Item: SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company uses SolarWinds NPM to monitor the health of our network and servers. We have thousands of devices and it's very helpful to know which are functioning properly in one dashboard. Alerting is also a key feature of the SolarWinds NPM and is essential to our job duties. We are all able to keep track of malfunctioning equipment without having to dive through thousands of logs. Setting up alerts to cell phones and emails is also pretty easy to do and we could not live without it during our on-call rotations.

Pros and Cons

Alerting on the SolarWinds NPM platform is straightforward to set up, customizable, and works reliably.
Being able to set up basic and more complex monitoring is a nice touch. Even devices that don't support SNMP can be monitored via a simple ping.
Visibility of all network and server device health on one dashboard is very convenient.

The SolarWinds NPM UI/UX isn't exactly the most modern-looking, but it gets the job done.
Updates to SolarWinds can be tricky at times and have broken the system in the past.
Configuring and scripting some of the advanced features can be confusing, but the thwack community is always very helpful.

Return on Investment

SolarWinds NPM helps minimize the resources needed to stay on top of network health.
SolarWinds NPM allows our on-call personnel to rely on its alerting instead of waiting for users to report issues.

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution

SolarWinds was much more flexible than other solutions, including Cisco Prime and that's why we ended up converting most of our environmental monitoring over to SolarWinds NPM. We still use Cisco Prime for wireless monitoring for the time being but may eventually transition over to SolarWinds or another comparable product.

Key Insights

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

Likelihood to Recommend

I think SolarWinds NPM is well suited for larger organizations that need quick, easy, and supported visibility into network and server devices across a large network. The ability to configure and customize alerts and reporting, give users role-based access, and have professional support options is ideal for large companies that need minimal technical overhead and just want to provide infrastructure teams with a tool to give them visibility into the health of the network and servers makes SolarWinds NPM a great choice.

Easy, Big and Mostly Reliable Network Performance Monitoring for Large Organizations

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)