Solarwinds NPM is Great!
October 11, 2018
Solarwinds NPM is Great!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
We use Solarwinds NPM within the Information Technology department as a way to identify highly utilized ports and devices, along with tracking down end-user device usage, and the possibility of end-users abusing service such as music streaming, video streaming, social media in general, etc. It has allowed us to troubleshoot, enforce policies, and complete capacity planning for the company.
- Showing the top-10 talkers is extremely helpful when hunting down bandwidth issues and hogs on the corporate network. This has assisted in resolving connection issues for many locations at once.
- Interfaces with high percent utilization has been a very large help with a NOC view that I have built, along with identifying devices that may be misbehaving (e.g. completing a backup outside of the schedule), along with end-user network usage.
- The switch stack view showing errors, discards, and usage also helps in troubleshooting network issues and improving performance via hunting down issues prior to end-users experiencing loss in performance and/or connectivity.
- Getting to a map involving a device can be a bit cumbersome, as you have to go into the device's page itself to pull up a map. Being able to go into a map section and look up a device would be a great help; just an idea for an improvement.
- NPM has had a positive ROI in helping with troubleshooting when a device has gone down, or is having hardware issues. The functionality of the NPM module has drastically shortened troubleshooting and repair times for hardware failures.
- I have also been able to identify end-users that have been using more bandwidth than roughly 70% of the rest of our company during a time period when multiple end users at multiple locations were complaining of slowness and response issues.
Solarwinds NPM has some of the highest level of integration, and worked with what we had already deployed for monitoring. We didn't have to modify device configurations prior to deployment, as they had already contained the entries within their configurations to allow the level of monitoring, alerting, etc. that were necessary for our purposes.