Item: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is being used by the network team to monitor our network equipment world wide. We monitor over 600 devices in SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, most of them Cisco switches and routers. Performance charts and reports are our primary use for SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, but we also get alerts for network outages or failures as well.

Pros and Cons

Alerting
Reporting

Easy navigation
Page load speed

Return on Investment

Proactive response to issue
Faster response time

Alternatives Considered

PRTG Network Monitor

A couple years ago, I compared SolarWinds IP Address Manager to PRTG, and, although they both could do everything, the layout and report builder in SolarWinds are much more intuitive and better designed than in PRTG. PRTG comes off as a simpler option that has the advantage of being fast, if you know how to navigate it.

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor does a good job of being a reliable place to generate alerts for devices when they have an issue. The alerts can be built from many metrics all tailored to your organization. You can even set groups of devices and have different alerting rules for each group.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor has a lot of good reports built in that you can use to analyze your network, however, if they do not have the report you need, it is a big learning curve to figure out how to get the report to show what you want since the reports are built on SQL scripts. If you know SQL you are good to go.

My go-to performance monitor is SolarWinds.

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros and Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings