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Filter 383 vetted SolarWinds NPM reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 161)
August 28, 2019
SolarWinds is our recipe for success
We are using SolarWinds as a SNMP monitoring tool for all of our switches, routers, UPSs and other misc devices. It is the primary monitoring tool of our networking team and is utilized remote technicians as well to be informed through the alerting engine. SolarWinds has been instrumental in proactively addressing network and power issues prior to end users calling us. This level of support has enabled us to minimize downtime saving our company a significant amount of money.
- I think the shining example that sets SolarWinds apart from the rest is the approach it takes with SNMP. I have served in the Managed Service field and monitored devices for over twelve years and SolarWinds SNMP monitoring design is bar-none the best I have used.
- I appreciate how different aspects of NPM flow togeher. An example of this is when you monitor a wireless controller and how it will automatically populate all of your access points along with statistics into the system. Using this feature along with the Network Traffic Analyzer has been a powerful troubleshooting tool.
- The user community is a large part of the success of NPM. SolarWinds provides a forum that allows others to share their successes and discoveries with others. It is both friendly and professional and has been a major help to me.
- I'm not a big fan of the licensing model which can quickly become bloated as your consider adding additional modules. It would make sense to me to cover device counts in your maintenance contract and then simple pay a straight fee for your modules.
- Getting assistance for setting up monitoring templates is primary found through the user community (especially for unique devices). I would love to see a section in thwack that has a more organized approach to monitoring scripts that are organized by device (perhaps even company).
- Make all functions required for monitoring templates available through the web GUI. Having to configure use the Universal Device Poller for configuring SNMP templates is a nuisance.
August 27, 2019
SolarWinds for K-12
We 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.
August 27, 2019
SolarWinds NPM - Good product, but watch out for the add ons
We 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.
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!
September 05, 2019
SolarWinds NPM - Hot or Not?
I am currently in development between multiple teams across IT. I implement real time monitoring systems for Wireless, LAN topology, and an alerting system that integrates for both the server team, help desk team, and the networking teams. It currently monitors the physical network, maintains an IP addressing summary, and integrates with vcenter and vsphere.
- Its web API is easy to use and pretty intuitive
- The customer support has been pretty decent whenever I have needed to go through them
- It has its own database gui that is easy to see and use in order to create custom queries
- Its real-time topology mapper and "Network Atlas" is being moved to a less functional web-based real time monitoring system that is not intuitive and doesnt support integration with real time monitoring of vcenter devices.
- Its pay per node price scale makes expanding your network less attractive.
- It doesn't support every vendor of networking equipment and in such a case requires extensive knowledge of OIDs and the SQL backend in order to implement the necessary monitoring nodes
- vCenter integration is very basic and needs improvement and customization options available to it that the rest of the program has
- the view based pages are incredibly difficult to set up in any sort of hierarchical sense. And getting menu customization to navigate through the pages is a pain in the butt.
August 29, 2019
NPM just works
We have over 40 buildings and we use NPM to monitor traffic between our locations and determine if there are issues at our different sites. We also use it to generate reports for use with determining need and future and past traffic stats. This helps to determine if we need to increase throughput to different sites or if there is an anomaly that needs to be looked at.
- The interface is really well-designed. It's pretty intuitive and easy to work with.
- I like the map editor. It works well in creating maps and having an overall view of your sites.
- I like the customization of the pages where you can change the layouts.
- I don't like building reports. It seems bulky to find what I'm looking for when browsing for different objects.
- I found it impossible to create a custom SNMP check. It may be due to my lack of knowledge, but it was difficult and SolarWinds was no help.
We use it on customer's networks for monitoring, alerting, and reporting. We have too many devices to monitor manually. We also use NCM, but I don't believe that is included in the scope of this review
- Granular and custom alerting.
- OID Monitoring and historical data / SNMP.
- Support for all devices or custom devices.
- Online support articles (KBs) could be better.
- Perfstack isn't great.
- Documentation for detailed things is lacking or non-existent.
There 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
November 11, 2019
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.
August 27, 2019
One of the sharpest tools in your toolbox
It 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
July 30, 2019
SolarWinds Does it with Style
We 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.
August 07, 2019
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor -- Increases Monitoring, Increases Performance
Within my current organization, SolarWinds is used for monitoring of network devices and servers within our domain. We use it for gathering of performance metrics (interface utilization, processor utilization, etc) as well as device uptime and reachability. Our primary goal for this monitoring is that it helps with understanding the "right-size" of equipment to purchase for an organization, in addition to providing maximum uptime for our end users.
- Monitor Uptime
- Provide Historical Resource Utilization Metrics
- Provide an API for automation
- High Resource Requirements
- Historical Measurements are Averaged-Out (Rather than exact)
- Occasional False Positives
November 07, 2019
SolarWinds NPM Review
It is being used by our infrastructure team only. It is used for our back office and production networking equipment for performance monitoring/tuning.
- Easy to use interface.
- Relatively easy to set up SNMP traps, summary, and graphs.
- Good change management tool for network changes.
- Better wireless heat maps.
- Needs better Netmap services.
- Relatively expensive.
September 17, 2019
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
August 01, 2019
SolarWinds NPM: The performance of a lifetime!
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor is used across our entire organization. We use it to monitor the infrastructure of our remote site across 72 square miles. NPM allows us to customize views for different users which allows us to have basic monitoring and reporting available to the staff, whereas our IT department can see the polling and errors on specific ports. It allows us to identify problems and resolve them before the end-users at remote sites are even aware of them.
- Detailed Alerting - Alerting can be setup for a specific timeframe with ports for troubleshooting.
- Mapping - It can identify switches' locations based off of specific information.
- NetPath - Identify specific device ports causing issues.
- Software upgrades are not easy. Perpetual software without a maintenance agreement cannot be kept during an upgrade.
- Have to manually add third party hardware IDs. Don't have support for Palo Alto Firewalls.
- Licensing structure.
August 01, 2019
NPM a great Solarwinds product
Our experience with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is great. We (IT department) monitor more than 3000 devices, from routers to switches, servers to virtual environments. Is super easy to add new devices with network discovery. We also like to create all kind of alarms to be aware of any situation happening on the network.
- Alarms
- Maps and topologies
- Manage devices and get real-time statistics about hardware
- I think they need to polish the pollers, sometimes they crash.
November 07, 2019
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor Review
We mainly use it to manage network performance. We use it across all our sites.
- Set up is easy. It is not complex to set up.
- Solar Winds support is okay. I wouldn't say it is the best, but average.
- NPM does what we need, mainly monitor network bandwidth and critical server (host).
- We really don't use SolarWinds for more than just checking network bandwidth or performance.
- Perhaps they need to evaluate their pricing model. Paying per interface can be very expensive.
November 05, 2019
Attractive all-around platform
We use NPM in our infrastructure department for support and project planning. It helps with bandwidth management and identifying the source of saturated link usage.
- Dynamic network topology mapping works well
- Flexible monitoring and alerting capabilities
- Very detailled networking statistics
- If topology mapping could be customised for some specific cases, that would be perfect
November 02, 2019
NPM to the rescue
Just the IT department has access to NPM. We have a lot of remote sites, so the system makes it easier for us to identify issues across the network.
- Ease of use.
- Constant updates.
- Quick setup.
- It can take time to get full use. There are lots of features.
- Cost is high.
October 04, 2019
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor Review
NPM was used only on the DataCenter Department to monitor all the servers, VMs, switches and routers.
- Trace and monitor your whole network
- Get important alerts from a lot of case scenarios.
- Better support for emergencies
- Add more vendors' functionalities other than Cisco focused utilities.
- Provide an easy way to make alerts from traps or syslogs instead of working inside of the SQL database or learning SolarWinds Query Language (SWQL) .
September 18, 2019
NPM - Forecast your network.
It is used on the IT department to scan, maintain and monitor all the systems, servers and devices in the whole organization. We had to add two extra pollers to loadbalance all the devices. Using only one poller is heavy for the system.
- You can add other Solarwinds products in it.
- Monitor network using SNMP, WMI. Getting health information and server useful information even for VMs environments.
- They need better support team.
- Some areas need to be more open to the user, more customization enabled by the user.
- Pollers need a better improvement to support more heavier weights.
August 27, 2019
Great Product - Would buy it again and again.
We use SolarWinds Network Performance Manager (NPM) to manage our control system for our public safety radio system and call recording. The NPM allows me to instantly capture the system health at a glance, and be notified in or out of the office of any current or impending issues.
- System monitoring
- System inventory
- Notification
- Better performance of screen refreshes for network maps
Being 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.
April 23, 2019
The best set of tools for your network monitoring needs.
We 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
March 29, 2019
NPM - not just another tool.
NPM 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.
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 your 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.
SolarWinds users can get a full NPM installation up and running the same day they download. Implementation does not require a team of consultants. NPM provides quick visibility into the health of network devices and servers on the network, ensuring that users have the real-time information they need 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, 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 |