Item: SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Rating: 10
Author: Nick Darnell

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using NPM to monitor 121 Cisco witches distributed throughout our environment. It helps us to immediately determine if a switch has failed in a data closet or if a power outage has occurred. We also use the statistical data captured by NPM to determine capacity planning and gather current usage statistics.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Capacity Planning
Outage Reporting
Config Backups

Cons

Creating the reporting for port security violations is difficult.

Return on Investment

Our response time is decreased when NPM monitors our switches.
Config backups allow us to quickly deploy replacement switches.

Alternatives Considered

I have not tried any other monitoring applications so I do not have a comparison.

Other Software Used

Cisco Webex Support, VMware Workstation, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Office 2016, Microsoft Exchange, Cisco AnyConnect

Likelihood to Recommend

In a large scale environment, NPM is extremely useful for monitoring your switches to determine if they are functional or not. We have very frequent power outages, and NPM has quite often informed us and we are onsite before employees have the chance to report an outage.

Comments

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Network performance monitor Usage in a medium scale environment.