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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 Enterprises (1,001+ 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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

(26-50 of 236)
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June 30, 2021

Best Value

Shahab Razak | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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
April 01, 2021

Orion Review

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Alerting.
  • Great dashboards.
  • Scalable, you can control how much you do/don't monitor.
  • Could have more options for integration.
  • Learning the terminology can take some time.
March 08, 2021

Good system to have

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Automation.
  • Monitoring.
  • Reporting alerts.
  • Creating logs.
  • Presentation.
  • Pre-packaged monitoring items with other manufacturers.
  • Lower the cost.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
December 08, 2020

NPM in PNW!!!

Jayson E. Conry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Dwain Erhart | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
November 11, 2020

An EKG for your servers

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Reinier Kleipool | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • 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.
October 02, 2020

Monitoring at its finest

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • NPM is a great tool for alerting us when servers have a high CPU or memory utilization.
  • NPM monitors our firewalls to make sure they are not being over utilized.
  • NPM alerts us if any of our equipment happens to go down which is extremely beneficial.
  • When we had Cisco ASAs, NPM was able to gather information on those. We now have Cisco FTDs and wish we could do the same.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
September 25, 2020

SolarWinds NPM

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Justin Benner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The UI is dashing, user-friendly, yet powerful enough to do almost all the administrative tasks with the click of a button.
  • The deployment and configuration is made simple thanks to the step-by-step guiding wizards.
  • Reporting and KPI have the flexibility to run both simple and complex queries to get the intended output.
  • Sonar discovery is an easy and efficient method for on-boarding devices.
  • Dashboards and maps efficiently exhibit the entire topology and metrics.
  • Reporting needs to be improved as there are more misses than hits in obtaining the intended output. CA eHealth reporting was much better and robust in comparison.
  • MIBS certification is one more challenge as every-time we have to request support for the addition of OIDs. The UNDP option is great but needs to be more flexible and robust.
  • Bulk discoveries, especially subnet-based, choke up the entire CPU and memory processing on the virtual infra. The discovery Wizard stalls in between without showing any error message for a considerable amount of time.
  • Having multiple APEs makes administration (Patch, Upgrade, etc.) more difficult and complex. Any change in permissions on Application Folders and AV exclusion takes time in diagnosing and isolating the APE.
  • Rabbit MQ and Cortex services frequently get corrupt, and we are unable to find a permanent fix for that.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy and efficient to monitor network devices.
  • We can deploy large number of devices for monitoring in a short duration.
  • Has very good additional modules like Perfstack and Netpath.
  • Syslog viewer was more useful and easy to use tool. But it has been depreciated in the newer versions and Log viewer has some bugs and cannot be used effectively.
  • Trap viewer was more useful and easy to use tool. But it has been depreciated in the newer versions and Log viewer has some bugs and cannot be used effectively.
  • It would be great if we get a feature to monitor nodes for SNMP availability, currently we cannot monitor this parameter through polling.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • 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.
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