SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor Review
December 14, 2015
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
We monitor all of our Cisco network equipment across Canada using Netflow integrated with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor reports and real-time bandwidth monitoring. We are able to get a good picture of what staff and students are doing on the networks. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor and NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) allows us to observe diagnose and solve issues by seeing types of network traffic. Streaming video feeds, youtube, Netflix etc... and social media applications can impact performance. Using SolarWinds allows me to target specific devices and give this information to an onsite contact across Canada. They can then tell the end users to stop and also be sure the end users are within acceptable use policies for the company.
- Real-time bandwidth monitoring. Provides me an accurate picture so we can review and compare with ISP providers to help improve performance and or make recommendations for upgrades to sites. We have paying students that demand a decent connection regardless of the fact they may not be using the network for academic related surfing.
- Identify types of network traffic. Pinpoint repeat and consistent offending endpoints. Helping to create tighter ACLs and firewall rules to block unwanted sites.
- Notification of nodes down. This allows us as the network team to get a head start on solving ISP related issues. We have redundant connections involving 2 or more ISP's this allows us to easily detwrmine which ISP is down.
- Report generation. Creation of specific detailed reports is long winded and complex. It is not just drag and drop of elements you wish to monitor. Adding the ease for importing shared report templates from other users globally would be a huge improvement.
- Topographical network mapping of individual sites is too complicated. Make it so I can add to a blank template to one or more nodes then the interfaces of each node. At the end of the day there are other products for network mapping paid and unpaid that are doing a better job.
- I cannot speak for the board on ROI. The network team feels SolarWinds is a powerful product I cannot say if the executive team feels it is a good ROI.
- NetBrain and Intermapper
Intermapper is an easy to use product. We can create a network topology for each of our monitored sites by simply adding a node then use a simple network management protocol (SNMP) to probe and pull relevant information. NetBrain has a better network discovery element.