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SolarWinds: Not just a piece of dust in the wind for monitoring
April 27, 2019

SolarWinds: Not just a piece of dust in the wind for monitoring

JAMEY TITONE | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

Being a media company there is a large amount of broadcast network traffic between production control rooms throughout the local TV stations. The Network Performance Monitor 12, allows a comprehensive toolset and a single pane of glass to view, troubleshoot, monitor and map my network to be the most efficient. The tool is not being used throughout the entire environment as of today but since the capabilities are superior to most other products on the market, the adoption factor is catching on and we will expand the tool on a large scale across our multiple domestics datacenters.
  • Using SNMP to automatically discover my network devices, while collecting the network information to produce a detailed network inventory.
  • The automatic discovery of the connection between L2 and L3 devices.
  • Using NetPath across the hybrid clouds is a time saver and pinpoints where to focus resources to fix issues.
  • Many of the functionality are Cisco-centric and in a mixed vendor environment, this causes some issues.
  • Limitation of the SD WAN tools.
  • The database of NPM should really run on Oracle not SQL.
  • The reduction in licensing cost by eliminating other tools by using SolarWinds.
  • Reduced annual support costs by 50% over a 3-year basis on our prior solution.
  • Negative impact was the initial setup did cost a significant amount in training and professional services.
Splunk was very expensive compared to the pricing licensing model that SolarWinds has. Splunk had many moving parts to getting a basic monitoring dashboard setup and it felt like I needed additional professional services just to get really in-depth functions to work in my environment which has many different vendors and their API's working properly.
In an on-air environment that broadcast live television, the real-time monitoring is a little slow and there have been some possible delays in reporting or alerting network outages or connectivity loss. It is not a show stopper but the real-time analytics could use some improvement. Monitoring network traffic across a large facility that has both layer 2 and layer 3 switches, the toolset fits perfectly and the ease of setup and the single dashboard is more adaptable than other products which require multiple different licenses and separate dashboards.