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Solarwinds NPM - Single pane network visibility
Updated January 24, 2020

Solarwinds NPM - Single pane network visibility

Jon Liedtke | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

We utilize NPM primarily for monitoring cisco switches. However, we also use it heavily to monitor other network devices as a means to first alert us of an outage or an issue. Our support team lives within the NPM dashboards throughout their work day.
  • NPM does a great job of alerting us to outages, latency, connectivity issues etc...
  • NPM provides historical data for monitored devices to the port level.
  • NPM provides our customers (we are an MSP) with real-time network information for their environment.
  • NPM is ideal for installations where systems are monitored on a local LAN. If you are monitoring over a WAN connection a lot of false positives can be generated based on latency and outages unrelated to the monitored environment.
  • The cost to add additional NPM polling engines is high in my opinion. If I could I would have a polling engine local to each LAN but it is cost prohibitive.
  • Upgrades of NPM in our case have presented some challenged, likely due to the age of our installation. Solarwinds tech support has been helpful in recommending an upgrade path forward.
  • NPM provides us with real time information necessary to the services we provide.
  • As we perform 90% or more of our monitoring over WAN connections this presents challenges.
We primarily selected NPM for its integration with our Solarwinds tools such as NCM, IPAM, SAM etc...
NPM is a good fit for monitoring of devices on a local LAN. If monitoring over WAN you will encounter some challenges.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
8.0
Network monitoring
8
Baseline threshold calculation
8
Alerts
8
Customizable reports
8
Hardware health monitoring
8

SolarWinds NPM ROI Questions

  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
Features are the primary need. I want visibility of everything.

Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

15 - NPM is our primary tool for monitoring and alerting of switches, compute and storage hardware, virtualization and domain controllers. Several individuals across all of these support teams receive and act on alerts daily.
2 - We hare two part time personnel that maintain NPM. Once it is configured and personnel trained on select administrative tasks routine maintenance/updates are the primary time consumer.
  • Memory usage trends which help with identifying memory leaks
  • Monitoring of additional hardware platforms.
  • Custom monitoring features (in house development)
We are always open to the possibility of something better. At this time NPM is that tool for us, but that could change.