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SolarWinds Network Monitor Performs
November 20, 2015

SolarWinds Network Monitor Performs

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is being used by IT. It is being used to monitor network traffic and to see where any bottlenecks appear. It is very helpful in finding out where potential issues in the network can come from.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor has been a great help in determining how to change our network layout to make it optimized.

  • Great traffic analysis
  • Helps to see where potential bottlenecks are
  • Helpful in developing networking strategies
  • In-depth packet analysis
  • Recommendations on networking setups
  • Recommendations on optimization
  • Gained back time on finding out network statistics
  • Easily created a network map
  • Less time spend diagnosing issues on the network
Mainly used Wireshark for packet analysis. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor added a great value as we were given loads more information on how the network was performing. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor also gave us the ability to better manage our network and see where all bottlenecks appeared and how to fix them. It gave us the ability to also track devices on the network.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is well suited in finding out where potential bottlenecks come from. It is very helpful when redesigning how a network is set up as you can view the information and create a new network design to fully optimize the network. It gives a great view on how traffic is flowing and where changes need to be made.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
9.0
Automated network device discovery
10
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
10
Alerts
10
Network capacity planning
9
Packet capture analysis
8
Network mapping
8
Customizable reports
9
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
8
Hardware health monitoring
8

Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

3 - 

Network Administrator, Software Developer and Systems Analyst.

The network administrator uses it to help find issues on the network, find out ways to set up better workflows in the network and monitor traffic for any odd traffic that is coming through.

The software developer uses it to find out which IP addresses are available and also finds out how his SQL traffic is affecting the network.

2 - Basic networking knowledge is required to use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor. A higher level of knowledge is necessary if you want to reconfigure your network. It is a great tool that helps people who have a small networking background find out issues that are happening in the network and possible ways to resolve them.
  • Network traffic
  • Finding bottlenecks
  • Seeing where potential problems are
  • Monitoring where traffic is going and coming from
  • Better network configurations
  • Moved around switches to give better performance
  • Changed the way that VLANs were set up
  • Found that some of our traffic was being hindered with the way that we set up our VLANs
  • Network Mapping
  • Network traffic analysis as we bring up more sites
  • Deploying better services to our customers
We gave it a 10 because there seems to be nothing on the market that comes close to all the features that SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor gives us. All of the features that come with SolarWinds helps to make our IT department more efficient and gives a better ROI for our company.

Evaluating SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
Great features. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor provided a great way to map out our network and help us determine how everything is was working in conjunction with each other. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor also gave us a big ROI as it saved our IT personnel a lot of time as they did not have to do tedious work of low level network tracing.
If we were to do it all over again we would have gone in with more questions. A lot of the SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor features are self explanatory but there are more that we would have evaluated a little bit more, i.e. the SAN monitor and health monitor for our SAN storage networks.