SolarWinds Network "Magnificent Performance" Monitor
June 16, 2020
SolarWinds Network "Magnificent Performance" Monitor
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Our company provides maintenance and break-fix services for outdoor, carrier-scale transportation technology networks. With SolarWinds, we are able to get in front of issues when devices fail or otherwise invisible network issues occur, before our clients even start to notice the problems. With over 500 outdoor locations statewide and thousands of devices to support, NPM allows us both a birds-eye view of network health and an on-the-ground, detailed perspective into individual devices, subnets, and segments of the network and how they perform.
- Providing detailed and high-level views of network device and infrastructure performance
- Providing an intuitive and informative user interface
- Generating flexible, customizable reports for any combination of devices imaginable
- Providing highly extensible device metadata categories and custom properties
- SolarWinds is an expensive platform with steep initial and recurring costs (if maintenance/update services are purchased).
- The amount of information in the Orion interface can be intimidating if you don't know what specific information you're looking for.
- I do not have access to quantitative ROI data for us our clients, but I know for certain that SolarWinds NPM has increased our operational efficiency a hundredfold.
Other products I've used (Spiceworks, Mikrotik's The Dude) are good at their jobs but ultimately don't have the scalability of NPM or the more advanced network visibility features that make NPM so great. Other products (like Spiceworks especially) are also built as several products shoved into one -- an asset management platform, ticketing system, a network monitor, etc. -- and can be slow in performance or limited in their potential as a result.