NPM is a great tool for your networking team!
Updated March 21, 2023

NPM is a great tool for your networking team!

Fabio Silva | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

We choose to use SolarWinds because the legacy Monitor tool was not cover some areas/alerts/vendors. Also, we were looking for a tool able to identify and act in some alerts. We are using NPM to monitor the infrastructure, to provide some stats that can help us to identify possible issues in the future, and to automatize some regular actions.

Pros

  • Monitor Cisco devices in general
  • Monitor Azure Gateways
  • Provide different kind of reports
  • Provide different kind of alerts

Cons

  • Pollers for Aruba Devices
  • The SolarWinds support team is not familiar with non-Cisco vendors, so it's hard to get some support from them.
  • Bugs sometimes is happening
  • Sometimes the Dashboard delays to show the current status of Nodes/Services
  • Netpath services
  • Wireless stats & reports
  • Orion Maps
  • Orion Dashboards
  • Orion Network Overview
  • Able to predict the future with the Forecast reports.
  • with NPM I can monitor the WAN circuits then decide if it needs a upgrade or not.
  • Able to provide quick responses for alerts, reducing the MTTR for some services
I didn't test other products

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?

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Great tool if you have Cisco-based devices. Not suitable for all vendors like Aruba, HP, Citrix. For other vendors, the Thwack forum sometimes is contributing with something that can help.

SolarWinds NPM Feature Ratings

Network Performance Monitoring
9.5
Automated network device discovery
10
Network monitoring
9
Baseline threshold calculation
10
Alerts
10
Network capacity planning
10
Packet capture analysis
10
Network mapping
9
Customizable reports
9
Wireless infrastructure monitoring
9
Hardware health monitoring
9

Using SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

20 - Network Operation Team, Help desk Level 1 & 2 and the Management Level (reports only)
1 - Knowledge about the current network, Basic Network skills, and familiar with SolarWinds features and Dashboard.
  • API Poller support
  • Netpatch services
  • Orion Maps
  • Orion Dashboards
  • Able to forecast upgrades & downgrades
  • Able to prevent issues
  • Able to be proactive about issues
  • To Determine potential outside network issues (using Netpath services)
  • To share the Orion Maps with Customers/Partners
The tool is delivering all that was promised. All so far so good!

Evaluating SolarWinds NPM and Competitors

Yes - Nagios - We are replacing Nagios with Solarwinds in order to have more Features provided by Solarwinds, better support, and better/faster learning for the engineers.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
The NPM has fantastic features like Netpath that are helping us to get issues and monitor better our network.
Probably I will increase my scores as I can see the support team is now able to understand and give the right support for non-Cisco devices. So far so good for all other tools/features.

SolarWinds NPM Implementation

Probably if I have the opportunity to implement it again, I would contract a consultant company to help us. More easy and fast to get it implemented.
  • Implemented in-house
Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled - The change management understands that Solarwinds in most cases is just monitoring the environment and most of the actions made are included previously in a CAB discussion.
  • Orion Alerts (sometimes required more skills to build it up)
  • Vendors not supported
  • MIB SNMP not working for some systems/vendors

SolarWinds NPM Training

  • Online Training
The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.

Configuring SolarWinds NPM

The dashboard is very friendly but sometimes requires good SOalrwinds & Network Skills.
Yes, we followed the best practices provided during the SolarWinds training.
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
NA.

SolarWinds NPM Support

Sometimes the support is not able to help with non-Cisco devices or vendors with fewer marketing share
ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Knowledgeable team
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
Poor followup
Problems left unsolved
Need to explain problems multiple times
Not yet. Currently, we just have the Network environment under Solarwinds. No reason to have this support for this moment.
Yes - Yes, I have flagged an issue with Orion NOC. It was fixed fast by the support team.
When a opened a ticket regarding NPM, they could sort the issue and in the final suggested running a Performance Tool to get the Health of my SolarWinds installation. Great Suggestion :)

Using SolarWinds NPM

All so far so good! Very friendly dashboard.
ProsCons
Relatively simple
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Do not like to use
Difficult to use
Lots to learn
  • Netpath services
  • Orion Dashboards
  • Network Overview
  • Orion Maps
  • Orion Reports (sometimes requires more skills to build it up)
  • Orion Alerts (sometimes requires more skills to build it up)

SolarWinds NPM Reliability

No problems to scale the application for other departments.
Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
The dashboard is friendly, all sessions have intuitive information and links to other Solarwinds modules.

Integrating SolarWinds NPM

Sometimes is easy, and intuitive but sometimes you need to invoke Solarwinds support or/and the other product Support.
  • Jira
  • Splunk
  • Azure
The documentation on SolarWinds is good but sometimes you need to invoke support to help you.
  • Jira
  • Nagios
For Jira, 100% sure because Solarwinds & Jira have an integration module available. Not sure about Nagios as they are SolarWinds concurrent.
  • File import/export
  • API (e.g. SOAP or REST)
Most of the integration as paid. Maybe a good approach leaves available all integrations as it can encourage people to buy and integrate their products with Solarwinds.

Relationship with SolarWinds

No problem with them, just sometimes they are sending e-mails about products that you already have.
They are providing a good pos-sales. Always asking me if there is any challenge with the SolarWinds implementation
SLA for cases;
Discounts to acquire additional modules.

Upgrading SolarWinds NPM

Yes - Yes, all upgrades made were smooth and causing minimal down time to the users
  • Following the current Application version
  • Cover bugs & vulnerabilities
  • Under a code that the support will probably suggest being
  • Fix bugs
  • Fix Vulnerabilities
  • Make the application faster
  • Provide more facilities & tools

Comments

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