NPM is a great tool for your networking team!
Rating: 10 out of 10
March 21, 2023
FS
Vetted Review
Verified User
6 years of experience
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
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
- Netpath services
- Wireless stats & reports
- Orion Maps
- Orion Dashboards
- Orion Network Overview
95%
9.5
- Able to predict the future with the Forecast reports.
- with NPM I can monitor the WAN circuits then decide if it needs a upgrade or not.
- Able to provide quick responses for alerts, reducing the MTTR for some services
I didn't test other products
20
Network Operation Team, Help desk Level 1 & 2 and the Management Level (reports only)
1
Knowledge about the current network, Basic Network skills, and familiar with SolarWinds features and Dashboard.
- API Poller support
- Netpatch services
- Orion Maps
- Orion Dashboards
- Able to forecast upgrades & downgrades
- Able to prevent issues
- Able to be proactive about issues
- To Determine potential outside network issues (using Netpath services)
- To share the Orion Maps with Customers/Partners
Yes
Nagios - We are replacing Nagios with Solarwinds in order to have more Features provided by Solarwinds, better support, and better/faster learning for the engineers.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
The NPM has fantastic features like Netpath that are helping us to get issues and monitor better our network.
Probably I will increase my scores as I can see the support team is now able to understand and give the right support for non-Cisco devices. So far so good for all other tools/features.
- Implemented in-house
No
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled
The change management understands that Solarwinds in most cases is just monitoring the environment and most of the actions made are included previously in a CAB discussion.
- Orion Alerts (sometimes required more skills to build it up)
- Vendors not supported
- MIB SNMP not working for some systems/vendors
- Online Training
Yes, we followed the best practices provided during the SolarWinds training.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
NA.
Not yet. Currently, we just have the Network environment under Solarwinds. No reason to have this support for this moment.
Yes
Yes, I have flagged an issue with Orion NOC. It was fixed fast by the support team.
When a opened a ticket regarding NPM, they could sort the issue and in the final suggested running a Performance Tool to get the Health of my SolarWinds installation. Great Suggestion :)
- Netpath services
- Orion Dashboards
- Network Overview
- Orion Maps
- Orion Reports (sometimes requires more skills to build it up)
- Orion Alerts (sometimes requires more skills to build it up)
- Jira
- Splunk
- Azure
The documentation on SolarWinds is good but sometimes you need to invoke support to help you.
- Jira
- Nagios
For Jira, 100% sure because Solarwinds & Jira have an integration module available. Not sure about Nagios as they are SolarWinds concurrent.
- File import/export
- API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
Most of the integration as paid. Maybe a good approach leaves available all integrations as it can encourage people to buy and integrate their products with Solarwinds.
SLA for cases;
Discounts to acquire additional modules.
Discounts to acquire additional modules.
NA
Yes
Yes, all upgrades made were smooth and causing minimal down time to the users
- Following the current Application version
- Cover bugs & vulnerabilities
- Under a code that the support will probably suggest being
- Fix bugs
- Fix Vulnerabilities
- Make the application faster
- Provide more facilities & tools
No
No