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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 96)
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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 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
  • Provide different kind of alerts
  • 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
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.
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.
Jesse Bridgelal | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Excellent Network Reporting
  • Great performance monitoring with various KPIs
  • Proactive alerting with alerts when approaching set thresholds
  • 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.
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.
Ravi Khanchandani | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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
  • 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
  • NetPath scaling for very large environments like Banks
  • Drag and drop functionality in Reporting
  • Drag and drop functionality in Dashboards
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.
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 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
Best suited when you need eyes on servers and network traffic. For instance, for network traffic, based on NetFlow, you can see the different categories of traffic that use the most bandwidth. For example, cloud storage. Via SNMP, you get to see server resource usage, i.e., how much CPU is being used throughout the day.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
By customizing our alerts and monitoring paths out of our Company to popular destinations like Google, Microsoft, Netflix, etc., our NOC has uncovered routing issues external to our network. We cooperate and provide feedback to our vendors and network providers to help isolate and identify potential service-affecting interruptions prior to issues affecting our Subscribers.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is well suited for large organizations with many devices. I appreciate the fact that I can monitor all of our devices very easily. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is great at detecting hardware errors allowing us to react and replace devices at the first signs of hardware errors. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is great at monitoring bandwidth usage which helps determine which links are saturated and allows us to respond and rectify the problem.
January 18, 2022

SolarWinds

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We monitor status and utilization at 13000 retail locations.
  • Up/Down status
  • Bandwidth utilization
  • Alerting
  • auto discovery
  • UI performance
Easy to use. I wish it was easier to auto-discover when new interfaces were used on existing nodes. I also wish the web interface had a faster response.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) provides us with very good insight to our network. I've done proofs of concept for applications costing upwards of half a million USD, and they were not significantly better. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a phenomenal value. Aside from all the troubleshooting work we do with it, historical utilization is used by management for capacity planning. The Universal Device Poller allows us to get information that is not readily exposed. One of the problems we addressed with it was life-cycle management.
December 08, 2020

NPM in PNW!!!

Jayson E. Conry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
My company currently uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to monitor the entire organization's network hardware both physical and virtual. We have multiple regions across the Pacific Northwest. It has been very supportive of all of our processing that ties into third party vendors' SaaS processes and appropriately triages any and all issues within the internal network and external tunnels.
  • Network Mapping. The Network map is an absolute must for any multi regional organization that requires a holistic view of how the networking SLAs are being met.
  • Network Atlas should be a process added to the console instead of having to access it to build the maps on the servers.
Cisco Nexus switches are better suited for NPM than most other tools.
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.
November 11, 2020

An EKG for your servers

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor 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
  • Dashboards to give you a real-time view into the health of your systems
  • Reporting capabilities are well sorted
  • Need a more intuitive way to configure interfaces between nodes in map editor
  • I would also like to see an improved method for auto-provisioning of server monitoring tools
  • Cost
I am very likely to recommend this because it saves the time and trouble of setting up alerts. The alerts can be customized and that makes the value justifiable. It makes my life as an IT professional much more effective. I would use it at any company I work for.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds to monitor the health of our LAN and WAN and to get early warnings when servers are having trouble. The email alerts have been very reliable. Additionally, I have found that the major components (switch stacks, etc.) are easier to see using NPM. The Syslog feature is also very useful as it is much easier than going to the switch to get the syslogs.
  • Clean and logical layout means you get in and out quickly
  • Easy to set up the status monitoring (SNMP, pings, etc.)
  • Easy to make a graphical presentation of the network
  • It takes a long time to load when I ask for the monitoring UI.
  • It would be nice to have links to tutorial videos within the UI.
  • I wonder if Atlas could be cloud-based so we don't need to host it.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is ideal for a system like ours where we have one firewall and three discrete LANs. We can monitor every switch and port in one LAN and see the interface to the other LANs, without displaying them. So it offers a simpler troubleshooting and monitoring experience for us. If we had one flat network, I'd probably appreciate it just as much, though
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.
Justin Benner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor as our main monitoring software suite used throughout our whole company. We have it broken out for various departments for their appropriate uses. By consolidating down to the single monitoring system it has made the overall management and implementation of the tools throughout the company much easier and takes fewer people taking care of the system.
  • Nice single pane of glass view of whole network
  • The ability to tailor each department with their own tools to use
  • Lots of out of the box features that just work
  • Quickly and easily run down issues with lots of different scenarios throughout the network
  • The ability to create custom pollers for unique situations
  • Some of the tools are a little cumbersome to get the hang of
  • The need to learn to use the SWQL language for advanced monitoring and reporting
  • The cost compared to other companies out there
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is very versatile for companies large and small with the need for network and systems monitoring. They have created some great tools for all aspects of the IT world from layer 1 on up. The only complaint I have now is that it requires a lot of customization to use for facilities monitoring, environmental, etc.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by Telstra for offering monitoring solutions to other customers.
  • Modern Dashboards
  • Interface details
  • Node details
  • CPU, MEM & VOL capacity forecast
  • Audit log
  • Errors dashboard
  • API integration with Meraki, Velocloud, Viptella
  • Orion DB tables dedicated to Meraki, Velocloud, Viptella data fields
  • UML flows for NPM
  • Documentation of SD-WAN integration
  • Feature requests are very slow to be implemented.
SolarWinds NPM is well suited for customers having traditional SNMP, ICMP, & WMI communications. SolarWinds NPM is not an SD-WAN monitoring ready product. A growing trend in recent times is for customers to move into SD-WAN solutions. However, SolarWinds is not changing or adapting to new trends in the market, even the pricing of SolarWinds has increased considerably in recent times.
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
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.
Ted Sadler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company provides maintenance and break-fix services for outdoor, carrier-scale transportation technology networks. With SolarWinds, we are able to get in front of issues when devices fail or otherwise invisible network issues occur, before our clients even start to notice the problems. With over 500 outdoor locations statewide and thousands of devices to support, NPM allows us both a birds-eye view of network health and an on-the-ground, detailed perspective into individual devices, subnets, and segments of the network and how they perform.
  • Providing detailed and high-level views of network device and infrastructure performance
  • Providing an intuitive and informative user interface
  • Generating flexible, customizable reports for any combination of devices imaginable
  • Providing highly extensible device metadata categories and custom properties
  • SolarWinds is an expensive platform with steep initial and recurring costs (if maintenance/update services are purchased).
  • The amount of information in the Orion interface can be intimidating if you don't know what specific information you're looking for.
Network Performance Monitor is especially well-suited for:
  • Monitoring the uptime, latency, statistics, and other metrics for individual device performance
  • Reporting on device availability and metadata
  • Identifying problem areas of the network down to specific interfaces
but is less suited for things like:
  • Network/IT device asset management
  • Small-scale business operations
Overall, SolarWinds NPM is an enterprise-grade, state/national scale platform suited very well for analyzing the performance and problem areas of large networks, but is not really meant for the "IT helpdesk" kind of user device asset management that some other platforms also do. Orion has those kinds of features available in other products, however. Also, SolarWinds would not be very appropriate for small, single-building, single-network kinds of operations.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds NPM is being used by several teams in our IT department including the networking team and various application support teams. It is used to proactively monitor the network, look for outages, and troubleshoot application performance issues for our end users.
  • Monitors and alerts on network device metrics
  • Adding a device is easy and device templates are accurate
  • The user interface is intuitive and packs information densely on the screen for easy use.
  • Configuring and monitoring at the port level can be confusing. Often level 1 technicians misconfigure what ports actually need to be monitored. More common on larger or more complex devices such as core switches.
  • The top-level menus in NPM (and all of SolarWinds Orion tools) are not always intuitive.
For any size network needing performance monitoring as well as up/down statistics and all types of network performance alerts, SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a great tool.

If you need detailed measurements over very short time intervals, SolarWinds NPM is not the tool you need. It is best suited at a macro view over minutes/hours/days.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds NPM at my currently company is only being evaluated and utilized by a small subset of our whole organization. We are currently deploying and utilizing NPM and NCM as a proof of concept to gain support for an eventual full migration to the remaining aspects of our team.
  • Building service groups based on multiple aspects and technologies allowing for monitoring of a full service as opposed to the individual aspects of it.
  • Ability to pull and organize information with custom snmp pullers means we are able to monitor and report on any event that occurs in our network.
  • The ability to create additional pages and gather custom information to create simple and easily accessible locations vast improves our ability to understand and react to network related events.
  • Custom page layout in NPM only allows for vertical columns of information, limiting your ability to display information in the best manner.
  • Universal Device Poller is a separate application that would be much more user friendly if it was incorporated directly into the NPM web interface.
  • High Availability failover solution requires additional licensing from third parties to utilize.
Solarwinds and NPMs graphic solution is rather limited in your ability to display information in the manner you prefer. I feel the graphing and reviewing historical performance graphs to be one of the least developed features of NPM. The network topology maps have recently made large improvements and is a great step forward from the old Atlas Map program.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds NPM has been a very helpful tool, we use it to monitor devices and network links and the performance and uptime of these and to be honest, without it I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. We utilize this from an IT departmental side as well as feed data to our development team.
  • Traffic monitoring.
  • Link performance.
  • Device uptime.
  • Detailed reporting.
  • Price.
  • More integration options.
  • User friendly interface for juniors.
Site to Site Link Monitoring
Monitoring the link between your branches is vital for your production systems and performance reporting.

Network Device Port Monitoring
Monitoring the ports on your switches for throughput and if they are up or down is very helpful.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds NPM to monitor our radio and fiber infrastructure. We have a wide range of equipment and have been impressed by the ease with which we have been able to add most of these to the NPM environment. We monitor interface status for connectivity and usage, with alarms being monitored by in-house engineers, who have been able to pick up on changes in trends and escalate as needed.
  • The clarity of the NPM interface is unparalleled in the level of information displayed. This is often a challenge on other monitors when there is such a variety of equipment being monitored.
  • Adding a node to be monitored is generally a stress-free process, with a lot of configuration available, but only the bare minimum being compulsory.
  • The graphing provided for nodes provides us with enough knowledge to prevent noticeable failures in many cases. No need to click too many buttons.
  • I have found the configuration of alerts to be somewhat confusing at times. I like to have as few required fields as possible to start with, and tailor the alert from that.
NPM gives a great overview of the goings-on in a network. The amount of information we want to see is easily found, and when we find we are missing some detail, that is also added with a minimal amount of effort. The mapping options are also great and allow us to see when different areas may be affected by localized power or other issues.
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