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NPM in PNW!!!
Updated December 08, 2020

NPM in PNW!!!

Jayson E. Conry | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

My company currently uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to monitor the entire organization's network hardware both physical and virtual. We have multiple regions across the Pacific Northwest. It has been very supportive of all of our processing that ties into third party vendors' SaaS processes and appropriately triages any and all issues within the internal network and external tunnels.
  • 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.
  • SolarWinds NPM allows the monitoring team and the network team better handle any of those pesky issues that creep up during the day. Consistency is kept and the speed at which it is able to triage is vital to keep up times on track for organizational SLAs.
SCOM is still tyring to figure it out. And issues with access to Cisco Nexus systems hinder it's ability to even be a comparable tool.
Cisco Nexus switches are better suited for NPM than most other tools.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
6.6
Automated network device discovery
5
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
7
Alerts
5
Network capacity planning
4
Packet capture analysis
4
Network mapping
10
Customizable reports
4
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
Not Rated
Hardware health monitoring
10

Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

50 - Most of our NPM users are network focused. NPM is primarily used at my company for trying to triage possible issues within our side of the network or our customers or vendors side. We need to know what if any interfaces are experiencing slowness or if certain geographic locations are in the throws of an outage.
4 - Our in house monitoring team handles all aspects of our enterprise level monitoring and alerting. Everyone on the team is well versed in all the enterprise monitoring and alerting tools. Specific skills are directly associated with training on the primary monitoring tools which Solarwinds is one and having up to date training within the tool as well as having a noticeable presence on thwack.
  • we have created a service map that gives us a quick view of our WAN landscape.
  • our primary NOC engineering board includes all NPM alerts as they appear as well as associated alerts that can quickly be added to an incident request.
  • The NPM Heat map has saved us several times when certain locations were having difficulty with WAN access or signal strength during very important meetings and conferences.
  • TBD as it is dependent on what our Network/Firewall teams are looking for alerting wise in the future.
NPM is our only enterprise level monitoring tool and we like to keep it that way!!! the last thing we want or need is to try and fix something that isn't broken. No need to try something that won't benefit our needs. We plan on staying put for a long time.