VM cluster's installed SQL server has performance bottlenecks and it is hard to troubleshoot of them.
We have issues in terms of data latency especially on SQL installed VM ware across datacenters which are working on dynamics which are hard to point exact hardware or SQL issues with the performance tool.
SolarWinds NPM can be improved if networking devices or servers connected more than four datacenters.,8,My organization uses Netpath to find how much network traffic enters into the specific node in the clustered environment and how much it reaches to the destination. We have production machines and reporting machines which each cluster to 8 nodes across the data centers. With Netpath, we can pinpoint network traffic at each node and the data latency if it exists in one of the nodes, possible causes, and how to eliminate them. It gives accurate information and possible resolutions in a graphical method which is easy to understand in large environments where a large number of nodes bind in a cluster environment.,Solar Winds NPM Network Insights quickly find if the firewall exposed to any vulnerabilities to the outside environments. We also benefitted in determining the health and performance of virtual ports and virtual servers and their communication and troubleshoot with minimal time and high accuracies in our fast environment.,Before SolarWinds NPM, our organization used more traditional alert systems like Perfmon and some traditional Windows monitoring tools which send alerts when there is an unusual activity across the network or servers. Those sometimes give generic email alerts which cannot describe what is causing the issue and which device causing it. It takes hours to troubleshoot and pinpoint issues. After installing SolarWinds NPM, our organization saved a lot of time as this monitoring services give the exact location, device information, how and why it has occurred, and what are the remedies to be taken to eliminate it.,There are a lot of positive impacts on my organization regarding saving time while pinpointing issues and taking the right steps to eliminate bottlenecks across the network where various devices are connected which save a lot of money by eliminating and putting a lot of resources toward troubleshooting the same issue which can be easily done with SolarWinds.
Our organization has not much benefitted when it comes to using SolarWinds NPM across the nodes for 8 or more connected in different data centers.
This reduces the human need to manually troubleshoot issues causing data issues across the network in a big environment.,SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer,NagiosSrinivas ReddySolarWinds NPM: a must have tool for any network2019-03-21T19:57:14.630ZWe use SolarWinds NPM to monitor all nodes on our network. Only IT uses SolarWinds NPM and we (IT) use it for monitoring, baselining and troubleshooting.,Complete picture overview of the network: useful for monitoring and identifying issues.
Hardware monitoring: useful for identifying hardware issues.
Detail level analysis: allows you to dive deep into interfaces.,Transmit Discards: We noticed the "transmit discard" showing on SolarWinds NPM doesn't get updated correctly. We had "transmit discards" errors on Cisco interfaces, after clearing the errors on the interfaces, no matter how long we wait, we still see the counters on SolarWinds showing old information. We had to delete those interfaces and re-add them for the display counters on the NPM to show correctly.,9,We didn't know this existed.,We use these all the times to monitor, identify and resolve issues before they become bigger issues.,We have not used this feature in-depth.,SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor definitely made a positive impact on IT because the tool allows us to be more efficient at what we do, which I think is hard to measure but definitely invaluable.,quoc nguyenSolarWinds NPM is a great value and a solid addition to any IT organization2019-03-06T17:58:19.695ZThere are multiple groups at Microsoft that use SolarWinds NPM, in this case it's being used by the cloud and enterprise organization to keep track of the network and servers for the developer division. It addresses a gap between our server monitoring and the more global IT monitoring done by our MSIT group.,Easy to use but contains a lot of depth for power users
Reasonable price point to get started
Good support model and great community,Alert set up can be confusing,9,We have used NetPath on occasion to help troubleshoot an issue with network performance; it is very easy to set up and users are generally impressed with the amount of data they are able to obtain from a free product. I think it is a great addition to the NPM environment.,We haven't used this feature.,We use more complex alert trigger conditions which work well in general. Some of the conditions and formatting can be a bit confusing, I think a better tutorial or walk through would help.,SolarWinds has had a very positive impact when it comes to our comfort that everything is functioning smoothly; we don't have to wonder if things are working and online.,John PratherSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a hit.2019-02-22T19:53:51.634ZNetwork Performance Monitor is used by our Infrastructure department to monitor Network, VMWare, and SAN devices. NPM has allowed us to get an insight into how our Infrastructure is performing and allows us to get ahead of issues that may arise.,Keeping Infrastructure Inventory in an organized place.
Alerting on Issues with devices and providing performance trends.
Providing hardware health for devices.,Basic integration for Juniper devices such as node details is lacking.,10,We have used NetPath to troubleshoot network latency on connections to Important Resources. NetPath is great at showing all hops in the path and latency levels for each hop.,Network Insights has helped us to manage our Cisco Nexus VPC connections.,We have been able to set up multiple customized alerts by device type and send alerts to the appropriate teams they need to go to. Alerts are easy to configure.,We were able to properly size network upgrades based on trend levels and capacity management capabilities.
We have been able to get ahead of serious business downtimes due to monitoring and alerts that have led is to an issue before business owners knew there was an issue.,HP BTO (formerly OpenView) Discontinued, Riverbed SteelCentral NetProfiler and LogicMonitorBrian McCollamKudos SolarWinds for NPM!2019-02-19T19:38:31.586ZWe use NPM for the Monitoring of network devices across the whole organization for all our offices around the world. We are using Netpath services as well as the user device tracker, NetFlow etc. to monitor and troubleshoot various issues on a day-to-day basis. It address our various problems by providing insights on different statistics e.g. we can actually see the end to the path in the internet for services, and it actually tells us any packet loss or latency in the internet between end to end nodes -- that's so cool. :),Quick to set up new nodes.
Simple to navigate across different components.
Very good documentation on any of their components and the ability to customize a lot of stuff.,Nothing that I can think about.,10,NetPath is, of course, a great component and is a great help to us. We are able to see performance statistics from the past and can see what was wrong and most importantly where the issue was in the end-to-end path, which is a huge help when showing past performance to anyone. :),Our organization is using network insights and its great components.,Yes, we are using this to filter out unnecessary alerts, and it is great to save time for troubleshooting rather than looking for related alerts. Kudos!,This is a great help to get visibility on our devices and helps to take backups and send emails in case of any failure so we can comply with the policies.Har Ranjit SinghNPM good for Small IT Departments2019-02-10T01:19:27.768ZWe use SolarWinds NPM to monitor all of our company's devices from routers to servers. We like to know when we have issues, and this gives us a heads up when we do have problems. That way we can already be working to resolve our issues before the first complaint from one of our branches.,The alerts are on point. You can set up any type of alert you might need.
I like the mapping tool, although if you use the automap feature make sure you have all your information correct.
it's very easy to use and navigate.,I would love for it to have a "netbrain" kinda of functionality to build network Visio drawings.,9,I really like this feature when troubleshooting issues. it helps us determine if the issues are on our end, our carriers' end, or the destination's end. We can't ask for a better product.,We haven't dug real deep into the insights. We primarily use it for up/down monitoring.,We have reduced the number of alerts by making hierarchies. That way we aren't overwhelmed with useless alerts.,It's helped reduce the downtime at a site.
We're able to react more quickly to network related issues.,NetBrain and LiveActionAaron CoodySolarWinds blows away the competition.2019-02-05T23:45:03.594ZSolarWinds NPM is used across the entire organization to help identify problem areas which previously we had difficulty detecting. NPM provides the data we need to improve network performance for all of our departments. Our employees depend on our network to be there for them, and NPM helps us to deliver.,The ability to add custom alerts.
The ability to change up the dashboard with Orion integration.
The speed of agent reporting.,Server performance. The product seems to use a lot of resources.,8,It helps us to organize equipment and gives us a better visual perspective of what is going on with devices.,Yes, we've set up alerts which have helped us to either shorten the duration of a segment outage or helped prevent it altogether.,We haven't had the opportunity to put the pencil to paper to determine ROI yet. However, we have reduced manhours by addressing issues faster.,WhatsUp GoldToivo SariOne of the sharpest tools in your toolbox2019-05-20T14:22:18.892ZIt is being used in conjunction with NCM and UDT to manage over 3000 network devices in the company and to monitor and backup all devices.,Config management
Network monitoring
Change control,Quicker polling
More polling options
More info on less prolific devices,10,We are not, yet.,We have been able to see the things we missed.,We mainly use canned alerts so far.,Use to find choke points
Helps to focus attention on specific devices,,Shane SkaggsSolarWinds Review from a Systems Administrator in a Food Manufacturing Environment2019-03-15T18:35:08.300ZWe use it to monitor our entire infrastructure to get alerts if a node goes down. We also use it to gather basic performance data.,Uptime
Performance history,I would like to see Mac addresses for nodes.,9,They are good. I would only say the speed could be better, but that could be an internal setting. Overall, we are happy.,It's hard to quantify this. Its definitely been a good investment as we've caught several things we otherwise wouldn't have, like servers going down and hardware getting pushed past defined limits.Jonathan LiagrisSolarWinds looks nice and gets the job done, but can be bloated and unreliable.2019-03-07T00:04:08.949ZUsed as a single console for VMware, storage, OS, Application and network monitoring.,Gives you one place to view many interconnected systems.,Support is lacking.
Software does not do a good job of monitoring itself and alerting you to problems.
Does not scale well in some cases, and costs can stack up as you have to build out more servers for the bloated software.,5,With our large environment of over 4000 servers, we have found that enabling these features can cause catastrophic performance problems.,There are other ways to monitor and alert on this type of problem. APM is not the easies or most effective way to monitor for this type of problem.,This is a feature that is helpful, but it does have some issues as well. I will say that this is one of the features SolarWinds has that makes it a viable product.,We have drastically reduced the number of critical issues.,AppDynamicsJoshua FoxSolarWinds Does it with Style2019-02-13T00:15:20.647ZWe use it for our school district. It is used by our IT department. It helps us find issues with switches and any server connectivity issues, from bandwidth to other issues causing slowness.,The up and down feature is great. Sometimes we missed the things it points out.
CPU usage information on the virtual systems we use is critical.
We like the network discovery feature, it does an awesome job.
Storage resource helps a lot.,Netflow Traffic Analyzer could really use an upgrade, such as including the ability to do Layer 3 flows not just Layer 2.
Better job in the update department
IP address manager takes too long to discover. I use a standalone IP address manager and it works better than the one in the suite.,9,We have used NetPath a few times but are still in the process of learning what else it can do, so I cannot give too much info on this product at this time.,Network Insights work great for our data center and have helped us a lot with switches. They showed some issue that was never noticed and affecting performance.,The alerts have been used for our Nexus switches and have been a life saver for us.,SolarWinds has had a positive impact for us since we have never had a tool like this. It has been an eye-opener to things we do not normally see.
It has helped us improve our datacenter and overall network infrastructure.
Productivity has gone up by helping us improve our server department, from application issues to hardware performance in our virtual environment.,ManageEngine OpManagerArmando AlvaradoWhy is SolarWinds NPM my best network colleague...2019-01-25T21:35:38.258ZSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is used across all organization locations. We are able to monitor the current state of network devices, servers, voice endpoints, and databases. Alarms are set to notify via email when predefined conditions are met, this allows our team to proactively act on situations that can lead to a service disruption.,Monitoring state of physical and virtual resources on servers.
Scanning of network devices.
Monitoring of packets loss and latency on the network.,Integration with Cisco Voice Gateways.,10,Not fully used at the moment.,Not benefiting from at the moment.,This is a very important feature for us. This capability allows us to prioritize core devices alarms that have to be taken with higher and faster response/attention.,The proactive measures that can be taken are enough to justify the investment.,WhatsUp GoldJose CathcartThe great WAN grapher2019-04-16T14:47:17.732ZOnly the IT department uses this. We use it to identify bottlenecks.,It's good at displaying graphs
The graphs and displays are very customizable
It's an integrated solution to the monitoring tool you know and love,The problems are less with NPM, and more with the difficulty of configuring devices to accurately use it.
Solarwinds as a product itself needs to improve performance.
NPM should be able to self deploy.,5,We do not use this at this layer. We're more interested in bandwidth used on our WAN links.,We use NPM to see what kind of traffic is going over our WAN links.,At this time, we are not using NPM for alerting.,When we suspect a problem, we can go to the graphs and see what is happening.
It lets us plan for capacity, if we need a bigger wan link we can plan for it.,Verified UserExpensive and clunky, but effective for basic monitoring of large environments.2019-03-05T20:15:56.565ZSolarWinds NPM is our current solution for monitoring the health of all of our network and servers on our premises. We use NPM for the basics such as up/down, CPU, RAM, and disk utilization. We also use the Network Sonar Discovery to aid us in quickly adding new nodes. We pair NPM with SAM for check-based application monitoring on many of our servers.,SolarWinds NPM has built-in support for a wide array of device types out of the box.
It is easy to add new nodes to your environment with the Network Sonar Discovery.
There is a large community of users that can help you when you're in need.,Account representatives are always changing and sales people are always harassing you to buy more. They don't listen to you when you bring this up.
The user interface is very dated and a pain to navigate.
The ability to format your alerts is very limited. This can cause problems, especially when alerting external services with a REST API due to invalid JSON.,4,We have not found much value in NetPath.,We have not used Network Insights.,We do not use any of the built-in alerts, and many of them cause more noise than the value they provide. We make heavy use of the ability to define our own alerts, but much of that is for the SAM component rather than NPM. The SWQL query language allows you a lot more flexibility than the basic alert conditions, but in many cases the way objects are structured in their database and the limits they impose can prevent you from doing what you really want.,SolarWinds is currently one of the most expensive products on the market and we are evaluating alternatives that are hopefully better and lower cost.
We have invested a lot of time in creating custom check-based monitors for the SAM component and feel a bit "stuck" with SolarWinds for the time being.
The cost of new polling engines has ruled out the possibility of adding new ones to each of our geographical regions in our cloud environment.,New Relic and PRTG Network MonitorVerified UserA product that does what it says and more2019-05-15T14:58:40.517ZOur Network Team uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor on a daily basis to not only monitor but also diagnose problems within our network. SNPM gives us direct insights into network traffic. Before using this product, network issues were a mystery.,Network Visibility
Change Tracking
View Network changes,Nothing we would add.,10,Using Netpath our organization was able to find issues in products that were not network related but always blamed on networking. We were able to track down a faulty web server that had bad code that the product owner blamed on networking. Networking was proved, and we could prove their services were broken.,SNPM has opened up an area that is usually hidden to most small and medium business. Network Visibility.,Using SNPM our network team has had the ability to create actionable alerts and tune down all of the unnecessary alerts that other programs typically create.,The 1st time that you save the company from a long network outage, the product pays for itself.,SolarWinds Remote Monitoring and Management
SolarWinds N-central,Verified UserNPM -- Making your days (and nights) more about what YOU want to do rather your networks whims.2019-01-19T01:15:16.069ZNPM is used to monitor infrastructure devices at all levels. We monitor servers, network equipment, phone equipment, printers, and small SNMP devices. Our IT department is able to monitor the statistics and services we need to maintain SLAs and provide baselines both for troubleshooting and growth predictions. NPM allows us to keep an eye on the network as a whole and provide alerting in case of problems. Our support teams are able to see at a glance current status and get a view of normal operations.,The Orion and NPM alerting engine allows us to create simple and complex trigger conditions. It also allows us to nest equipment behind scopes. Getting one alert that a buildings router went down is a great alternative to the hundreds of alerts that could be generated by equipment that isn't actually down just hiding behind that router.
Initial setup and adding a node is a breeze. You can create a simple view of a device in a matter of seconds or spend hours fine-tuning exactly what you want to monitor on. Discovery helps find the devices that may be lurking deep in closets or above the ceiling grid.
Orion helps NPM display the aspects of your devices you want to see. Don't care about CPU? Remove that widget. Decide that was a mistake just add the widget back on. Have 100 nearly identical VMs you want to see grouped together? Create a page for the type of device. This aspect does take some serious setup though. While its powerful enough to create templates and scope information to users... it takes time and understanding to make it look just right.
The broad range of device monitoring endpoints that come boxed with NPM is mind-boggling. Add in universal device pollers and create your own for the devices that aren't included. You can even share these with the community and help the guys using the same equipment.
Support is great. They are usually quite friendly and knowledgeable. They frequently have issues solved in a single call.,Orion can be a pain to configure. There are a ton of widgets and they aren't always clear as to what is displayed. There can be dozens of metrics using very similar names
Cost of SolarWinds products is always eye-popping. Their sales managers can also be incredibly pushy. While the cost-benefit usually comes out positive be aware that it isn't going to be the easiest part to justify.
The included custom map creation software can be a pain point. It frequently requires a support call to get working. There is a lot of care and headache to get things looking just right -- once a map is created it can be painful to maintain.,10,NetPath was a fantastic utility when it launched. It gave incredible insight into the ISP and hosting networks. It immediately helped us diagnose a routing issue sending our traffic around the globe instead of a couple states away. This vastly improved user experience for that service.
Sadly ISPs seem to have found ways to block the algorithms, as it shows very little of the network today.,Network insight is a great system to view your infrastructure. It requires very little setup and provides great graphs and views even for people unfamiliar with IT systems. It also allows you to create great looking NOC and status screens to help users and support teams to see critical devices and systems at a glance. As it is baked in and easy to set up it removes a lot of the pain of setting up a Nagios or Zabbix system.,Alerting in SolarWinds is fantastic. It allows incredibly sophisticated triggers or even just SQL calls. It helps you get an understanding of what you're alerting on while building the trigger. They also allow you to set up sophisticated actions to set up email, text or more interesting ways of getting information to the people who need it. They can also be set to alert people when the issue is resolved. Anything to help reduce the after-hours work or let you know something needs to be looked at NOW.,The ease of setup has removed the need for a dedicated staff member to script or program your monitoring system. You can quickly get information flowing instead of designing your own software to look at the things you need to see.
Letting us know issues are happening as soon as they occur helps us get solutions in place before business continuity is impacted. Being able to see baselines and growth problems before they become a problem keeps downtime to a minimum.
NPM lets us see the actual usage of systems and plan for our future equipment with hard numbers instead of vague admin feelings. It helps build a pretty picture of the WHY we are asking for that much money and prove after its spent that it was a good idea.,Zabbix and NagiosVerified UserNPM Was great in our small data Center2019-01-18T18:26:33.994ZWe were using SolarWinds as a performance monitor on incoming and outgoing traffic from our data center switches. It's allowed us very useful insight into our network and how it is performing. It allowed us to find multiple issues we may not have seen if we hadn't had the visibility NPM allowed us. The alert system is one of the best I've seen. Overall SolarWinds was a vital tool in our data center, allowing us to troubleshoot on the fly rapidly with precise information on issues.,The dashboard is flexible, allowing you to choose what information you see.
It has a very user-friendly GUI. I found it easy to give instruction on the use of the product to new employees who hadn't seen the product before.
The drill down into information and point to point NetFlow data was great, and real time. This is a very important ability in any network monitoring tool. Matched with the fact that NPM could also collect from a variety of vendors who supported Netflow, but also vendors or situations where the product wasn't using NetFlow.
The alert system and how NPM was able to tie into other SolarWinds products to assist with troubleshooting issues, making that process easy and streamlined.,One thing that bothers me is the aesthetics. They seem a tad dated and not very optimized. While the data it provides is great.
The amount of information it provides could be overwhelming if someone does not have an experienced engineer to guide them through what information they really need on the initial view.
Maybe adding an interactive map using Google API would be great, I know some customers have already written a module for this it would be great if SolarWinds supported this in house.
The database Orian uses ( this goes for any Orion product) can be a little sluggish if you don't have someone who knows SQL to clean and maintain the DB.,8,We never had a chance to utilize this aspect of NPM. However, from what I have seen in Demos and my own research, this product would fit well in a WAN solution. The overall NPM solution is great for discovering issues before end users experience degradation of service.,We found that the ability to query SNMP to a device and pull down health, performance, and hardware stats very valuable. This was perhaps the aspect we benefited from most. It is able to monitor the cpu performance of devices and alert you if a service on a device is bogging down performance, we discovered a spanning tree issue using this portion of NPM. Leveraging this we were also able to give manufacturers insight into issues while attempting to resolve hardware failures using warranties and technical services. The ability to pinpoint underperforming hardware was critical to solving issues before they caused an outage.,While we only utilized this on an irregular basis, I found that it was reliable and very, very in depth. I was able to set alerts for anything. If I was trying to locate a problem that only occurred at night during backups. I was able to enable an alert that I had built, to on any packet drop a single interface as a critical error. This gave me a break from having to sort through other minor issues.,The ROI has been positive. It's saved man-hours and headaches in troubleshooting issues that otherwise would have been very hard to discover.
Using NPM we were able to save our annual uptime of 99%. We quickly discovered and had a fix for issues that would have otherwise been very hard to discover, costing man hours and time for customers.,Verified User
Windows, Windows® Server 2016; SQL Server 2016 SQL Server 2016 SP1 SQL Server 2017 (including installations on Linux)
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
352 Ratings
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