An honest review of SolarWinds NPM from a Network Operations Manager at a major US Airline
Our corporation uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to monitor all of our networks/endpoints for outages that may affect …
SolarWinds NPM
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SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Starting at $1,583 Starting Price
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Awards
Popular Features
View all 10 featuresNetwork monitoring (229)
9.0
90%
Alerts (226)
8.9
89%
Hardware health monitoring (213)
8.8
88%
Customizable reports (210)
8.5
85%
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Pricing
View all pricingNPM
$1,583
On Premise
Starting Price
Entry-level set up fee?
- Setup fee optional
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.solarwinds.com/products/pric…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting / Integration Services
Features Scorecard
Network Performance Monitoring
8.2
82%
Product Details
What is SolarWinds NPM?
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) delivers comprehensive network fault monitoring and performance management that scales and expands with a company's network monitoring needs. Users can collect and view availability, real-time and historical statistics from routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and any other SNMP-, ICMP-, or WMI-enabled devices directly from a web browser.
The vendor states that SolarWinds users can get a full NPM installation up and running the same day they download, and that implementation does not require a team of consultants. NPM provides visibility into the health of network devices and servers on the network, ensuring that users have needed real-time information to keep their network running at peak performance.
Network Performance Monitor helps IT Pros:
- Quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and avoid downtime
- Respond to multiple condition checks, correlated events, and device dependencies
- Automatically calculate capacity exhaustion dates using customizable thresholds based on peak and average usage
- Streamline network troubleshooting with an easy-to-use Web interface
- View paths to critical business services hop-by-hop, even into the cloud, with the NetPath™ feature
- Get deeper visibility into complex network devices with Network Insight™ features for Cisco ASA firewalls, Cisco Nexus switches, and F5 BIG-IP load balancers
SolarWinds NPM Features
Network Performance Monitoring Features
- Supported: Automated network device discovery
- Supported: Network monitoring
- Supported: Baseline threshold calculation
- Supported: Alerts
- Supported: Network capacity planning
- Supported: Packet capture analysis
- Supported: Network mapping
- Supported: Customizable reports
- Supported: Wireless infrastructure monitoring
- Supported: Hardware health monitoring
Additional Features
- Supported: Multi-vendor device support for any router, switch, firewall, VPN concentrator, wireless access point and other devices that support standard protocols
- Supported: Intelligent alerts for correlated events, sustained conditions, and complex combinations of device states
- Supported: Insight on hardware health by monitoring, alerting, and reporting on the state of key device sensors
- Supported: NetPath for hop-by-hop monitoring of critical business services, on-premises or into the cloud
- Supported: Network Insight for Cisco ASA firewalls
- Supported: Network Insight for Cisco Nexus switches
- Supported: Network Insight for F5 BIG-IP load balancers
SolarWinds NPM Screenshots
SolarWinds NPM Video
Network Performance Monitor overview
SolarWinds NPM Downloadables
SolarWinds NPM Integrations
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
- SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)
- SolarWinds IP Address Manager (IPAM)
- SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
- SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
- SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
- SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)
- SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)
- SolarWinds User Device Tracker
- SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager
SolarWinds NPM Competitors
- ManageEngine OpManager
- Progress WhatsUp Gold (formerly Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold)
- Nagios Core
- Micro Focus Network Node Manager i (formerly HP Network Node Manager)
- DX Infrastructure Manager (formerly CA Unified Infrastructure Management)
- Paessler PRTG
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 |
Comparisons
View all alternatives
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SolarWinds NPM?
SolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.
What are SolarWinds NPM's top competitors?
ManageEngine OpManager, Progress WhatsUp Gold (formerly Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold), and Nagios Core are common alternatives for SolarWinds NPM.
What is SolarWinds NPM's best feature?
Reviewers rate Network monitoring highest, with a score of 9.
Who uses SolarWinds NPM?
The most common users of SolarWinds NPM are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees) and the Information Technology & Services industry.
Reviews and Ratings
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April 26, 2022
An honest review of SolarWinds NPM from a Network Operations Manager at a major US Airline
Our corporation uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to monitor all of our networks/endpoints for outages that may affect connectivity. With the use of NPM, we can easily view uptime graphs, receive alerts, and even SNMP traps or Syslogs. In addition to SolarWinds NPM, we also complement it with SolarWinds NTA and NCM where we can view all network traffic and download nightly backups to our configurations.
- Monitor uptime and create alerts for nodes which are down.
- Collecting Syslogs and Traps
- NPM is very slow at drawing charts and historical data from the SQL database.
Our organization uses Netpath when we need a deeper look at a network's connectivity such as traceroutes. With the use of this tool, we can visually see where a network may be impaired so that we can more quickly resolve the issue with ISPs.
April 18, 2022
Complete network monitoring for large organisations
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is used to monitor all network devices (switches, routers, firewalls,...), manage SLAs and alerting. We build dashboards to monitor main link usages, implement complex alert rules and use Netpath to monitor end to end paths. It is helping us have a clear view about our network and very useful for troubleshooting
- Devices monitoring
- Alerting
- Graphs
- Scaling (each node is limited)
- Cloud monitoring
- Dashboards
We're using Netpath to monitor end to end network paths and it's really useful.
This feature can be used by non technical users as it's very simple (green = OK, yellow = warning, red = problem) and graphical view it's very user friendly.
It's missing option to edit node names and sometimes it's generate confusing graphs.
This feature can be used by non technical users as it's very simple (green = OK, yellow = warning, red = problem) and graphical view it's very user friendly.
It's missing option to edit node names and sometimes it's generate confusing graphs.
Our company uses SolarWinds NPM to monitor the health of our network and servers. We have thousands of devices and it's very helpful to know which are functioning properly in one dashboard. Alerting is also a key feature of the SolarWinds NPM and is essential to our job duties. We are all able to keep track of malfunctioning equipment without having to dive through thousands of logs. Setting up alerts to cell phones and emails is also pretty easy to do and we could not live without it during our on-call rotations.
- Alerting on the SolarWinds NPM platform is straightforward to set up, customizable, and works reliably.
- Being able to set up basic and more complex monitoring is a nice touch. Even devices that don't support SNMP can be monitored via a simple ping.
- Visibility of all network and server device health on one dashboard is very convenient.
- The SolarWinds NPM UI/UX isn't exactly the most modern-looking, but it gets the job done.
- Updates to SolarWinds can be tricky at times and have broken the system in the past.
- Configuring and scripting some of the advanced features can be confusing, but the thwack community is always very helpful.
We have quite a few cloud-hosted applications and have set up NetPath to monitor these connections so we can confirm and react to issues with these services before major outages occur. We have used this many times to pinpoint where the fault lies in a connection to a cloud service and it's been immensely helpful to the network team in this regard.
We essentially use it to monitor our network devices - switches, routers, firewalls, ETC. We have our uplink interfaces monitored as well so that we can see usage and report on them as needed for things like bandwidth bottlenecks both internally and externally.
- Notify us when a network device goes down and comes back online.
- Reports for network interfaces.
- Fairly simple to add or remove a network device.
- The software upgrade process is a little hairy and has caused me trouble on occasion.
- The server that it needs to run is a bit of a resource hog along with the SQL server.
- Some additional features like the network map are a bit clunky compared to some other products that we use.
We have not looked into this because we have a similar product with our network equipment manufacturer that does the same thing. We didn't really have the time to go through all of our network devices to change the port mirroring to send the packet information to 2 separate solutions. We've already run into a few issues anyway with the server not having enough resources for the constant SNMP traffic and SQL database that we didn't want to then have a TON of packets forwarded to it as well.
We utilize SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) to monitor device health at all layers of our network (switches, routers, wireless controllers, etc.). The dashboard allows us to quickly identify problems such as down devices, bandwidth spikes, dropped packets, and high CPU utilization. Particularly useful is the notification system that alerts our network team when a device is not reachable.
- Easy identification of network issues
- Notification when critical systems are offline
- The "Network Top 10" dashboard is all-around great
- Upgrading the software can be tedious
- Managing/creating reports could be faster
- Overall, no major complaints
Although we have not utilized NetPath Services to necessarily identify potential problems, it has been useful to visualize the flow of traffic across our network and out (like a beefed-up traceroute). This is a relatively new feature in our environment that we will be exploring more as we continue to performance tune our network.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor provides advanced features to monitor network devices, firewalls, access points. It becomes easy to track such issues and resolve them within business objective timelines through the use of email alerts. The tool allows you to create custom dashboards and organize our data in ways that benefit our organization. The SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor also allows our staff to identify network bottleneck issues quickly which in turn results in faster problem resolution times.
- Provides real-time network performance data
- Customized reporting
- Easily create WiFi heat maps
- Cost when scaling can get expensive
- Would like to see tighter integration between SolarWinds products
- GUI could be streamlined more
This feature has allowed us to hop by hop analysis along critical network paths. This has afforded us an opportunity to identify issues before our users realize what is happening. It allows us to identify the impact of every hop in a comm path. This is a helpful tool when we are migrating services to the cloud, it enhances change management meetings by providing visible data to review.
February 06, 2022
NPM is a great tool for your networking team!
We choose to use SolarWinds because the legacy Monitor tool was not cover some areas/alerts/vendors. Also, we were looking for a tool able to identify and act in some alerts. We are using NPM to monitor the infrastructure, to provide some stats that can help us to identify possible issues in the future, and to automatize some regular actions.
- Monitor Cisco devices in general
- Monitor Azure Gateways
- Provide different kind of reports
- Pollers for Aruba Devices
- The SolarWinds support team is not familiar with non-Cisco vendors, so it's hard to get some support from them.
- Bugs sometimes is happening
Netpath is a great tool to discover problems in the LAN/WAN layers. We are using this tool when needed to test new circuits, a diversity routing/patch, and/or measure the stats during a maintenance window.
February 01, 2022
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) Review
For several years, our organization has continued to utilize SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) for around the clock performance monitoring of the network and networking systems in the environment. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) solves the issues of continuous visibility, notification, and alerting pertaining to problems or issues that may occur anywhere within our IT environment.
- Performance Monitoring
- Network Alerting
- Troubleshooting Issues
- Dashboard Graphics
- Node Licensing
- 3rd party compatibility
Our organization has benefited greatly by SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) NetPath feature which enables visual analysis, and analysis along critical network paths for on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. NetPath aides problem solving by automatically creating a map of the problem area, and displaying the performance details of devices inside and outside the network.
January 31, 2022
Not impressed but not disappointed either.
It is used to monitor the availability of critical systems of the infrastructure such as Active Directory, DHCP, and servers in remote sites. It's also used to get NetFlow stats on Cisco Routers to get a time slice view of network traffic and bandwidth.
- Aggregate date
- All in one interface
- Supports SNMP and NetFlow
- Can see route of packet across the internet to destination server
- Simplify interface
- Simplify installation
- Price
We used NetPath to visualize the path of packets taken for the PSTN Skype service hosted on the other side of the country. We also used NetPath to see the path taken by different ISPs to the same destination. We're able to access performance based on the number of hops due to the path taken.
Someone knew. But no one knew who. NPM let us regain control of the who knew and turn it into a measured responsibility. Our Company now has knowledge of what our network resources include and how those resources are utilized daily. We demonstrate processes and services which are hyperextended and leverage available resources for use in our production environment by monitoring the trends and use of our business assets. NPM tools have helped us free up monetary resources for additional pressing projects which provide business growth. The payoff?? Minimizing monetary bleed and maximizing resource utilization. We will renew our NPM licensing allowing us to continuously monitor our IT infrastructure, connect to upstream providers, and monitor many production processes and services. This will continue to maximize our planning capabilities for resources and scalability for continued Membership and Subscriber growth.
- Identifies IP addresses, hostnames, packet loss, and latency
- Displays top talkers per each monitored interface
- Path offers device details and detects configuration changes
- Detailed (potentially multi-path) map between Windows node and a specified destination
- Customizing the NPM interface is capable of a multitude of instructions in the Virtual Classroom via the SW website.
- Customizing the threshold values and which interfaces to monitor are configurable by many videos in the Virtual Classroom on the SW website.
- Customizing the active alerts' values are configurable by following directions and video instruction guides in the SW Virtual Classroom on the SW website.
We use the NetPath capabilities of Network Performance Monitor to visualize and capture when changes to routes affect services that are open to our Subscribers. By proactively monitoring these pathways, we are able to identify when we need to switch network paths to alternative service pathways to keep our sustainable services to our Subscribers. This goes a long way in providing Over Top (OTT) support to our Subscribers and helps to ensure we are focusing our efforts to provide quality services to our Subscribers.
January 27, 2022
Best Network Monitoring Tool out there
We are a University with 13 locations with 2 employees monitoring all locations inclusive of over 300 Switches and 200 Servers that host various apps. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor allows us to monitor
all devices from one console including switches, routers, servers, and even printers.
It
allows us to monitor for hardware errors and bandwidth issues which
is a major help in troubleshooting errors and planning for the future. I use it to view all of the switches and apps and ensure everything is up and functioning at just a glance.
- Monitors all the switches
- Alert when a network device is down
- Monitor bandwidth usage across the network
- Monitor Hardware health on devices
- Bandwidth monitoring could be improved, when creating a map we need to either show bandwidth usage or interface speed. I would like to see both
- Wireless heat maps could be improved. It only works with certain vendors
It is a feature we have not used in production, but we have tested and plan to implement it.
SolarWinds Network Performance (NPM) is used to monitor the health of our switches and other network devices, from several brands including Cisco, Aruba, and HPE. We use it to monitor when devices are offline, when interfaces have status changes, and also interface bandwidth on devices to identify potential issues.
- Alerting network device status down/up
- Monitor devices for hardware status
- Monitor bandwidth usage
- No improvements needed
SolarWinds NetPath is a very good feature to monitor network environments across several sites and locations. SolarWinds NetPath automatically generates the network path and gathers information about devices in the network path. This is very useful information for monitoring our inter-site connections including the ISP's in between the locations. The user-friendly GUI improved quite a bit in the latest release.
I have been using SolarWinds NPM for well over a decade. We have setup up hundreds of alerts and notifications that will email us when network notes ranging from servers, storage systems, VMware ESXi hosts, to all kinds of networking switches and gear encounter issues, are down, reset. We quickly are notified when a system is down or has rebooted and or has not come up in a timely manner.
- monitor up/down status of network nodes
- sends alerts immediately by email
- good graphs and widgets to view at a quick glance status of nodes
- maybe a little easier way to add new network nodes
We have not taken full advantage of NetPath at this time.
January 25, 2022
solarwinds npm
We are using the solarwinds npm to monitor the network availability of our networking devices like routers, switches and servers. We are monitoring the link utilization and device performance and availability uptime and downtime of the devices and their links. We are also monitoring the physical and virtual storage of our devices along with reporting and alerting.
- Resource performance monitoring.
- Link monitoring.
- Alerting.
- Reporting.
- New devices are not supported.
- IPSec VPN tunnel monitoring of the FortiGate firewall is not supported.
- Creating custom pollers does not provide the required information.
We have configured net path multiple times but it not very user friendly.
January 25, 2022
GREAT All-in-One Network Monitor
SolarWinds NPM is a comprehensive tool for administrators to have an overview of network paths using major protocols (i.e. ICMP, SNMP, etc.). This would help network administrators to be able to pinpoint issues within the network effectively cutting the guesswork on the points of failures and latency issues.
- Highly customizable
- Great mapping tools
- Has an overview of devices and endpoints in an environment
- Tiering could be more granular.
- Customization could be made easier for end-users.
N/A
January 24, 2022
Review of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
We are a University with multiple locations with one Network Engineer to manage and monitor all locations. SolarWinds NPM allows us to monitor all devices from one console including switches, routers, and printers. It
allows us to monitor for hardware errors and bandwidth bottlenecks which is a major help in troubleshooting error and planning for the future.
- Alert when a network device is down.
- Monitor device for hardware errors.
- Monitor bandwidth usage across network.
- Wireless heat maps could be improved. We have multiple AP vendors and from experience, it only works with certain vendors.
It is a feature we have not used in production but we have tested and plan to implement in the near future.
January 21, 2022
All in One Network Performance Tool
I use Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) for network visibility, uptime, and troubleshooting. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) verifies issues with network devices such as bandwidth allocation, network devices up/down state, and many other things to assist me in troubleshooting to keep the most uptime for my business.
- Alerts
- Performance
- Inventory
- Free netflow statistics
- Difficult threshold changes
January 20, 2022
Robust Network Performance Monitoring Solution
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is our primary enterprise monitoring tool used for monitoring the entire infrastructure. This includes servers, N/W devices, storage, databases, firewall, UPS, etc., to list a few of the device types which we monitor. It supports multi-vendor network monitoring and insights for deeper visibility. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) includes intelligent alerting, intuitive dashboards, and reporting features. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is part of the SolarWinds Orion Platform and is the main monitoring component and integrates seamlessly with other SolarWinds modules. It supports SNMP, WMI, and agent/agentless monitoring.
- Very scalable for large environments
- Agent and agentless monitoring available
- Robust SNMP monitoring, realtime MIB updates by the vendor
- Integrates seamlessly with other SolarWinds products
- Support more vendors, checkpoint and storage vendors
NetPath is used for monitoring the network path to a service or a remote site. This includes monitoring network traffic, latency, and packet loss. This data can be real time and historical, which assists the network team in troubleshooting issues. It detects route changes and integrates with NCM and detects config changes to alert you if a configuration change caused any n/w issues. Baseline thresholds are available for alerting.
January 19, 2022
The way to monitor your network.
Based on my 7-years of experience I am deeply convinced that Solarwinds products (NPM, NTA) are extremely scalable and reliable solutions with customizable user-friendly interfaces. The most important feature for me is the creation of custom reports using a variety of data sources (SQL query, SNMP, OID, etc.). Alerts constructor is a simple and powerful tool as well.
- Custom reports building.
- Alert management with conditions constructor.
- A huge variety of data sources.
- Web console requests cashing works quite slow - I assume Redis configuration should be improved.
- Network elements virtualization and clustering monitoring do not satisfy the contemporary requirements (has to be more functional and provide a wider list of vendors).
- WiFi heatmap is available for Cisco Meraki equipment only.
As cloud solutions became a world contemporary reality it is quite critical for us to get actual monitoring information about cloud services reachability. NetPath and related to it alerts (for example, based on path change) also is a very useful thing for WAN infrastructure monitoring that really helps to understand the current traffic distribution between the sites.
January 19, 2022
Great one stop shop for Network Monitoring
SolarWinds allowed us to consolidate Network Performance monitoring into one tool. It has allowed us to spot issues we would have otherwise missed.
- Network Maps, Live Maps.
- Custom Dashboards.
- Ease of adding new elements.
- Support for Juniper/Arista devices.
- Sluggishness and need for a modern UI.
- Limitation to Windows.
Yes, we currently use Netpath for end-to-end Packet loss and latency trends. However, we are limited to using Windows devices for Netpath pollers which is a limitation.
January 18, 2022
Great Product for Network Monitoring
Our business is manufacturing, we have a wide campus design network equipment and it is hard to manage without SolarWinds NPM platform to check the status of the alerts it generates when a system is down. it helped us take quick actions in terms of doing maintenance during peak hours of the business and to maintain high availability at all times. NPM plays a vital role in our organization and we like how granular statistics it shows on the dashboard, it is very easy to set up any system to monitor its availability in terms of network, power, CPU usage, and other hardware stuff.
- NPM Alerts when a network device is down
- bandwidth issues can be determined
- hardware issues can also be seen
- improvements over the WAN
yes we did
January 18, 2022
SolarWinds
We monitor status and utilization at 13000 retail locations.
- Up/Down status
- Bandwidth utilization
- Alerting
- auto discovery
- UI performance
I do not use.
June 30, 2021
Best Value
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is our prime network management software for our NOC, Network Engineering & Operations. We use it twenty-four seven to manage F5 Load Balancers both in the cloud and on-premises, routers and switches, wireless infrastructure, firewall infrastructure, LAN and WAN, and all other network elements. SolarWinds is also our alerting tool (red, amber, green) threshold management and performance reporting.
- Alerting
- Reporting
- Baselining
- Wide vendor support of network elements
- Cloud and on-premise element support
- Should be easier to customize UI
- Integrate inline dynamic network diagramming from within the UI (create & maintain)
- Simplify top menu in UI
We have benefitted greatly from using NetPath by resolving an issue that went on for months. Not only did NetPath show us the full flow of the packet through multiple firewalls, but it also showed us that it was taking an unexpected path. We now use NetPath to visually monitor all of our ingress/egress points and are notified of any errors or performance issues before any user reports them.
We use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, and Network Configuration Manager to monitor and manage our global network infrastructure. It is primarily used by network engineers, although we are starting to make some inroads with stats for other department managers. It is proving very useful for them to correctly size their Internet bandwidth needs. Views are made for each site and used by the local teams as needed.
- Perfstack is a feature we have started using heavily and our resident programmer/script expert is working on a script to pick out a FLOW conversation, get all the switch ports between the two endpoints and generate a perfstack of them. This is looking like it could be very useful for troubleshooting.
- The modern dashboards have real potential and I like how they auto-refresh each widget independently.
- SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager and Netflow Traffic Analyzer are great as always. NCM in particular makes my life so much easier.
- Please work on the Universal Device Poller to get it on the web.
- Consistent sorting would be really nice. There are places where things are sorted alphabetically and other places where they're sorted by creation date (which makes no sense).
- Live maps. I like the direction you're going, but it still needs a lot of work just to get it on par with Network Atlas, and I hope you're aiming higher than that because Network Atlas is just not that great.
We use NetPath in two scenarios.
- A few permanent checks between hub sites to keep an eye on WAN health
- Temporary monitors as needed for troubleshooting
December 15, 2020
SolarWinds NPM
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is used only by the IT team for monitoring core infrastructure services. This resolves our problem of proactively monitoring and alerting us for any issues before they happen. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is highly customizable with their alerts, including automated tasks to resolve issues depending on the alert itself. Also has useful features, such as NetPath.
- Ease of use
- Highly customizable
- Works well
- Learning curve
- Confusing UI
- Expensive
NetPath is a very useful tool. Also allows creation of another netapath agent at another site so you can see the behaviour from different office locations. This actually came in very handy during implementation of one of our projects, where it assisted in determining the root cause of packet loss and intermittent network activity.