SolarWinds NPM Review in a Nutshell
December 14, 2020

SolarWinds NPM Review in a Nutshell

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

We are supporting SolarWinds Environment for multiple customers. I have worked on other Monitoring tools as well like Zenoss, CA Nimsoft, but the features SolarWinds provides is what makes it different from other Monitoring Solutions. It provides such great features and we have all the control over these, we can customize this to our own needs. If something is not supported out of the box we can use its feature to create our own solution, we don't have to wait for them to release their support like we have to do with other products. For NPM, [a] major part of monitoring is done using SNMP and SolarWinds provides the great MIB database and the thing we can build our own custom pollers is pretty great. Additionally, the Orion Platform on which NPM runs provide such great dashboard, reports and alerts that should meet the requirement for all the organizations.
  • Out of the Monitoring of almost all Network Devices.
  • Build custom pollers to monitor which is not supported out of the box.
  • Further you can alert on these custom metrics and Out of the box metrics.
  • It provides you great dashboards, Reports features.
  • You can integrate it with any MoM layer tools either using its API or sending out traps.
  • Out of the box Integration with Service Now ITSM Tool.
  • Limitation on no of elements we can poll from one poller.
  • Complicated API - There is not much doc around API, and it could be hard for a beginner to work around the automation.
  • To be honest I am working in a Services-based company and we don't know what ROI customer might have got. But I am confident that it is positive.
Zenoss is a Cloud based solution which is not very easy to use, and we don't have access to its backend. If we go for the Zenoss core then also we have to install it on a Linux based system and manage it which is very difficult some times if we compare it with SolarWinds.
Network devices are the backbone of any organization, so I can say with confidence, to make sure the network is up and functional 24*7, you can deploy SolarWinds which is easy to install and manage. It provides rich sets of metrics and alerts out of the box. The cool thing about this is it is very easy to install and manage.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

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