SolarWinds NPM is a great tool for the price
February 15, 2019
SolarWinds NPM is a great tool for the price
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
We are using SolarWinds NPM to monitor and diagnose sites with high transit and receive network usage information. We use this tool to find the devices using massive amounts of data and then can decide if this is business related or something else. The ability for NPM to segregate sites by a location code as well as devices assigned to the site helps a lot with monitoring the overall environment. It helps when users complain of network slowness.
- We had an all-hands meeting a little bit ago, and the video was choppy and sound quality was horrible. We were able to log into NPM and look at our primary site and see the transmit was at 99%. We were able to click on the node and drill down to the top 5 conversations and see what was consuming the pipe. From there we were able to remediate the issue.
- We have a small site that users were complaining of slow internet traversing. We came to find out the traffic of SAN replication was running longer than normal due to a massive amount of intake of new data from the previous day, causing replications to run longer than normal.
- The ability to save configurations into NPM is a great feature in case of failure.
- The tool could be a little easier to do initial setup and discovery with.
- We have used NPM for four years now. And over the period, it has helped us identify multiple events causing performance degradation. We had one incident where a site could not do anything on the network, open folders, open files or even browse the internet. We went to NPM and it took some time to poke around to figure out what was causing the issue. There was not a single instance to point to but multiple. Come to find out, our internal user backup tool was upgrading all clients to a more recent version. This was a small change which, at the time of approval, was non-impactful. However, the realization that all the clients then would check back into the server and transmit data all at once was unknown.
- Consistent monitoring of two sites and 96% consumption of pipeline. The VPN tunnel customers from on-site could not do anything. Come to find out CommVault replications were consuming all the Data with its initial sync. This initial sync was over 4TB of data, so it took a while. Even when the replication was throttled it took more time and consumed about the same bandwidth