Item: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Rating: 7
Author: Eric Quackenbush

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

AVOXI uses SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor across the organization. It is used by the Customer Support and Productions Ops departments. Production Ops uses it internally to monitor the uptime and performance of all network objects in our environment. Customer Support uses it primarily to prove the availability of resources and also to monitor some customer equipment and proactively alert customers to problems on their end.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Monitor performance. Receiving alerts for latency issues in real-time enables us to track down the root cause more quickly. Recently it helped us discover that an off-site backup copy was not being properly throttled, thereby causing call quality issues weekly at 3 AM.
Drill down to find details. In the previous example (weekly performance hit) we started at an edge device, saw the traffic spike, traced it to the access switch, and then the switch port. That made it easy to correlate the source of the traffic with the perceived symptom.
Graphs over time. Again, using the previous example, we were able to use the graphs and look back over the history of the two ports involved (inbound to the edge of one datacenter and outbound from the offending application) to prove correlation as opposed to a one-time coincidence.

Cons

The hardware resources are a bit steep. We have had to restart services a few times when website performance deteriorated over time.
Being tied to Microsoft is a negative for us. It just seems wrong to have to run one MS SQL Server along with a few dozen MySQL boxes.

Return on Investment

I am unable to provide ROI details. I use the tool, and my job would be infinitely more difficult without it, but only the Management team would track ROI data.

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor works well at a network level to identify traffic patterns. Having it enables us to spot trends before they become issues. I can identify specific devices that are having or causing problems, but it doesn't help to find the specific problem with the device itself. That's job security, I guess. We can't expect the tool to do 100% of our work.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

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