NPM: The Heart and Soul of SolarWinds
Updated February 01, 2020

NPM: The Heart and Soul of SolarWinds

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

We use NPM across our entire IT department. Our network engineers use it to proactively identify network configuration issues and hardware health problems. Our incident management team uses it to hone in on the problem when an outage is reported to the Help Desk. Our IT field support staff use it to get a sense of what is at their site and if the WAN bandwidth is getting saturated. IT leadership even peeks in on NPM to get a simple dashboard on the network. It's the heart of our SolarWinds server cluster.

Pros

  • Easy-to-configure NOC-style dashboards for almost anything on a network you want to monitor.
  • Customizable reports for any network metric.
  • Customizable email alerts on dozens of different network issues.
  • Centralized discovery and inventory for routers, switches, analog gateways, UPSs, access points, and other network hardware.

Cons

  • SolarWinds is slow to integrate features that users suggest, even when dozens of users have made the same suggestion over time.
  • The charts aren't as customizable as we would like (y-scale, plot size, etc.).
  • The reports feature has a combination of legacy ReportWriter reports and new reports. They should all be migrated to the new style. The old reports are hard to modify and the output is less usable than the new style.
  • Before NPM, we were in the dark on so many network issues. Setting up NPM for the first time was like "lifting up a rock in the woods"—seeing all sorts of scary things that were always there that you didn't see before.
  • It has helped us to prioritize IT spending on end-of-life equipment replacement.
  • It has saved hundreds of hours of staff time in troubleshooting outages and performance issues over the past 4 years.
Before SolarWinds, we used eHealth. It was absolutely awful. The user interface was extremely clunky; getting basic charts took at least a half dozen screens. There were no usable ready-made dashboards. No alerts. Just not even in the same class as NPM. We liked NetBrain but their pricing model is prohibitively expensive for a network of our size.
NPM is well suited to a mid-to-large size IT department that needs to keep track of a large or complicated network in one place. You could run an entire NOC from NPM with all the alarms, reports, and dashboards that it has. NPM would be less appropriate for a small IT shop that runs a small or simple network.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
8.8
Automated network device discovery
10
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
8
Alerts
9
Network capacity planning
8
Packet capture analysis
9
Network mapping
7
Customizable reports
8
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
9
Hardware health monitoring
10

Feature Questions

The interface is so intuitive that I don't usually give a tutorial on how to use it. I just point IT folks to the front page URL and give them the guest account credentials. From there, they can just poke around and learn/discover as they go. You quickly realize you can click on pretty much anything (devices, interfaces, circuits, etc.) and get a whole new screen with detailed information. It's very straightforward.
  • Uncovering all the configuration flaws and performance issues in your network
  • Real-time bandwidth utilization charts and performance reports

SolarWinds NPM Support

This rating is for SolarWinds support on its own without the 3rd-party support we pay for. In general, SolarWinds will respond to tickets that you open if you have specific issues that need to be solved. But they don't help you with installing upgrades, performance tuning, custom reports and alerts, or training. For stuff like that, they expect you to sift through their Thwack community message boards for information on how to solve your issues. In general, Solarwinds feels that their application is so intuitive that anyone can learn how to install and operate it. Sure, the application is intuitive in operation, but administration of the backend can get pretty complicated.
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Support understands my problem
None
Yes - We use Loop1 for premium support. It gives us peace of mind that there is someone on call 24/7 in case our SolarWinds system fails, since we don't have anyone on staff that has enough knowledge in the system to rebuild any of the modules from scratch. With the same support contract, we have hours available for professional services -- useful when we need a special script or a custom report created from scratch. Finally, they help us stay on top of all the SolarWinds patches and updates and teach us about new features.
Yes - It was responded to in a timely fashion, but I wasn't able to recreate the issue so it was closed. (This was years ago.)
I'm sorry, but I really can't.

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