Expensive and clunky, but effective for basic monitoring of large environments.
March 05, 2019
Expensive and clunky, but effective for basic monitoring of large environments.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor
SolarWinds NPM is our current solution for monitoring the health of all of our network and servers on our premises. We use NPM for the basics such as up/down, CPU, RAM, and disk utilization. We also use the Network Sonar Discovery to aid us in quickly adding new nodes. We pair NPM with SAM for check-based application monitoring on many of our servers.
- SolarWinds NPM has built-in support for a wide array of device types out of the box.
- It is easy to add new nodes to your environment with the Network Sonar Discovery.
- There is a large community of users that can help you when you're in need.
- Account representatives are always changing and sales people are always harassing you to buy more. They don't listen to you when you bring this up.
- The user interface is very dated and a pain to navigate.
- The ability to format your alerts is very limited. This can cause problems, especially when alerting external services with a REST API due to invalid JSON.
- SolarWinds is currently one of the most expensive products on the market and we are evaluating alternatives that are hopefully better and lower cost.
- We have invested a lot of time in creating custom check-based monitors for the SAM component and feel a bit "stuck" with SolarWinds for the time being.
- The cost of new polling engines has ruled out the possibility of adding new ones to each of our geographical regions in our cloud environment.
SolarWinds vs NewRelic is apples to oranges. New Relic provides a lot of metrics for our applications that NPM was never designed to do. However, NewRelic Infrastructure provides a much better visualization (a closer to real-time look) of hardware utilization than NPM does.
PRTG was evaluated briefly, but it was determined to be not big enough for our environment. NPM also seemed to do everything it did, and better.
PRTG was evaluated briefly, but it was determined to be not big enough for our environment. NPM also seemed to do everything it did, and better.