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Solarwinds NPM - Well worth your time
Updated July 20, 2020

Solarwinds NPM - Well worth your time

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

NPM does a great job of establishing baselines and creating reporting that I can show to my management to prove we are out of bandwidth. I like to think of NPM and NCM as one product because they essentially do all the functions you need together.
  • Graphing is fantastic. Trend lines and 95th percentile really make the grade when showing off what your network can do, or where it's limitations are.
  • Alerting works flawlessly.
  • The sales team is relentless and will never stop bothering you. Ever.
  • More vendor MIB's can be put into the standard offering.
  • We are now able to easily manage our network, capacity, configuration etc.
WUG is a very baseline up/down monitoring solution and isn't terribly robust. The functionality built-in to the NCM product far outshines what WhatsUp Gold can do on its very best day. The product is overpriced and underperforms. SolarWinds is pricier, but the functionality gained is well worth it.
NPM is well suited to get a baseline as to what's going on in your network via NetFlow/nbar2. This will not replace an extra hop, or other protocol analyzer products which do a much deeper dive. I really believe that NPM and NCM should be bundled as a single product because having one without the other is hard to work with.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
9.4
Automated network device discovery
9
Network monitoring
10
Baseline threshold calculation
10
Alerts
10
Network capacity planning
10
Network mapping
9
Customizable reports
10
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
8
Hardware health monitoring
9

SolarWinds NPM Support

Support expects you to understand their product inside and out, as if you did support on your own. I usually get a "Why are you calling us" vibe from SolarWinds. I do not feel welcomed as a customer, by them as a whole. They usually do provide the right solution, but they're incredibly slow about it.
ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Slow Resolution
Not kept informed
Escalation required
Difficult to get immediate help
Need to explain problems multiple times
Slow Initial Response
Yes - We pay for premium support so that we get quick access to a tech when we need it. Solar winds is slow to respond as is, so standard support would not have been fast enough for our liking when we have an issue.
No. I truly cannot provide time when solarwinds support went above and beyond to provide exceptional service. Usually what I get is an email with a document that may or may not apply to me. I am not impressed with their service in the least. Not sure how strenuously I can express my displeasure.