Item: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Rating: 8
Author: Chris Short

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SolarWinds NPM internally to monitor uptime and latency between our network segments. We are able to easily isolate and find errors in individual switch ports as well as be alerted in real time of any latency issues above thresholds.

We also use NetPath at our customer sites to provide real time tracking of network hops to various endpoints, which allows for better troubleshooting and isolation of routing or other network issues.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Response time threshold and alerting
Network tracing over public connections
Individual switch port error and discard reporting

Cons

NetPath alerts can be improved for changing conditions. The "Unknown" state alerts aren't very useful
Better categories of internal resources to isolate and track specific segments

Return on Investment

NetPath has allowed us to be proactive with regional network issues to avoid large numbers of client issues at once.
Default alerts have allowed us to know when a network link has dropped or gone below a service threshold.
Insights has allowed us to track switch resources to ensure that we are growing our equipment properly.

Likelihood to Recommend

Network Performance Monitor is well suited for internal environments where network response time matters. This would include SAN and clustered resources, complex multilayer switching environments and sites with multi-location routing (e.g. we have switches that are 800 miles apart where we need to ensure certain ms response times for our DR objectives).

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

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