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The way to monitor your network.
Updated April 04, 2023

The way to monitor your network.

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Based on my 7-years of experience I am deeply convinced that Solarwinds products (NPM, NTA) are extremely scalable and reliable solutions with customizable user-friendly interfaces. The most important feature for me is the creation of custom reports using a variety of data sources (SQL query, SNMP, OID, etc.). Alerts constructor is a simple and powerful tool as well.
  • Custom reports building.
  • Alert management with conditions constructor.
  • A huge variety of data sources.
  • Web console requests cashing works quite slow - I assume Redis configuration should be improved.
  • Network elements virtualization and clustering monitoring do not satisfy the contemporary requirements (has to be more functional and provide a wider list of vendors).
  • WiFi heatmap is available for Cisco Meraki equipment only.
  • Performance Analysis (resources/traffic online monitoring)
  • Easy customization
  • Reporting (built-in, custom)
  • NPM as a monitoring product has the only score - is to reduce a service downtime all ROI is calculated based on how fast the engineer has been notified about an issue and resolved it.
Solarwinds can successfully combine pros of the other monitoring systems and be more user friendly, simple and intuitive. The list of NPM cons is not so big and most of its point can be compensated by customization (Solarwinds created a great expert community for it). The product price is the last but the significant argument in favor of Solarwinds

Do you think SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)'s feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) again?

Yes

I created a numerous list of custom reports that haven't been presented as out-of-box - IP SLA monitoring, RAID status/information, information about switches virtual-chassis, etc. as well as was able to present reports from another monitoring system in Solarwinds Web console. I also actively use such useful tools as NetPath.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
8.8
Automated network device discovery
8
Network monitoring
9
Alerts
10
Network capacity planning
9
Network mapping
8
Customizable reports
10
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
7
Hardware health monitoring
9

Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

15 - Solarwinds NPM is tend to be used by our company Network Team as the first step of network issue troubleshooting (key features here are: custom alerts for critical issues with notifications via text messages and syslogs); checking network resources utilization as well as users traffic allocation (we use NTA in a bunch with NPM for this purposes); getting reports.
2 - Solarwinds is quite simple solution in term of administration. We are using MS SQL as DB but it does not required a significant DBA skills (just initial installation + backup and daily maintenance (shirnking, re-indexing) settings) + sometime you will want to use SQL query as a data source for some graph or report. The administration of NPM requires creative qualities as only on then dependence how far are you going to go in monitoring jungle - for example, you can create a multiple groups of equipment based on their location, draw a map for each location and put your nodes on them that significant increase visualization of all parts of your network and etc.
  • Alerting (can create or customize almost any alert and notification type)
  • Reporting
  • Monitoring (Performance Analysis is really good)
  • IP SLA (jitter) monitoring
  • WiFi networks monitoring (#of users, traffic and etc.) for multiple locations
  • Performance Analysis
  • RAID disks statuses monitoring (for Dell/Lenovo servers)
  • Reporting
  • Cloud
  • Open source solutions monitoring
In spite of some drawbacks such as lack of possibility to work with open-source solutions (HAProxy, StrongSwan VPN, KVM virtualization and etc.); limited wireless built-in features (for Cisco Meraki only); sometime it takes several second to load a new page (Support wasn't able to advise any solution for it), Solarwinds NPM is simple, intuitive solution with wide range of useful features and tools set as well as great customization possibility.