This is a great product. Has earned every penny we spent on it including our time.
December 18, 2020
This is a great product. Has earned every penny we spent on it including our time.
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
We use SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM), NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, and Network Configuration Manager to monitor and manage our global network infrastructure. It is primarily used by network engineers, although we are starting to make some inroads with stats for other department managers. It is proving very useful for them to correctly size their Internet bandwidth needs. Views are made for each site and used by the local teams as needed.
- Perfstack is a feature we have started using heavily and our resident programmer/script expert is working on a script to pick out a FLOW conversation, get all the switch ports between the two endpoints and generate a perfstack of them. This is looking like it could be very useful for troubleshooting.
- The modern dashboards have real potential and I like how they auto-refresh each widget independently.
- SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager and Netflow Traffic Analyzer are great as always. NCM in particular makes my life so much easier.
- Please work on the Universal Device Poller to get it on the web.
- Consistent sorting would be really nice. There are places where things are sorted alphabetically and other places where they're sorted by creation date (which makes no sense).
- Live maps. I like the direction you're going, but it still needs a lot of work just to get it on par with Network Atlas, and I hope you're aiming higher than that because Network Atlas is just not that great.
We use NetPath in two scenarios.
- A few permanent checks between hub sites to keep an eye on WAN health
- Temporary monitors as needed for troubleshooting
- We've been able to identify hotspots in our network and increase capacity where needed.
- Helped branch site correctly size their Internet requirements.
- Reduced network engineers' workload and troubleshooting time.
Thousand Eyes is used to monitor site-to-site and cloud health. Vendor-centric tools are used for Firewall and Wireless Management and Monitoring.
Although it would be nice to have a single app that monitors everything, we rely on several vendor-specific applications that do the things we need. With almost everyone providing APIs to get at their raw data, we are starting to use programs like ELK to bring bits and pieces of disparate data together in a single view. This has proven especially useful for managers who don't necessarily want/need to see details.
What's Up Gold--I liked that it could monitor TCP ports in their base product but it was years behind on other features.
Nagios--It was on older version we looked at but required too much scripting.
ZABBIX--Our HPC group uses this to monitor their servers. It scales way beyond what SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) can do but requires too much fiddling.
PTRG--This is pretty basic, but with an OID you can graph anything.
BMC--$$$
Nagios--It was on older version we looked at but required too much scripting.
ZABBIX--Our HPC group uses this to monitor their servers. It scales way beyond what SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) can do but requires too much fiddling.
PTRG--This is pretty basic, but with an OID you can graph anything.
BMC--$$$