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SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a Great Tool
Updated January 14, 2020

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a Great Tool

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

We use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to monitor all of our network infrastructure here in our head office as well as at our colocation, executive office, and a couple remote call center sites. We have hundreds of devices and it helps us to monitor for performance and down issues and has been reliable in doing such.
  • Easy to maintain
  • Highly customizable interface
  • Easy to setup alerts
  • Every now and then the web interface starts getting really slow and the server needs reboot
  • Licensing needs to be simplified, there are so many moving parts and so many different licenses to maintain
  • Has a bug where interfaces show in "unknown" state and you have to remove/re-add the interfaces to make that stop or just ignore them
  • It has helped us maintain a high uptime for our users since the alerts work quickly to notify us of issues
  • Increased uptime has increased our user productivity thus saving us money
We have not used any other NPM products
If you are a small business there are likely some free tools you could use for basic monitoring of your environment. If you are a medium to large scale business however, SolarWinds is cost effective and a good solution to use to monitor everything. You can set it up to alert different groups of administrators based on all sorts of criteria.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
9.6
Automated network device discovery
10
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
Not Rated
Alerts
10
Network capacity planning
Not Rated
Packet capture analysis
10
Network mapping
10
Customizable reports
9
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
Not Rated
Hardware health monitoring
8

SolarWinds NPM ROI Questions

  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Vendor Reputation
Solarwinds was a company we had already heard of, they seemed to be popular in the NPM space, and their price was on par with what we were looking for.

Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

3 - Only our network team uses the product. Our engineer uses it to monitor and troubleshoot network devices such as routers and switches, I use it to monitor our Windows and VMWare servers, and my manager uses it to monitor both.
1 - I am the only person who supports the software. I am the one who set it up, updates it, troubleshoots issues, and works with support.
  • We haven't tried going off the beaten path using this software
  • We could use it for storage monitoring with their storage plug in
We haven't had a need to not renew the product year to year so I don't see us abandoning it anytime soon as it's worked well for our needs.

Evaluating SolarWinds NPM and Competitors

We are fine with our process, I don't think we need to change anything.

SolarWinds NPM Support

I haven't had to open many tickets with support but they always answer quick and resolve our problems quickly, they seem very knowledgeable and friendly
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
No - We have whatever standard support came with the product and it works just fine for us
I had a licensing issue and the technician tried to send me a tool that he wasn't normally supposed to give out to help me, and it was giving him trouble sending via email so he uploaded it to a file sharing site to let me download.

Using SolarWinds NPM

ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Adding a node is really easy
  • Setting up alerts are as simple or as complex as you want them to be
  • Sometimes the system gets slow and the server needs restarted