SolarWinds NPM - One stop shop for complete network monitoring
November 06, 2018

SolarWinds NPM - One stop shop for complete network monitoring

Mike Nostrom | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

NPM is used to monitor the health and performance of our entire networking environment. It helps us to detect and resolve network performance issues and outages to minimize end-user down time throughout our entire organization.

Pros

  • Helps us to monitor our infrastructure in an easy to view customizable console
  • PERFSTACK! This feature is extremely critical to troubleshooting problems
  • Plays nice with others - Nexus, ASA & F5

Cons

  • Filtering/searching options on syslogs and alerts.
  • Licensing Model - You need a good knowledge of what you're trying to see. Licensing is based on the number of elements being monitored (devices and interfaces). It can get costly so you want to have a good understanding of what areas you wish to target if Cost is an issue in your organization.
  • Speed. It can be slow when there are lots of devices monitored.
  • Spending less time troubleshooting the problem vs. fixing it
  • Less network downtime reduces idle employees
  • We usually know there is a problem before the end users. This allows us to help decrease unnecessary support desk calls.
We run SolarWinds NPM, Cisco Prime and VMWare vRealize Ops Manager for monitoring solutions. NPM and Cisco Prime are the only ones that monitor our network infrastructure. Cisco Prime has multiple configs whereas SolarWinds does not. Prime does not scale as well as SolarWinds does. I prefer to use SolarWinds over Prime as it allows me to see more of my infrastructure than Prime.
SolarWinds NPM is the eyes and ears of our network. It gives us global visibility into everything on our network and its status. Without it, we would be blind to issues and be reactive instead of proactive when things happen. We use it to check bandwidth constraints and also to troubleshoot outages to trace back to the root cause. We also use Cisco Prime for our networking environment because it does a few things better than NPM.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
8.1
Automated network device discovery
9
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
9
Alerts
7
Network capacity planning
8
Packet capture analysis
7
Network mapping
8
Customizable reports
6
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
8
Hardware health monitoring
9

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