TrustRadius
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, from Austin-based SolarWinds, is a network monitoring option.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/Qn/7Y/GFXR292JE2EE.PNGSolarWinds2 Decades for network motioning experience.2018-09-28T18:29:08.042ZWhen I started at my current company the previous engineers had used Nagios but never trained anyone on their specialized configurations or how to duplicate their work. Since Nagios no one on the team that was left had experience with Nagios. I brought in SolarWinds NPM to quickly bring a handle on basic networking monitoring which was not being done. Management bought into my plan and we've migrated all monitoring to SolarWinds products as a core single pane of glass.,Easy templates can be made to train everyone on adding and managing nodes.
Reporting Reporting Reporting
Constant upgrades to features to keep up with the changing times.,Better email controls. Right now we can do everything to control different groups getting emails but it could be easier.
NTA needs to be part of NPM they should not be separate products.
Filtering/searching options on syslogs and alerts.,10,This new feature NetPath really replaces what we used to do with some of Cisco's EMM line. While this is just a very graphic traceroute it has proven to be very helpful in discovering performance issues with multi-homed BGP datacenters.,The views into the Cisco ASA and F5 load balancers have helped us increase our ability to respond to issues as they are occurring not hours later when we have complaints filtering in.,Noise vs happiness is how I look at the difference of Solarwinds with some of the other products. Yes you have to configure and tweak but the community always has some great suggestions and next level ideas on custom alerts and monitors for those alerts. 13 years ago no one was monitoring BGP change of state just up/down but I wrote a poller that did this and all of the sudden we were able to address largely impacting issues before our customers started to report them.,Reporting and forecasting helping us find the path to supporting growing areas before bottlenecks happen
Transparency with all of our internal groups for what is really happening on the network.
Templates and standards to ensure consistency on the network.,Roger OliverNPM is a valuable tool for Network Monitoring2018-09-21T15:52:42.273ZOur 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.,10,We have not used NetPath Yet.,The Health monitoring has helped us be proactive in replacing gear that is failing before it causes an outage for our users. The temperature alerts also allow us to identify and address environmental issues before they have a negative impact on the network equipment. The performance piece has helped us in our long-term planning.,We have built a lot of custom alerts and reports based on the information required by our stakeholders. The alerts allow us to be proactive in identifying and addressing issues.,Save us money on underutilized internet circuits - We were able to scale our internet pipes down at various locations based on the information we gathered.
Help Us Make Our Case to replace Aging Equipment - Some organizations have an "if it isn't broke, don't fix it." mindset. The Health reports gave the detailed data we needed to show upper management where investments needed to be made.
Targeted Dashboard - We have been able to build trust with our applications teams by providing them a view for network performance as it relates to their applications and servers.,Deirra J. FootmanSolarWinds NPM Customer Review2018-09-11T18:43:12.495ZIt's being used across our whole organization. It allows us to use one pane of glass to see both Network and Server issues across our organization. This is important to allow our NOC to watch many systems/interdependencies without watching multiple systems. It also allows us to keep recent configurations of our network gear, for survivability.,It pulls SNMP data well, in particular it allows us to capture port level information with a decent amount of historical data. This is true for user ports or trunk ports.
It does a good job of keeping an up-to-date stable of configurations. This is invaluable for recovery operations.
Syslog collector is also very useful to again correlate performance data against what errors the box itself is processing.,I would like to see the robustness of the database and pollers improved. It seems like we often need to do system upkeep or the application seems to grind along very slowly.
I would also like to see an improved method for auto-provisioning of server monitoring tools.
I would also like to be able to update maps/drawings directly from the web interface without having to use a separate Windows client.,6,We haven't used NetPath. We purchased NPM a very long time ago, before NetPath was implemented/integrated. Because of that we have never understood how NetPath can help us, nor had the impetus to do so.,We very much benefit from these tools to help us identify if a particular device or link is being overworked or underutilized. NPM does a fairly good job looking at our Cisco and Juniper infrastructure. However, we also have Palo Alto Firewalls and I have seen NPM fail to report accurate CPU utilization for this platform. I would love to see strength added to strength to improve PA reporting.,To my knowledge we have created one complex alert function, and that is to report when a particular links' utilization drops to 0. This link never goes "down" at the physical interface, but our Carrier may have an outage downstream that cause this particular link to "drop". By creating this report which measures utilization we are still able to track and report on connectivity issues in a complex environment.,SolarWinds has definitely helped us find a platform for all of our reporting. Not just network, but also servers and other infrastructure. This is very valuable to our NOC which watches all of the infrastructure.
The modular architecture with multiple polling engines, allows us to keep pollers in different locations and also to offer services to the entire university system and not just a single campus.,WhatsUp Gold and NagiosCollin LichtenbergerSolarWinds Proves Time and Time2018-08-28T16:50:22.741ZSolarwinds NPM is current being used in my organization's network throughout. As for access to the platform it is restricted to the IT team at the moment but are working to get real-time statistics to display on our SharePoint portal for all organization users to see the real-time health of our network and services. NPM has solved a couple of problems that were important to identifying root causes for network or network related issues. This was accomplished by utilizing the built-in features of NPM such as device polling (SNMP/PING) which gives us a status of the health of a device or the reachability to it, and NetPath has helped in cases where we have had ISPs failover and increase latency or increase the amount of network hops to a configured resource.,Easy to navigate UI while still providing powerful monitoring features.
Wide range of features to monitor just about any network/service.
Configurable (eye candy) reporting for upper management.
alerting features are very good for just about of any type of alerting you need,With many services moving to the cloud monitoring can be a challenge depending on your cloud deployments.
Pricey but much less work to do than open source / free tools.
If not configured to its full potential or to your organization's needs it can appear to be useless for it's price.
Alarms in a device can only be acknowledged individually and not on a incident affected basis.
For newer devices/platforms you have to customize pollers as the built-in pollers may report incorrect data.,10,NetPath has helped our organization in a way that now we can tell when either of our two ISPs have network issues, had a major failure, or if an upstream tier provider maybe the root cause. A really neat feature in NetPath is that it breaks down the entire path to include owners/contact information of the devices in the path in the Internet on a hop to hop basis.,This is critical in any monitoring solution. You have to be confident that the data you are seeing is indeed the operating condition/s of your network device/service. This also help with capacity planning where you can easily identify weak points in the network that suffer from providing an insufficient amount of the resources that the network requires which leads to hardware/software upgrades or appropriate reconfigurations.,Another important feature for a good monitoring tool is when you cannot be alerted when devices fall outside of a predetermined threshold. SolarWinds provide sufficient alerting whether you are actively in the UI or elsewhere from the office. Also provides automatic escalations by including other people in the alerts when a threshold is not met as far as user interaction (SLA).,We have visibility into our network and services like this organization has not had before with our Cisco IOS/Nexus devices.
We have a more than capable compute platform that easily handled the SolarWinds NPM installation with no additional hardware purchases.
The amount of labor hours spent configuring NPM is significantly less that other tools I have used which is a huge plus.AJ GumataotaoEntry-level tool; starting to show its age (not in a good way)2018-08-15T15:34:28.468ZWe are currently using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) to provide enterprise-wide monitoring across a physical campus location in Irvine, Satellite WAN locations (MPLS) and Meraki managed sites. We also utilize NPM in conjunction with Netflow and Voice Network Quality Manager (VNQM) to get a complete picture of our entire Enterprise infrastructure.
It address the strong need for a stable and quick network for our Enterprise Services (Proprietary applications created to service Glidewell needs).,Summarized network statistics in easy to use out-of-the-box graphs
Quick and very pretty presentation-quality graph via "PerfStack". A quick-fire comparison graph solution provided only with SolarWinds products.
Most tools are pre-scripted and work well in most environments. Easier for entry-level positions to learn. No learning to script needed to start.,Since it summarizes most of the details, it lacks any real-time functionality. If a user complains of network slowness, you'll have to use either a separate tool to drill down in real time after the fact and hope it replicates or if the network issues are quick and intermittent, it will be missed by SW unless you have super aggressive and almost unrealistic polling times (sub-minute) for the SolarWinds platform, particularly the polling engine
Frequent crashes related to the Orion Platform.
Some features are released without optimization or cause severe platform issues and ultimately end up being disabled until patched later.
Updates tend to be on the slow side when it comes to APIs for new technology. Examples: Meraki, Nexus OS(SD-WAN), etc.,5,NetPath is expensive, but, improved TraceRoute with visualizations. It is only really useful in very specific situations where you know EXACTLY where to look and just need a tool to watch the routes for an extended period. It doesn't feed back to the larger platform as a whole, requires a deployment of a "sensor" and costs licensing to utilize.
We've used to try and troubleshoot issues with users in Costa Rica complaining about slowness with accessing some applications we run from AWS ECS (web-based platform). We did not find any new information outside of what we already knew from NPM tool.,We have not. Most of these issues are blatant enough that they have noticeable issues the exact moment they hit. Most of the "insight" is useless statistical data that only really network engineers who are infatuated with numbers care about. We have only really used NPM for hard up/down situations and only provided analysis when coupled with NetFlow data.,The canned alerts are pretty awesome. They get the job done. The canned alert actions are also awesome, no scripting required.
We do have some difficulty in understanding the naming conventions of the statistics that SolarWinds gathers. A lot of times, it requires a lot of Googling and even then we don't fully understand what a metric is trying to say or there are a few similarly named metrics with different numbers, it can be difficult to figure out which is the right one (even for our much more seasoned analysts and engineers),It has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars by avoiding production outage by simply providing an overview of our network and narrowing the extent of issues. To be fair though, this value add can be provided by simply having any network solution. It just happened to be we chose SW NPM.,LiveAction, SevOne, ScienceLogic and WhatsUp Gold,Providing enterprise-wide metrics for aggregate network utilization
Single-pane of glass, ease of use.
Low ceiling for entry; does not require engineer level knowledge to use.
It's cheap, gets the basic job done, but, lacks in new features or new device type support,Price
Existing Relationship with the Vendor,5Greg Richards
Windows, Windows® Server 2016; SQL Server 2016 SQL Server 2016 SP1 SQL Server 2017 (including installations on Linux)
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
205 Ratings
