NPM Was great in our small data Center
January 18, 2019
NPM Was great in our small data Center
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
We were using SolarWinds as a performance monitor on incoming and outgoing traffic from our data center switches. It's allowed us very useful insight into our network and how it is performing. It allowed us to find multiple issues we may not have seen if we hadn't had the visibility NPM allowed us. The alert system is one of the best I've seen. Overall SolarWinds was a vital tool in our data center, allowing us to troubleshoot on the fly rapidly with precise information on issues.
- The dashboard is flexible, allowing you to choose what information you see.
- It has a very user-friendly GUI. I found it easy to give instruction on the use of the product to new employees who hadn't seen the product before.
- The drill down into information and point to point NetFlow data was great, and real time. This is a very important ability in any network monitoring tool. Matched with the fact that NPM could also collect from a variety of vendors who supported Netflow, but also vendors or situations where the product wasn't using NetFlow.
- The alert system and how NPM was able to tie into other SolarWinds products to assist with troubleshooting issues, making that process easy and streamlined.
- One thing that bothers me is the aesthetics. They seem a tad dated and not very optimized. While the data it provides is great.
- The amount of information it provides could be overwhelming if someone does not have an experienced engineer to guide them through what information they really need on the initial view.
- Maybe adding an interactive map using Google API would be great, I know some customers have already written a module for this it would be great if SolarWinds supported this in house.
- The database Orian uses ( this goes for any Orion product) can be a little sluggish if you don't have someone who knows SQL to clean and maintain the DB.
- The ROI has been positive. It's saved man-hours and headaches in troubleshooting issues that otherwise would have been very hard to discover.
- Using NPM we were able to save our annual uptime of 99%. We quickly discovered and had a fix for issues that would have otherwise been very hard to discover, costing man hours and time for customers.
We selected SolarWinds because our senior engineer was familiar with the product. We looked at several competitors and discovered they were priced higher than Solarwinds and did relatively not as much when compared. After a few demos with other vendors, we went with SolarWinds because of familiarity, price point, and overall low ramp-up time. Installing the product was easy, and setting it up in our environment was a non-issue. I would recommend SolarWinds to anyone looking for something that is smaller priced and heavily flushed out with features.