SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.8 out of 10

Score

7.8 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Business Problems Solved

Users have found this product to be extremely versatile and useful in a variety of situations. One key use case is for professional presentations. Users have praised the product for its ability to create visually appealing and engaging slides that captivate audiences. The ease of use and intuitive interface allows users to quickly create polished presentations without the need for extensive design skills. Additionally, the product's extensive library of pre-designed templates and customizable options provide users with a wide range of choices to cater to their specific needs.

Another important use case for this product is for educational purposes. Teachers and students alike have found value in using this product to enhance their learning experience. With its interactive features such as animations, videos, and quizzes, it enables educators to create engaging lessons that capture students' attention and facilitate better understanding of complex concepts. Users appreciate the product's collaborative capabilities, allowing for seamless group projects and real-time feedback.

Furthermore, this product has proven to be a valuable tool for businesses in creating impactful marketing materials. Users have reported that the product's drag-and-drop functionality makes it easy to design eye-catching brochures, flyers, and social media graphics. The ability to seamlessly integrate images, text, and various graphic elements ensures that businesses can create visually appealing marketing materials that effectively communicate their brand identity.

Lastly, users have praised the product's ability to simplify personal projects such as photo albums or event invitations. The variety of customization options allows users to personalize their creations and add their own touch. Whether it's creating personalized greeting cards or designing stunning wedding invitations, this product has been a reliable choice for users seeking high-quality results without the need for extensive design knowledge.

Overall, this product has proven to be versatile and adaptable in various contexts, making it an indispensable tool for professionals, educators, businesses, and individuals alike. Its user-friendly interface combined with its extensive features and customization options allow users to unleash their creativity and achieve impressive results in a wide range of use cases.

Reviews

237 Reviews

SolarWinds NPM brings all your Network Tools into a single Toolbox

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 8, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) to monitor the availability and performance of our networks across 15 geographically dispersed sites. This includes network devices, Servers, Virtual Machines and even our bandwidth consumption. SolarWinds NPM is a powerful and yet user-friendly solution with a variety of very useful tools and performance monitors allowing you to proactively manage your network and be alerted to potential issues using proactive monitoring and threshold management. The system is able to manage a wide variety of devices regardless of manufacturer and brand. There are also a host of very useful reports which can be customized to the organization's needs and automated according to run as needed.

Pros

Excellent Network Reporting
Great performance monitoring with various KPIs
Proactive alerting with alerts when approaching set thresholds

Cons

It would be great to have Root Cause Analysis built into the platform
The Network mapping feature could use a friendlier interface
The Network Monitoring Platform does not include the Topology Mapper.

Likelihood to Recommend

Solarwinds NPM is well suited for medium to large networks, it may be a bit heavy for the SOHO environment as most of the tools and reports are designed for monitoring KPIs which may not be critical for a small shop. NPM can handle large networks with several sites and mixed technologies ranging from networks, server systems, storage devices and SLA reporting.

Jesse Bridgelal

Network Architect in Information Technology at Ministry of Health (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Single Window Network Performance Monitoring

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 31, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is used in various ways for us as well as other organizations that we support. Various use cases are as follows - Network availability during business hours Network utilization reports to review all Service provider WAN links Device health monitoring Capacity planning reports for a proactive approach NetPath - very widely used for identifying network issues like latencies, packet drops, config issues, traffic issues using a hop by hop path analysis

Pros

Device Health Monitoring
NetPath - network path analysis
Performance monitoring of devices - utilization of resources like CPU, Mem, Interfaces
Specific vendor monitoring with Network Insight - Cisco, F5, Palo Alto

Cons

NetPath scaling for very large environments like Banks
Drag and drop functionality in Reporting
Drag and drop functionality in Dashboards

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is most appropriate in environments where the traditional network gear like routers, switches, wireless controllers, and firewalls are in place and you need to do monitoring for availability, performance, health, and path analysis - basically all monitoring aspects. In environments where you have more of the recent network components like SD-WAN solutions, no real value add comes in from deploying SolarWinds, though SolarWinds claims that more and more SDWAN vendors will be added to the monitoring bandwagon. Currently, there are only a limited set of SDWAN vendors that are supported directly.

Ravi Khanchandani

Founder Director in Information Technology at Techsa Services Pvt Ltd (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

8 years of experience

View profile

An honest review of SolarWinds NPM from a Network Operations Manager at a major US Airline

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 26, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Monitor uptime and create alerts for nodes which are down.
Collecting Syslogs and Traps

Cons

NPM is very slow at drawing charts and historical data from the SQL database.

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds NPM is well suited for any Information Technology professional who needs to monitor their networks, nodes, or endpoints for outages. NPM can easily create rules for alerting and is invaluable to our organization to maintain high uptime.

Brett Stone

Network Operations Manager in Information Technology at Cape Air IT Department (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

15 years of experience

Complete network monitoring for large organisations

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

April 18, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Pros

Devices monitoring
Alerting
Graphs

Cons

Scaling (each node is limited)
Cloud monitoring
Dashboards

Likelihood to Recommend

Monitoring network devices (status, performance) and manage alerts with specific schedules as per device type (datacenter, user, ups, ...). SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is less appropriate for wireless devices. For network devices you can monitor everything that's read by SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (all versions) and create graphs.

Verified User

Team Lead in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Easy, Big and Mostly Reliable Network Performance Monitoring for Large Organizations

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 15, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

I think SolarWinds NPM is well suited for larger organizations that need quick, easy, and supported visibility into network and server devices across a large network. The ability to configure and customize alerts and reporting, give users role-based access, and have professional support options is ideal for large companies that need minimal technical overhead and just want to provide infrastructure teams with a tool to give them visibility into the health of the network and servers makes SolarWinds NPM a great choice.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

If you're looking for advanced monitoring, NPM has it - but it falls short

Rating: 6 out of 10

Incentivized

April 14, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

NPM is well suited for small to medium-sized organizations. It does the basic functions of a network monitoring suite very well however some of the more advanced features aren't as straightforward. Basic up/down email alerts work well but there are obviously many solutions that do this as well. I wouldn't recommend NPM for very large organizations because the server needed to support that many devices.

Curt Sminkey

Network Engineer in Information Technology at Widener University (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

View profile

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) - Know Your Network

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Easy identification of network issues
Notification when critical systems are offline
The "Network Top 10" dashboard is all-around great

Cons

Upgrading the software can be tedious
Managing/creating reports could be faster
Overall, no major complaints

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) should be considered by anyone who is in charge of managing a medium to large network. It allows for a high degree of oversight of your topology and helps with resolving issues quickly. Also, setting up devices to be monitored can be as simple, or granular, as you like. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) may not be as well suited for smaller, less complex networks.

Verified User

Employee in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor provides clear insight and usable information

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

March 31, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Provides real-time network performance data
Customized reporting
Easily create WiFi heat maps

Cons

Cost when scaling can get expensive
Would like to see tighter integration between SolarWinds products
GUI could be streamlined more

Likelihood to Recommend

The WiFi mapping tool is very helpful. This piece was very helpful as we separated employees throughout the enterprise and allowed us to maximize spending when determining the placement of wireless nodes. We also used SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to monitor endpoints and troubleshoot network traffic issues with server traffic. Also, it is well suited to relay beneficial capability when under pressure to alleviate these types of issues.

Verified User

Executive in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

NPM is a great tool for your networking team!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

February 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Monitor Cisco devices in general
Monitor Azure Gateways
Provide different kind of reports
Provide different kind of alerts

Cons

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
Sometimes the Dashboard delays to show the current status of Nodes/Services

Likelihood to Recommend

Great tool if you have Cisco-based devices. Not suitable for all vendors like Aruba, HP, Citrix. For other vendors, the Thwack forum sometimes is contributing with something that can help.

Fabio Silva

Senior Network Engineer in Information Technology at Fexco (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 1, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Performance Monitoring
Network Alerting
Troubleshooting Issues

Cons

Dashboard Graphics
Node Licensing
3rd party compatibility

Likelihood to Recommend

There was a scenario within our organization where all network connectivity was lost internally within the organization. The network team started troubleshooting, researching, and investigating the root cause(s) of the outage. With the help of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), we were able to determine the health status of the Primary Switch was down due to several closed ports. NPM allowed us to quickly identify the problem and resolve the issue.

Ned Kelley

Cyber Security Engineer / Analyst in Information Technology at RTX (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

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Reviews and Ratings

Easy, Big and Mostly Reliable Network Performance Monitoring for Large Organizations

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 15, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience