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SolarWinds NPM

SolarWinds NPM

Overview

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Users have found this product to be extremely versatile and useful in a variety of situations. One key use case is for professional …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 10 features
  • Alerts (228)
    8.9
    89%
  • Hardware health monitoring (215)
    8.8
    88%
  • Network monitoring (231)
    8.7
    87%
  • Customizable reports (212)
    7.9
    79%
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Pricing

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NPM

$1,638

On Premise
per year

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
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Product Demos

Why I Recommend SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

YouTube
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Features

Network Performance Monitoring

A network performance monitoring system monitors the entire network for performance problems and collects performance data such as network traffic analysis performance bottlenecks, etc.

7.9
Avg 8.2
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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:

  • 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 a 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: Seamless conversion upgrade to AIOps-powered Hybrid Cloud Observability
  • 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 Nexus switches, F5 BIG-IP load balancers, Cisco ASA firewalls

SolarWinds NPM Screenshots

Screenshot of Network monitoring software used to reduce network outages and detect, diagnose, and resolve multi-vendor network performance issues.Screenshot of See relationships for routers, switches, interfaces, volumes, and groups, updated automatically without user intervention to maintain the network, not network maps.Screenshot of Reduce visibility gaps into critical network switches, firewalls, and load balancers with Network Insight for Cisco Nexus, Cisco ASA, and F5 BIG-IP.Screenshot of Reduce the flood of unnecessary network alerts. Create alerts based on simple or complex nested trigger conditions, defined parent/child dependencies, and network topology.Screenshot of Identify dead zones and improve wireless coverage. With its network monitoring tool, users can access out-of-the-box wireless reports, including wireless availability and rogue access points.Screenshot of Configure alerts by calculating dynamic baseline threshold data with network performance monitoring software.

SolarWinds NPM Video

Network Performance Monitor overview

SolarWinds NPM Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Windows® Server 2016; SQL Server 2016 SQL Server 2016 SP1 SQL Server 2017 (including installations on Linux)
Mobile ApplicationNo

SolarWinds NPM Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

SolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.

Reviewers rate Alerts highest, with a score of 8.9.

The most common users of SolarWinds NPM are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(600)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

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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.

Users recommend considering the whole stack of Network Modules on the SolarWinds platform instead of NPM as a standalone product. They believe the other modules are valuable additions for monitoring, managing, and analyzing the network. SolarWinds NPM is considered the best network performance monitoring solution on the market. Users suggest using it for network monitoring and exploring other modules for specific infrastructure monitoring. While NPM is a good tool for network monitoring, users advise looking into alternative options for advanced monitoring needs. Some users suggest improving the navigation to make it more fluid and user-friendly. Overall, users recommend SolarWinds NPM for managing and monitoring network infrastructures due to its reliability and cost-effectiveness. They also recommend trying the live action feature and Meraki for enhanced network analytics. Users suggest considering other products with better UI and capabilities. SolarWinds NPM is worth the price if affordable, especially with sponsorship. Working with third-party services or SolarWinds to properly set up the tool is recommended. Using multiple tools in conjunction with NPM provides more visibility. Users recommend signing up for Thwack and utilizing their resources for assistance with SolarWinds products. Trying the demo first before purchasing is advisable. NPM is considered a core module in every company that chooses SolarWinds as their monitoring tool. It is important to ensure that the server can handle the software. Experienced staff maximizes the benefits of the platform. Users suggest downloading a trial copy of NPM to test it out. NPM outperforms other tools according to user opinions. More theme options and additional ways to export data are requested. Other modules from SolarWinds that work well with NPM, such as Server & Application Manager, should be explored. Support team and Thwack community are highly praised by users. Users should not be overwhelmed by features and take advantage of free trial resources. SolarWinds is recommended for enterprise-level monitoring, but Loop1 consulting is advised for complex environments. Initial setup can be time-consuming. The 30-day evaluation of the full product is excellent. Becoming a Thwack member provides access to extensive resources and support. SolarWinds may have a higher cost but is considered worth it. Proper provisioning of hardware, software, and infrastructure is crucial before deploying SolarWinds. Users recommend setting up the trial version first and getting familiar with the product. SolarWinds NPM receives high recommendations from users and is praised for its great dashboards.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 57)
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Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
I created a numerous list of custom reports that haven't been presented as out-of-box - IP SLA monitoring, RAID status/information, information about switches virtual-chassis, etc. as well as was able to present reports from another monitoring system in Solarwinds Web console. I also actively use such useful tools as NetPath.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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 and (I) OT devices. 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
For our organization, we use Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) for network visibility, downtime, uptime, and troubleshooting for our organization. SolarWinds NPM verifies issues with network devices, such as bandwidth allocation, network devices up/down state, and other things to assist our organization in troubleshooting any problems or performance issues.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Curt Sminkey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is easy to set up and discover your entire network in minutes. It supports different types of polling mechanisms including ICMP, SNMP, WMI and agents. Agents can be deployed from the centralized SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) console. Orion Maps and Network Atlas provide a visual representation of your entire network and alerts can be defined when there are route changes, packet loss, increased latency, etc. Dashboards are easy to configure and provide the NOC team with a holistic view of the entire infrastructure.
June 30, 2021

Best Value

Shahab Razak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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
Apart from the recent security breach I still maintain that SolarWinds is the best NOC tool and best value for the money. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor will quickly baseline your network and you can set thresholds and alert quickly after that. The reporting UI contains valuable canned reports and modifying them to create your own reports is quite easy. Building reports from scratch is also easy. Their support for different hardware vendors and products is very comprehensive.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are supporting SolarWinds Environment for multiple customers. I have worked on other Monitoring tools as well like Zenoss, CA Nimsoft, but the features SolarWinds provides is what makes it different from other Monitoring Solutions. It provides such great features and we have all the control over these, we can customize this to our own needs. If something is not supported out of the box we can use its feature to create our own solution, we don't have to wait for them to release their support like we have to do with other products. For NPM, [a] major part of monitoring is done using SNMP and SolarWinds provides the great MIB database and the thing we can build our own custom pollers is pretty great. Additionally, the Orion Platform on which NPM runs provide such great dashboard, reports and alerts that should meet the requirement for all the organizations.
  • Out of the Monitoring of almost all Network Devices.
  • Build custom pollers to monitor which is not supported out of the box.
  • Further you can alert on these custom metrics and Out of the box metrics.
  • It provides you great dashboards, Reports features.
  • You can integrate it with any MoM layer tools either using its API or sending out traps.
  • Out of the box Integration with Service Now ITSM Tool.
  • Limitation on no of elements we can poll from one poller.
  • Complicated API - There is not much doc around API, and it could be hard for a beginner to work around the automation.
Network devices are the backbone of any organization, so I can say with confidence, to make sure the network is up and functional 24*7, you can deploy SolarWinds which is easy to install and manage. It provides rich sets of metrics and alerts out of the box. The cool thing about this is it is very easy to install and manage.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using SolarWinds for all our networks as well as all client network infrastructures in the organization. This will help us to provide real-time monitoring and IP flow top talkers instantly in a live scenario.
  • Real-time monitoring
  • Instant up/down of network devices across all networks
  • Top talkers in different ways (IP, application, and others)
  • Auto-discovery is very easy for devices.
  • inbuilt scanner from LAN network to get auto network discovery.
  • This should work with minimal hardware and work with any server OS.
  • This should not depend on latest SQL Version. Clients have to arrange latest licence which is additional cost for client.
  • During installation, the application crashed in many scenarios. This should have rolled back instead of crashed.
  • Please include a device backup option and live monitoring of any change in device configuration.
  • One tool for all network devices--monitor, manage, backup, utilization, and change all in one
This is the best tool I have worked with as a user, as an admin of the tool, as a suggestion to our many clients.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a user-friendly tool for easy installation and configuration and use in NOC. This is very well suited for MAP configuration and to create multiple MAP.
Dwain Erhart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use the Orion Summary page for all senior admins - we get alerts if things are coming down, if servers are running low on disk space, if memory is over utilized. Many different uses. I like the additions of NetPath services. I have also used reports and the network Atlas to create visual representations for our active links. Diving into a node is helpful to establish response time issues, trends and even capacity forecasts. I use this on servers, SANs, switches, Wireless controllers, and alert monitoring services.
  • NetPath services are a godsend when you are trying to explain to ISPs, etc. about where traffic is congested or stopping. Sometimes seeing is believing for them.
  • The other BIG deal is anticipating disk capacity - when volumes get to full, servers crash. With NPM, we can and create set thresholds for warning us before we run into issues, and then we can add storage, memory, and CPU, (especially on our Virtual environment.)
  • Alerts are great - instead of hearing from our users that a server is offline, we are aware of it right away.
  • We also like the alerts that le us know when there are upgrades available.
  • It would be nice to be able to set up SNMP3 for some of our systems in an easier fashion. But it is not a show stopper.
  • Sometimes the support refers us to the Knowledge base and Thwack. Not a huge deal, but I only end up putting in a ticket when I have spent a great deal of time searching for a solution.
  • Email alerts sometimes go wonky after an upgrade.
If you have a decent sized server farm, you will want to monitor it. If you spend time arguing with ISPs about whether they are at fault, you need NetPath to clarify. If you are a very small business, you may get by without it, but it can really save your team time and effort when you deal with multiple servers. We don't monitor EVERY node on our network - just the high level points - all servers, all network egress/ingress points, keeping ahead of storage space issues, and getting an email if something is happening you would otherwise be unable to check on a regular basis.
Reinier Kleipool | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
It is used to monitor all network components in use at Rabobank with the exception of a few territories.
  • Provides very detailed insight into Node performance and troubles.
  • Features a VERY useful API that is able to drive all of the application.
  • Event and alter management is easy to use.
  • Offers many extra modules that are very well integrated.
  • It does not support hardware inventory for H3C/Comware based devices.
  • It does not really understand aggregate links.
It will work particularly well in a mixed network/server environment. It is very useful for monitoring small to mid-sized networks. I doubt it will work well in in a 10,000+ node network because dependent alert suppression is not sufficient. In large installations eventually the database will become the bottleneck. Do not use it in a H3C/Comware only environment.
September 25, 2020

SolarWinds NPM

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds NPM to monitor all of our infrastructure including servers, switches, and applications. It allows us to get alerts when anything is going wrong with a critical system so we can proactively address the issue before it impacts the business. It also provides us a detailed view into the health of our systems via reporting and dashboards.
  • Alerting with custom thresholds.
  • Reporting capabilities to easily see historical data.
  • Dashboards to give you a real time view into the health of your systems.
  • Configuring thresholds for your alerts can be a little cumbersome.
  • Getting additional details onto the alerts is not as easy as it could be.
  • You need to have two servers to run SolarWinds NPM, one for the service and a separate one for the database.
SolarWinds NPM works well for us as we are a relatively small shop with a limited number of servers/interfaces to monitor. If you were a larger shop the licensing for SolarWinds would get very expensive because they license it per "node" or item you want to monitor. If you want to monitor hardware and network on a single device, that's 2 nodes.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using it strictly for our IT department to address issues before they arise. We are able to monitor multiple locations with different resources in every location. We are notified of issues beforehand so we can minimize any downtime. It's amazing to have everything under a single console and get a snapshot view of the big picture of what's going on.
  • It has amazing alerting that you can customize based on every need.
  • It has detailed dashboards that give a very nice overview of what's going on.
  • The SNMP capabilities are off the charts.
  • User management allows every tech to see what they need to see.
  • Ease of setting up alerts
  • Better map views
  • More hardware information without needing to use the MIB Database
It is well suited for a NOC that has a lot of resources to monitor, for a big overview. You can choose to monitor only critical alerts or even informational alerts all to your liking. It works well with every vendor to get the correct monitoring. It's amazing to monitor multiple locations.

It is very expensive so if you don't have the biggest environment I don't know if it's the best option for you. Also if you have one location with 2 servers you have to determine if it pays to go through the complicated setup.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It'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.
It does basic ping and SNMP monitoring fairly well, but again I would very much like to see the robustness of the system improved. We far too often have to call support because the application is running slowly. This is my biggest complaint. Besides this, I see SolarWinds NPM doing very well in a campus environment. I do not believe it is well suited for monitoring cloud applications at this time, though.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used across the whole organization. The product helps the IT department monitor systems and applications, which would allow IT to respond and address issues more timely and in a proactive manner.
  • System monitoring
  • Application monitoring
  • Update node properties
  • Certain query functions in reporting
It is good at monitoring computing systems and applications. I have not used very much, but I think it can improve with reporting and taking corrective actions when alerts occur.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilize SolarWinds NPM to monitor our internal and client networks. It is currently only used by a single department (or business unit) but we supply regular reports to many other teams and clients. It directly addresses the needs of being able to monitor and troubleshoot a diverse range of hardware.
  • Detailed Statistics
  • Reporting
  • Configurability
  • Doing anything in bulk needs major improvement
  • Network mapping displays
  • Be more reactive to customer requests
  • Cover ALL technology vendors, not just a select few
This review is purely aimed at making others realize that SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is not a simple replacement tool for what you might already be using. It is extremely powerful, extremely configurable but the average likely user--a network or server admin--is ulikely to have the necessary coding and SQL skills needed to utilize that. This is something that SolarWinds haven't really talked about, and in my opinion, is a major flaw and is what makes me only give it a 6/10 rating.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, for us, is used for the monitoring of servers, networking equipment and other devices. The only department that uses it is information technology. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor helps us manage what's going on in the environment and also keeps an eye for any machines that go offline anytime during the day or night. Before SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor it was all hit and miss as to when we knew devices were in trouble.
  • The software is very in-depth. You will be able to get metrics and data on things you never thought possible.
  • SolarWinds has a vast array of products in its database so we have yet to add anything that wasn't already included.
  • The reporting is wonderful. It is in-depth and allows us to provide documents to business partners when asked.
  • Sometimes there are too many things to look at. It may be hard to find just what you are looking for. I would prefer a more dumbed down interface or even a guided wizard.
  • It may be our implementation but it seems a little sluggish at times.
  • Upgrading it can be a pain since there may be multiple updates needed to get current.
The software is powerful and does what its advertised to do. I think that Solarwinds is a perfect candidate for any administrator with at least 25 devices/servers to manage. One of the best things you can do during the selection process would be to get an estimate for the number of interfaces you will have. These can add up fast since everything can be monitored.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds NPM is being used in our department to monitor over 1000 network devices. They monitor all ports and routing statuses. The problems that it addresses is visibility into network device health and status. With other network add-ons such as Network Configuration Manager, configuration backup is also possible. What NPM has helped us with is identifying when devices become unresponsive or when certain routing adjacencies fail. This can help us identify issues in the network without relying on our customer to tell us they are having performance or reachability issues. We also rely on NPM to identify link errors in our environment. We were able to identify many links where CRC/input errors were occurring. Without NPM, it would have been a monumental task to identify that as a possible performance issue point.
  • Identifying down nodes in network.
  • Identifying neighbor adjacency changes.
  • Graphing feature to give a quick look at interface bandwidth trends.
  • "Network Top 10" to identify issues in the network.
  • Support is almost non-existent. Almost always solved by Googling for a solution.
  • Care and feeding sometimes requires direct database interaction. For example, when neighbor adjacencies are removed, they will show up on the alerts page. But deleting them from alerts won't work. Changing the auto delete timeout is not a workable solution as sometimes real links are down for extended periods of time. One needs to go into the database to delete the routing neighbors that are no longer valid to permanently remove them.
  • Upgrades almost always have unforeseen issues. Whether a package isn't installed/ configured correctly to additional polling engines not able to be simultaneously upgraded, etc.
  • No Linux version. Windows requires many patches that required reboots on a monthly basis.
Overall, I give NPM an 8. It is the best overall product that we have used and meets our requirements. Once it's configured, it is fairly stable. It does a good job of presenting data to our team for troubleshooting. It seems to work well in our large deployment. However, one has to pay attention to database server/disk performance. Unfortunately, no built-in load balancer to balance Orion web console traffic. No good documentation of how to balance web traffic with vendors like F5.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, we monitor our core network and all customer circuits and CPE equipment to proactively plan repair when links degrade or respond to service outages. We also create logins for our customers to monitor their circuit usage and performance. We use reports to upsell customers who are consistently saturating their bandwidth.
  • Good aesthetics in graph-rendering, etc.
  • Handles a large number of monitored elements
  • Fine-grained control of user permissions
  • Polling engine requires windows
  • Database only accepts MSSQL--requires license
  • No templating of user permissions
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is most appropriate for a large environment with a lot of network elements to monitor and where multiple users need a clean simple interface. For smaller networks, it would be difficult to justify all the required licensing, and free tools would be sufficient.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is being used by the network team to monitor our network equipment world wide. We monitor over 600 devices in SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, most of them Cisco switches and routers. Performance charts and reports are our primary use for SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, but we also get alerts for network outages or failures as well.
  • Alerting
  • Reporting
  • Easy navigation
  • Page load speed
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor does a good job of being a reliable place to generate alerts for devices when they have an issue. The alerts can be built from many metrics all tailored to your organization. You can even set groups of devices and have different alerting rules for each group.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor has a lot of good reports built in that you can use to analyze your network, however, if they do not have the report you need, it is a big learning curve to figure out how to get the report to show what you want since the reports are built on SQL scripts. If you know SQL you are good to go.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
In larger environments it is a must. No way you could manually do what SolarWinds does for you.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds NPM to monitor performance statistics and status (up/down) of over 250 servers and hundreds of switch and router interfaces enterprise-wide. Custom alerts are used to notify application or server owners when a system is down or degraded.
  • Adding nodes is easy.
  • Status monitoring is efficient and timely (assuming your polling and alert settings are appropriate).
  • Dashboards are useful and highly customizeable.
  • It's a big animal and takes time and expertise to keep it running smoothly and maintain the monitored nodes. Don't assume some IT tech is going to use this in their spare time.
  • Because it is very complex, there can be a steep learning curve. Get some training from Loop1.
  • The web interface is slow. Probably can't be helped, but it is frustrating at times.
Very useful for monitoring large numbers of nodes, and it has great forecasting ability (this server will run out of disk in x days). It does not have detailed application awareness; you will need additional modules for websites, network flow, application monitoring, and log aggregation. Alarm tuning is almost an art form; you will need to spend time tuning alarms or they will become noise and get ignored.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use NPM to monitor our various nodes across the company.
  • The Dashboard features quickly enable us to evaluate where we are for the day and give a quick look into how clients feel about both the service they receive.
  • SolarWinds features a pooling system that lets you install SolarWinds in as many servers as you want besides SolarWinds. You never restrict yourself to the database with this pooling method.
  • I dislike its licensing and is a little bit costly as compared to other monitoring tools.
  • Not really fair but there is a lot to configure. That is because there is a lot it can do. It is important to spend the time and get full use of it. It can be overwhelming in the beginning while you are setting things up and very time-consuming.
We like the Intelligent maps that show the status of each location. The Netpath has helped in major troubleshooting, we also like the advanced alerting mechanism. The Netflow Traffic analyzer is another cool feature. In short, NPM helps us detect, diagnose and resolve network issues.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It was implemented to monitor systems and environments for the entire enterprise.
  • Customizable to my needs.
  • Reliable.
  • Managing alerts is terrible
  • You must manage your own server, and database for the solution.
It is appropriate for Enterprise environments, not for small companies. For SMB, there are less expensive options.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
AVOXI uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor across the organization. It is used by the Customer Support and Productions Ops departments. Production Ops uses it internally to monitor the uptime and performance of all network objects in our environment. Customer Support uses it primarily to prove the availability of resources and also to monitor some customer equipment and proactively alert customers to problems on their end.
  • Monitor performance. Receiving alerts for latency issues in real-time enables us to track down the root cause more quickly. Recently it helped us discover that an off-site backup copy was not being properly throttled, thereby causing call quality issues weekly at 3 AM.
  • Drill down to find details. In the previous example (weekly performance hit) we started at an edge device, saw the traffic spike, traced it to the access switch, and then the switch port. That made it easy to correlate the source of the traffic with the perceived symptom.
  • Graphs over time. Again, using the previous example, we were able to use the graphs and look back over the history of the two ports involved (inbound to the edge of one datacenter and outbound from the offending application) to prove correlation as opposed to a one-time coincidence.
  • The hardware resources are a bit steep. We have had to restart services a few times when website performance deteriorated over time.
  • Being tied to Microsoft is a negative for us. It just seems wrong to have to run one MS SQL Server along with a few dozen MySQL boxes.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor works well at a network level to identify traffic patterns. Having it enables us to spot trends before they become issues. I can identify specific devices that are having or causing problems, but it doesn't help to find the specific problem with the device itself. That's job security, I guess. We can't expect the tool to do 100% of our work.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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) .
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