Saving time with SolarWinds NPM
November 02, 2018

Saving time with SolarWinds NPM

Emanuel Maldonado | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

Currently our IT department uses NPM to monitor the campus wired and wireless infrastructure, servers, security cameras, environmental monitors, and VoIP. Our department is small and the advanced alerting helps us to identify problems quickly.

Pros

  • The web interface is completely customizable. Each member of the IT team uses a view that suits them. The sysadmins use a view that focuses on VMware while my view focuses on network switches and traffic.
  • The alerting on NPM is excellent and easy to configure. We even created an alert for a device that is supposed to remain disconnected from the network. The possibilities are endless.
  • We have created device pollers combined with custom metering for each Smart UPS on campus. When a building suffers a power outage this poller allows us to inform management how much time is left before the building loses VoIP and WiFi services.

Cons

  • NPM can work in conjunction with their Network Engineer toolset. But only a few of the tools are available to use this way. If the integration was completed then SolarWinds would have a real winner.
  • I don't have those statistics.
SolarWinds goes light-years beyond checking for a simple up or down status. We have had the case where a network switch is up and passing packets but no longer providing PoE. NPM let's us know.
It all comes down to making the best use of our time. Typically users would rather use your time than their own. For example, in the case of poor database performance a DB administrator will most likely blame the network. They would like you to use your time to provide evidence to the contrary. This will allow them to use their time for something other than troubleshooting their server or database. Once the innocence of the network is proven then and only then will the DB administrator look elsewhere for a solution. In the meantime clients suffer longer and more time is lost. Solarwinds NPM saves time. If the network is performing as it should it only takes a moment to verify and share the information. If there is a network issue NPM will have already sent an alert long before the DB admin makes the call. What more could you want?

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
8.6
Automated network device discovery
10
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
10
Alerts
10
Network capacity planning
10
Network mapping
5
Customizable reports
5
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
7
Hardware health monitoring
10

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