SolarWinds NPM
September 25, 2020

SolarWinds NPM

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

We use SolarWinds NPM to monitor all of our infrastructure including servers, switches, and applications. It allows us to get alerts when anything is going wrong with a critical system so we can proactively address the issue before it impacts the business. It also provides us a detailed view into the health of our systems via reporting and dashboards.

Pros

  • Alerting with custom thresholds.
  • Reporting capabilities to easily see historical data.
  • Dashboards to give you a real time view into the health of your systems.

Cons

  • Configuring thresholds for your alerts can be a little cumbersome.
  • Getting additional details onto the alerts is not as easy as it could be.
  • You need to have two servers to run SolarWinds NPM, one for the service and a separate one for the database.
  • SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server.
  • SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time.
  • We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business.
SolarWinds gives a more holistic view of your environment. The price was on par for value received and the usability was a little easier with SolarWinds than the other tools. The reporting out of SolarWinds was a little easier to grasp for us, as well. Overall, it's a great tool.
SolarWinds NPM works well for us as we are a relatively small shop with a limited number of servers/interfaces to monitor. If you were a larger shop the licensing for SolarWinds would get very expensive because they license it per "node" or item you want to monitor. If you want to monitor hardware and network on a single device, that's 2 nodes.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Automated network device discovery
8
Network monitoring
9
Baseline threshold calculation
5
Alerts
8
Network capacity planning
Not Rated
Packet capture analysis
6
Network mapping
Not Rated
Customizable reports
8
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
Not Rated
Hardware health monitoring
8

Comments

More Reviews of SolarWinds NPM