SolarWinds NPM Review
June 10, 2020
SolarWinds NPM Review
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
SolarWinds NPM is being used by several teams in our IT department including the networking team and various application support teams. It is used to proactively monitor the network, look for outages, and troubleshoot application performance issues for our end users.
- Monitors and alerts on network device metrics
- Adding a device is easy and device templates are accurate
- The user interface is intuitive and packs information densely on the screen for easy use.
- Configuring and monitoring at the port level can be confusing. Often level 1 technicians misconfigure what ports actually need to be monitored. More common on larger or more complex devices such as core switches.
- The top-level menus in NPM (and all of SolarWinds Orion tools) are not always intuitive.
- We have been able to proactively address network performance issues without waiting for users to report the impact. This has A) found issues that users experience, but fail to report and B) given the networking team a 30-45 minute lead compared to waiting for user reports and ticket escalation.
- Has helped in the creation of business use cases for network equipment or bandwidth investments. We can focus on areas needing redundancy or additional capacity with actual data.
SolarWinds NPM is much easier to configure, has better out of the box functionality, and has better dashboard and widget options.