SolarWinds NPM Reviews

NPM, NCM, NTA and VNQM.

Implementing this product has given us detailed visibility and understanding of our network. Small teams are able to manage large enterprise with this tool.

EOC.

2 years

Not much. Where we did we were able to avail support from vendor.

None except for EOC.

We have deployed it in distributed model with EOC. EOC has been a pain. We are keen to move to Centralized Deployment which we are yet to test and see if it overcomes limitations of EOC.

Customer service is very good.

Good technical support. There is an active online community too.

We have used PRTG, MRTG. However Solarwinds is a more integrated suite to tools for the enterprise or provider.

Installation needs reasonable understanding of Windows Servers, SQL Servers, Services and Group Policies (in enterprise). Customization might need good knowledge of SQL programming.

In-house.

Good.

The product is highly recommended. I am yet to understand how it stands against the competitions.

Bandwidth utilization and netflow reports

Our bandwidth consumption continues growing. We need to be aware of overutilization of our circuits. SolarWinds helps us have visibility to the most relevant issues in our network and makes our problem solving process much faster and easier.

IPAM. We wish it would work with Cisco CNR and help us manage all of our DHCP servers from a centralized platform.

7 years

We did have issues while upgrading, but gladly SolarWinds provided good service and assisted us to resolve those issues.

We didn't have any issues with stability.

No. The performance problems that we have experienced at times are due to hardware limitations.

Outstanding

Outstanding

No other product in the market offers as much as SolarWinds does for the price. Great value.

Initial installation is straightforward. However, upgrading can be quite complex if you have multiple polling servers, as you need to carefully follow the same steps and upgrade path on each server.

The installation was done in-house.

I cannot put this into numbers, but from an engineering perspective I believe there is no other product that provides as much value for the buck.

It was set-up before I was hired and therefore I do not have cost information.

No other options were considered.

Make sure that you have the required hardware and dedicated SQL server. Trying to save money can have a major performance problem on your SolarWinds implementation. Make sure you meet the requirements.

We use this product to monitor our performance. It gives us visibility of our environment, especially for software.

The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less.

The agent that we use is also light and does not block server memory.

SolarWinds makes it easy for us to monitor our environment.

The reports that it generates are useful for creating documentation.

The integration needs to be improved. SolarWinds has many modules for things like application monitoring and network performance monitoring, but sometimes they are not as good as others that are being used. This means that we use other tools and eventually, we want to integrate them into SolarWinds. It might also be the case that we have other tools, like Splunk and Windows Event Collector, and we want to integrate them but can't.

We began dealing with SolarWinds NPM about two years ago, in 2018

SolarWinds is quite stable. In the last couple of weeks, I have heard that they have a bug or a security hold in the RMM platform. Luckily, we do not use it, but instead, just use NPM. Nevertheless, we contacted the supplier and asked them to help us update to patch the security hole.

I think that it is easy to scale.

We receive our support from the local vendor and it is good. When we call and ask for support, the response is very good.

The initial setup is quite straightforward. It was easy for us to install and the deployment took about one month to complete. In the first week, we gathered the software that we wanted to install. From there, it took us another week to do the different installations. After that, we deployed the agent and the tools for working with it.

We use BigFix to deploy, so it's easy for us. 

The product is updated regularly.

Overall, this is a good product and I can recommend it, especially if you have a Windows environment and network. That would not be complex. My only issue is with the integration.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The features I find most valuable are--

• Reliability
• Security
• High-tech development
• Collateral
• Essentially they deliver what they promise for the end-user

We use it to create guides for end-users. We install SolarWinds on cloned virtual machines and offer free access to partners of my company.

I've used it for four years.

I had a customer who had a problem adding to a database for DAP-end integration with Orion. Simple details were needed to resolve with correct passwords and the release of ports on a firewall. Also, a deployment problem was failing in some versions of Windows and Meso. After all updates were performed, the Orion installation package did not work. We restarted it and worked.

I have no problems with the support of SolarWinds. When my client has a problem, our support always uses the documentation immediately. As we also have a lot of training and always test a lot of tools in our environment, when the client asks for something we know exactly where to go. Our SLA is five minutes for the first call, and to solve problems one-and-a-half hours.

We did, and we switched because the interface is more user friendly and easier to configure.

It's very simple. Anyone can install and configure SolarWinds with a step-by-step guide, even if that person is a layman when it comes to IT.

We used a vendor team.

It's the best of platform for IT management. It shows statistical data in a very detailed manner, where the user can customize the entire platform and input any information from the database through a fully-customized report.

• Overall simplicity
• Solarwinds development of the product line

• It's provided us with a quicker turn around time for diagnosing and remedying a failure or issue
• The pre-built templates for Windows are outstanding
• If you're new, they tell you what the metrics mean and the possible solutions
• You can also modify baselines it to your environment.

It needs group views with performance metrics. They do certain ones well, but not filters to a custom group view.

I've used NPM and SAM for five years.

No issues encountered.

Data collection can be an issue so you have to maintain that accordingly.

None yet.

Customer service is pretty good.

Tier 3 is excellent they know how to repair a problem.

We had Openview for the network side but the cost forced us to switch and it has actually ended up better for us in the long term.

It's very straightforward and super easy to deploy, 15 minutes tops. It's documented well what you need, or there's an option you can do if you're on a limited budget. Also, the support engineers are always there to help with specific questions.

We implemented it in-house.

It paid for itself within six months, when compared to our previous solution.

We did not track it but it was less than four hours worth of total effort. Day to day cost of using the product US$273 given our current licensing model.

No other options evaluated.

Get the trial download to use its all the features for 30 days. Its automation/DevOps is outstanding for its software development kit.

Historical interface statistics & historical storage utilization.

I have been able to catch network/server issues before they became critical. It also enables me to free up disk space on a critical drive before it completely runs out of space. Tickets can be pro-actively opened with carriers when we see CRC's and errors on interfaces. Lastly, I can quickly identify spanning tree and/or routing issues by watching syslog & trap messages.

Reporting functions are limited & difficult to modify.

Over 7 years

No issues encountered.

Not anymore. Years ago I would frequently have issues after performing software upgrades, but over the last 3 years that has improved significantly.

Not much, but I have had issues with our SQL database becoming fragmented over time & having to engage a SQL expert to address it.

Over all customer service has always been timely, helpful & friendly.

Overall tech support has been timely & helpful whenever I've needed assistance. I've opened literally dozens upon dozens of tickets over the years and most of the time I get the answers I need on the first call.

Previously WhatsUp Gold.

Setup has always been very intuitive & simple.

In-house implementation.

Not sure how to quantify that, but it has been well worth the cost in my opinion. The problem is getting my co-workers to actually use it.

Depending on the number of nodes to be monitored, take careful steps to size the polling server & SQL server appropriately. If at all possible, use a dedicated SQL box. Also, take the time to configure all of your network devices to send syslog & traps to the NPM server.

With admin-level permissions, the "Manage Node" feature is the most valuable to me since my preference is to search via strings. It provides a quick visual representation based on searched strings but a lot of false-positives as well with certain vendors – Cisco being one of them, e.g. reporting “critical/warning" states on things that don't really matter to us such as voltages on line cards or in the backplane of devices.

It improved the way our organization functions by being a consolidated product which I was able to do a lot of the initial data entry and organization with – unfortunately I have not had time to dedicate to figure out every bell-and-whistle with the NPM product. I’ve deployed rules for SNMP traps, syslog alerts, and other advanced alerts to send emails based on certain parameters – sadly these have been on an “as-needed and as-time-permitted” basis which has been lacking lately.

I honestly haven’t given thought to areas that need improvement since I spend a lot more time monitoring the network than optimizing NPM and features; nowhere enough time-wise to nit-pick and test every little thing. So far for what I have done with it, it has worked, getting there wasn’t always the easiest – usually a lot of trial and error based on research.

In our network we've used Solarwinds NPM product for a little over 3 years.

I wasn’t part of the deployment for it; our systems team was responsible for initial deployment.

Yes, plenty of those that our systems team has spent hours on the phone with Solarwinds support with trying to rectify. Especially after moving to later NPM releases; this has made our systems team weary of moving to later NPM releases due to past occurrences following.

Yes, polling more frequently yields a near exponential increase in resource utilization which becomes a problem on virtualized platforms resulting in excessive queueing on poller engine(s). While Solarwinds support virtualization they prefer dedicated hardware by some of their documentation; pretty expensive when you consider Solarwinds software, licensing, and then dedicated hardware to boot. Virtualized deployments also seems to yield a slower experience when browsing the web front-end, this could be due to the uniqueness of our corporate network though.

I haven’t worked with their customer service probably since the beginning, any problems with the platform our systems team would usually be in contact with Solarwinds customer service and technical support.

I haven’t worked with their customer service probably since the beginning, any problems with the platform our systems team would usually be in contact with Solarwinds customer service and technical support.

Older systems that were part of a legacy network and platform that were not well kept and didn’t have many features we were looking for. During RFP’s we narrowed it down to a couple of vendors with Solarwinds at the time taking the lead.

I wasn’t part of initial setup/deployment of product itself.

I don’t recall, was over 3 years ago and we have undergone major transformations as a company since then.

Solarwinds is highly modular regarding products and services so it is important to keep in mind that most other modules have a separate price and licensing tag and that it can become very expensive very quickly. When looking for features try to narrow it down to only the critical ones you need, I prefer simplicity and functionality over complexity – as a company I imagine the complexities came from catering to as many customers’ needs as possible. Lastly prepare to spend a lot of time working and tending to NPM, the biggest time taker I’ve had with NPM personally was getting Overview, Node, and Interface views setup that were useful and speedy – their default views are not recommended and “noisy.”