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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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Popular Features
- Alerts (228)8.989%
- Hardware health monitoring (215)8.888%
- Network monitoring (231)8.787%
- Customizable reports (212)7.979%
Pricing
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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Why I Recommend SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
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- Competitors
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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
SolarWinds NPM Video
Network Performance Monitor overview
SolarWinds NPM Integrations
- SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
- SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA)
- SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
- SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
- SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)
- SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD)
- SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (WPM)
SolarWinds NPM Competitors
- LogicMonitor
- OpenText Network Node Manager i (NNMi)
- Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Management
- Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
- ManageEngine OpManager
- Nagios Core
- Progress WhatsUp Gold
- DX Infrastructure Manager (formerly CA Unified Infrastructure Management)
- Paessler PRTG
SolarWinds NPM Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Windows® Server 2016; SQL Server 2016 SQL Server 2016 SP1 SQL Server 2017 (including installations on Linux) |
| Mobile Application | No |
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.
LogicMonitor, OpenText Network Node Manager i (NNMi), and Broadcom DX Unified Infrastructure Management are common alternatives for SolarWinds NPM.
Reviewers rate Alerts highest, with a score of 8.9.
The most common users of SolarWinds NPM are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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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!
- Business Problems Solved
- Recommendations
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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
(101-125 of 236)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
August 27, 2019
SolarWinds for K-12
- Single pane of glass for my entire infrastructure.
- Configurable text and email notifications if systems go down or have errors.
- Port Utilization with errors and discards.
- It would be nice if there was a way the interface details could give you a report of ports not in use based on the life of the switch, not the last reboot.
August 27, 2019
Great Product - Would buy it again and again.
- System monitoring
- System inventory
- Notification
- Better performance of screen refreshes for network maps
August 27, 2019
SolarWinds NPM - Good product, but watch out for the add ons
- Generally speaking, NPM does alerting very well. It has a lot of flexibility in how to build and deliver the alerts.
- Being able to do HTTP POST on alerts helps integrate it with modern tools like Slack and OpsGenie, even if it's not a baked-in integration.
- The ability to get all relevant device data from one page (and a couple of tabs) is nice, and there is customization available within that view.
- What I deem as some of the better features in NPM come from integration with other paid SolarWinds tools, such as NTA, NCM, etc. It can be a bit disappointing to look at the marketing material, find something you really want to do, only to discover it requires buying yet another product.
- SolarWinds licensing isn't great. Some of the caveats around "you need x number of interfaces licensed for NPM, so you need that many for this other product" make the suite less and less attractive and the total cost continues to climb.
- There's essentially 3 generations of User Interface built into the current product. Some tools, like syslog, still exist on the old Windows-application-run-from-the-server model and are in the web interface, most things are in the web interface that's been around for a while, and now they are integrating new features only in the newer-style web UI. There's no consistency to those UIs, so it looks and feels like 3 different products.
- The Universal Device Poller is a great way to get functionality out of NPM for products without baked-in support. But there are still some things that seem like table stakes that require the Universal Device Poller - monitoring APC UPS devices for example. Other products (including open source) do this really well since just about everybody needs to monitor stuff like that. Years later, NPM still relies on the pollers.
- Sorry, but I hate the graphs. I prefer rrdtool-style graphs, and there is some hope for the future in the new style web UI.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Granular and custom alerting.
- OID Monitoring and historical data / SNMP.
- Support for all devices or custom devices.
- Online support articles (KBs) could be better.
- Perfstack isn't great.
- Documentation for detailed things is lacking or non-existent.
August 07, 2019
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor -- Increases Monitoring, Increases Performance
- Monitor Uptime
- Provide Historical Resource Utilization Metrics
- Provide an API for automation
- High Resource Requirements
- Historical Measurements are Averaged-Out (Rather than exact)
- Occasional False Positives
August 02, 2019
SolarWinds NPM: The performance of a lifetime!
- Detailed Alerting - Alerting can be setup for a specific timeframe with ports for troubleshooting.
- Mapping - It can identify switches' locations based off of specific information.
- NetPath - Identify specific device ports causing issues.
- Software upgrades are not easy. Perpetual software without a maintenance agreement cannot be kept during an upgrade.
- Have to manually add third party hardware IDs. Don't have support for Palo Alto Firewalls.
- Licensing structure.
August 01, 2019
NPM a great Solarwinds product
- Alarms
- Maps and topologies
- Manage devices and get real-time statistics about hardware
- I think they need to polish the pollers, sometimes they crash.
July 30, 2019
SolarWinds Does it with Style
- The up and down feature is great. Sometimes we missed the things it points out.
- CPU usage information on the virtual systems we use is critical.
- We like the network discovery feature, it does an awesome job.
- Storage resource helps a lot.
- Netflow Traffic Analyzer could really use an upgrade, such as including the ability to do Layer 3 flows not just Layer 2.
- Better job in the update department
- IP address manager takes too long to discover. I use a standalone IP address manager and it works better than the one in the suite.
- Easy to use but contains a lot of depth for power users
- Reasonable price point to get started
- Good support model and great community
- Alert set up can be confusing
May 15, 2019
A product that does what it says and more
- Network Visibility
- Change Tracking
- View Network changes
- Nothing we would add.
April 30, 2019
SolarWinds Network Device provides in-depth monitoring
- Custom dashboards
- Good for a network using SNMP/SNMPv2.
- Alerts and monitoring
- Dashboards require dedicated time to setup.
- Not easy for new applications.
April 30, 2019
A good and reliable tool for infrastructure.
- Maintains resource status - CPU, interfaces, etc.
- Ties in well with other modules in SolarWinds.
- More integration with other tools like DNS for IP resolution.
- Sometimes data is not gathered correctly or adequately.
- Using SNMP to automatically discover my network devices, while collecting the network information to produce a detailed network inventory.
- The automatic discovery of the connection between L2 and L3 devices.
- Using NetPath across the hybrid clouds is a time saver and pinpoints where to focus resources to fix issues.
- Many of the functionality are Cisco-centric and in a mixed vendor environment, this causes some issues.
- Limitation of the SD WAN tools.
- The database of NPM should really run on Oracle not SQL.
April 22, 2019
Just the right tool for the job.
- The reporting tools can provide a wealth of transparency, especially for management. The ability to have all the reports I need in my inbox first thing in the morning is invaluable.
- The customized dashboard is particularly useful for the various roles that our users have. This includes everyone from our system administrators that needs stats on servers to managers that need to see at a high level how the environment is performing.
- Consolidated logging from multiple environments is a great feature as well. Whether it from legacy systems that do not support email alerting to appliances in other time zones, a central place to troubleshoot an enterprise-wide issue where you don't have to constantly recalculate time offsets is a huge bonus.
- NPM also allows for customized alerting with just about any technology that is available.
- I would like to see a component that can capture real-time data from an interface and write a database or even a file for short term diagnostics.
- Provides great summary views of the network and system status, including a good selection of 'Top 10' summaries for easy review of developing or current issues.
- Allows for good segmentation by site and type of site for more granular views.
- Excellent log history, allowing for the discovery of previous issues to determine if the device or site has had similar problems in the past.
- Adding devices for monitoring requires real-time discovery. If the device isn't available, it can't be manually added to NPM, which makes it difficult to monitor equipment deployed to a remote site as soon as it is connected.
- It can be difficult to create monitoring, especially for some proprietary devices requiring custom SNMP MIBs that don't use the public branch of the SNMP tree. We have found this a barrier to monitoring many IP cameras that we would prefer to monitor centrally.
April 19, 2019
NPM SolarWinds and our experience
- Gives snapshot of pings in the network now and an average across a time span
- Easy to set up
- Easy to use
- Nothing that I can currently think of...
April 19, 2019
NPM and NCM
- Monitoring
- Backup
- Recovery
- More support for extreme devices.
- Child dependencies
April 19, 2019
Robust piece of software
- Alerting
- Mapping
- Reporting
- Setup support team
- Easier access to tools
- Cleaner web Interface
- VM monitoring
April 16, 2019
The great WAN grapher
- It's good at displaying graphs
- The graphs and displays are very customizable
- It's an integrated solution to the monitoring tool you know and love
- The problems are less with NPM, and more with the difficulty of configuring devices to accurately use it.
- Solarwinds as a product itself needs to improve performance.
- NPM should be able to self deploy.
April 04, 2019
NPM for a great monitoring solution
- Bandwidth utilization
- Proactive alerting
- Top 10 network issues
- By adding a device you add ALL nodes on that device. You must retroactively remove these AFTER the device has been added. There should be an option in the setup a process to remove nonessential nodes when adding a device.
March 29, 2019
NPM - not just another tool.
- Monitoring uptime of devices, being that you can tailor how often you want to poll the device or by simply doing ICMP you know in seconds when a device went down.
- Configuration compares features for network devices easily and allows us to spot any config difference that might have occurred after a device went down unexpectedly after a power outage.
- Inventory collection, you can quickly create a report to poll for inventory within your organization but you can edit it in ways that you can get exactly what you are looking for, its very flexible when it comes down to playing with the MIBs on Cisco devices.
- Node management is very easy as well, you can filter by a number of different parameters, some of them are out of the box and you can even create your own. In our organization we created a custom property called "Region" so that way we can see devices based on the region they are located at (Americas, EMEA, APAC)
- Wireless heat maps are pretty hard to deploy, we managed to make one of them work but it's not an easy task.
- Filtering on syslog server could be improved, maybe adding command line capability to it.
- It would be nice to make it easier to execute custom scripts from Alerts action pane.
- Extremely intuitive and easy to use.
- Very robust and flexible with granular customization in how you want to set up the GUI interface.
- The GUI web application is very responsive and "snappy."
March 21, 2019
SolarWinds NPM: a must have tool for any network
- Complete picture overview of the network: useful for monitoring and identifying issues.
- Hardware monitoring: useful for identifying hardware issues.
- Detail level analysis: allows you to dive deep into interfaces.
- Transmit Discards: We noticed the "transmit discard" showing on SolarWinds NPM doesn't get updated correctly. We had "transmit discards" errors on Cisco interfaces, after clearing the errors on the interfaces, no matter how long we wait, we still see the counters on SolarWinds showing old information. We had to delete those interfaces and re-add them for the display counters on the NPM to show correctly.
- Uptime
- Performance history
- I would like to see Mac addresses for nodes.
- NetPath: great visualization of connectivity from application to network
- Error monitoring and active alerting are easy to setup and review.
- Wireless summary: provides real-time and client connectivity to troubleshoot wireless issues.
- More visuals for clients to network connectivity out of the box, instead of creating manual network atlas maps.
- Better tools for virtual network monitoring.
- More NetFlow options and reporting.