SolarWinds NPM Reviews

Our primary use case for SolarWinds is to monitor our server's status, determining if it is down or not, and examining each packet from server to server. 

We also use it for Application Performance Management and Network Performance Management to ensure everything is operating smoothly.

SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason. 

The application performance management, network performance management, and database analyzer tools within SolarWinds are very helpful in preventive maintenance. It effectively reduces costs despite being expensive, and we believe it is worth the investment. 

Everything has been complete and stable for our needs over the past four years.

The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot. It is effective in monitoring network performance.

We have been using SolarWinds for four or five years.

There are no stability issues with SolarWinds. It is stable.

We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.

Positive

We contacted SolarWinds about the implementation.

The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.

The solution is considered expensive. It is deemed worth it for the benefits it provides.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We've been using SolarWinds for our network monitoring. It's basic advanced network monitoring, up-down of Rogers switches, as well as metrics, latency, wireless metrics, where users are, errors on interfaces, route cables, and things of that nature. We're just pulling as much data from our network devices as possible to present that in an easy pane of glass.

I find the NetPath to be very valuable. It visualizes that traceroute that you can share with anyone in the business. For example, when they say, "Hey, what's going on? The network's slow because my application or my server's having issues" you can show them this nice graph that visualizes where there may be congestion or if there isn't any congestion at all.

Its initial setup is simple. 

So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions.

Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital.

There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.

We've been using the solution for about three years. 

The stability is fantastic. We haven't personally had any issues other than a few gripes about the lack of information. However, as far as it being stable, for me, it's been pretty solid.

It's possible to scale, however, it comes at a cost. You have to go through them and there's a whole nother license piece that costs a large lump sum to grow your polers to start importing more if your initial server is getting towards a limit. It's scalable, with the caveat of it's going to cost you.

We have about ten to 20 users. It's a mix of network analysts, CIS admins, storage administrators, and application administrators.

We do not plan to increase usage at the moment, mainly as we're pretty much utilizing it as much as we need to, however, it is pretty much monitoring our entire environment or maybe couple hundred switches, some routers, couple hundred servers, and applications and things like that. We pretty much monitor our whole environment and our environment's not really growing anymore. We're pretty good right now.

Technical support is pretty good. In the few cases we have reached out for any support, they've been pretty responsive. Also, their online resources and knowledge bases are very extensive as well.

Positive

We actually didn't use anything before this product.

The implementation process is pretty straightforward. They give you an MSI and once you have your servers and databases set up, it's just a couple of clicks and it's set up.

For overall importing of everything may have taken a couple of weeks to have things up and running due to how our organization is structured and how we can gather information to pull into SolarWinds and our implementation strategy. For example,  who set up servers and applications. We start getting with the appropriate aims to get whatever monitor or whatever polling method we need, whether it was S and NP strings or accounts for any server monitoring with administrative access or whatnot. Then we look at the network and do those automatic scans from there. Once we start pulling in that information, we start actually organizing all the nodes in there to properly alert and monitor. It takes maybe a month or so to get it to a baseline.

For deployment and maintenance, honestly, it's just me by myself doing it. It would be easier with a few more people.

The setup was done in-house. We did not use any third party, like an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

As far as assisting in being proactive in our network, it's been a great help in helping us maintain a healthy environment and being proactive and making sure things are up to date and upgraded.

The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing.

There weren't any other options were evaluated. We saw SolarWinds and noted our other sister companies use that. We just went with it to be standardized within our entire conglomerate.

We are a customer and end-user.

I would definitely advise others to do their homework. There are a lot of different modules you can buy with different licensing. You need to understand what you're looking to monitor, and what you're trying to present to your business, and then do the homework on the solution itself and see how that fits your needs before just going and buying it or even talking to a sales representative.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. It's pretty good at its job. I haven't really delved into too many other things. I've tried to look at other tools recently and in my opinion, solutions like Nagios or Zabbix aren't the best. I haven't really looked into other things like Datadog or LogicMonitor yet, however, I'd say this solution is kind of a leader in the pack for what it's doing. Still, there's definitely room for improvement.

The primary use case is to to know what nodes or devices are up or down in our environment. I can also provide a performance report, if needed to anyone who asks, by pulling it out from SolarWinds NPM. We have it integrated with other SolarWinds products, like NDM.

I have been using the solution for the last seven years. The company has been using the solution for over nine years now.

This solution provides us with proactive reports.

We use it to understand our historical reports, since we keep these reports for 365 days per our compliance requirements. We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future.

At this moment, we are facing some problem with Zoom and our web content sync. We are having trouble with the quality of our user experience. A lot of users are reporting that their calls and screen shares are getting disconnected, and it is happening very frequently. Therefore, I would like to monitor the Zoom application from SolarWinds NPM. Unfortunately, it doesn't have this capability right now, and I had to find another application for this.

We would like a single application from SolarWinds that incorporates all their products.

It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. While it is very flexible, and you can do lots of things with the SolarWinds, the down side is that the product can be unusable. Also, sometimes, the performance is slow. In comparison, I have tested some Unix-based applications, which are very quick. However, SolarWinds is Windows-based, so we are seeing a lot of performance issues.

The scalability is good.

A number of times, I have contacted SolarWinds technical support. Depending the issue, sometimes they will just ask me for the diagnostic. However, if we call support for critical issues, we expect immediate solutions. However, sometimes in these cases, they still just ask us for the diagnostic report and tell us that they'll get back to us within 12 to 24 hours. But, if we are in the critical state, we need to answer to our management about what is happening. We cannot wait 24 hours. That is too much time for us. There are times that they do resolve issues quickly. Therefore, sometimes they are good, and sometimes they are bad.

We used to be on NetIQ, but were scaling very fast. This product was very scalable and flexible, which is why we went for it.

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex.

The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now.

We are currently exploring New Relic as an alternative product. The Zoom monitoring issue is one of the reasons that we are looking at New Relic and willing to pay their higher price.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor are support and flexibility.

I work with multiple customers using NPM to monitor the performance and the vital status of network devices, making sure to take care of network security devices by monitoring them with NPM. NPM provides real-time data on the overall CPU and health of network boxes, which is helpful when needing to check specific devices. This includes the interface traffic and vital states of the devices.

NPM helps me by offering a comprehensive view of network device health, supporting the SMS gateway, which allows receiving SMS alerts on my mobile. It also supports Outlook for email alerts, API support, and meets several requirements for financial and ISP environments.

The most valuable feature is the vital states of the devices as it provides overall CPU and device health information. Interface traffic monitoring is also beneficial. NPM is user-friendly and supports the SMS gateway and Outlook for alerts, which are essential in financial and ISP environments.

It would be beneficial if NPM offered support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as currently, it does not support this and we are migrating our services there. Improving customer control for opening and escalating support tickets would also be advantageous.

I have been using NPM for almost seven to eight years.

Initially, there were some stability issues where SolarWinds NPM stopped working with the database, making it difficult to access the interface. However, it has improved and is now more stable.

Scalability is not an issue with NPM, and it is suitable for small, medium, and enterprise environments. It offers reliable scalability.

The current model requiring engagement through a local partner to escalate issues to SolarWinds takes time and could be improved. Customers should have direct access to open and prioritize tickets in the customer portal.

Positive

I have used OpManager and other solutions, but NPM provides accurate data and supports necessary integrations, making it a preferable choice.

The initial setup of NPM is simple and user-friendly, with presentable data and a user-friendly interface.

In Pakistan, the pricing for SolarWinds is high compared to other vendors. Despite this, customers are satisfied with the product because it meets their needs.

I evaluated competing products like Orion and OpManager, but choose NPM for its accuracy and features.

I recommend NPM if the customer has the budget for it, as it is a high-quality solution with comprehensive features.

I use SolarWinds NPM because no other tool has the capabilities that it does. The solution is user-friendly and has many options for customized monitoring that other tools don't have. SolarWinds NPM is an easy tool because it supports both servers and the network at the same time.

The solution's database performance could be improved. The data performance is a little slow and scattered for clients who use the solution for a bigger infrastructure. You can't keep a hold of one-year data if you want to because it doesn't give you the capacity to hold that much information at your end. You have to keep the retention period very minimal.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for seven years.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

We currently use SolarWinds NPM for bigger clients, and I didn't see any problems with that. It totally depends on how many licenses you can purchase or afford. The solution has options for people with a small budget and enterprise businesses. It completely depends on the client's needs and budget.

Anyone can use the solution to monitor hundreds or thousands of servers in the network, as well as 10,000 to 30,000 servers. The number of servers it can monitor isn't limited.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

The solution's technical support doesn't support any customization. If you want a customized script or a customized solution, they don't support that. Otherwise, the technical support team has really good and knowledgeable people.

Positive

The solution's initial setup is straightforward. You just need to know what you need and, accordingly, use the guide to set up proper hardware for your servers. It's a pretty straight installation, and it is not very complicated.

The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market.

I rate the solution's pricing a nine out of ten.

The solution's alerting system is fine. However, we face a few challenges that we can see in the alerting system that we cannot modify as per our needs. There are some restrictions, but SolarWinds is working on clarifying those challenges. Apart from that, it seems fine to me.

We are currently using the solution on-premises. However, you can also use it on the cloud as it has both options.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM was used for everything. For interface monitoring, load balancing checking interface uptime and device status. 

We had the full suite of products, not just NPM.

It is simple to use.

It can be agentless.

The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is.

Their IPAM component is severely lacking. The process is extremely manual. It just doesn't get in there if you don't manually enter it. 

It is not particularly DNS-aware. When it comes to DNS names, you pretty much have to configure everything manually. It will not grab anything on its own. 

They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.

I am been using SolarWinds NPM for 15 years.

I believe that we are working with version nine.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable solution, aside from the fact that they had a major hack a couple of years ago and effectively allowed the Russian government to completely hack their code, making everyone vulnerable.

SolarWinds NPM is not very scalable.

We had 10 users.

There was only an IT engineer that was responsible for upgrading.

There was only one administrator. The rest were read-only.

Technical support is very good. You always got a live person.

The initial setup is straightforward. It is easy to set up.

The initial configuration is simple. Because, they did not use a backend SQL database, their initial setup was extremely simple. 

As they grew, they began to use SQL, which made things a little more complicated. 

It was extremely simple at first.

It probably took me a week to get it all set up and running, and another month to get everything in it. 

The initial configuration to the point where it was up and running took me about a week.

We installed it in a central data center and then began implementing it. We had to manually discover devices, pull them in, and manually add them one at a time.

It was implemented in-house.

We have seen a return on investment.

It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first.

It is significantly less expensive than Infoblox.

I don't recall the exact amount, It was approximately 20 years ago, but I recall it being relatively inexpensive to install. The initial part was really cheap, but the licensing cost became really expensive over time.

I would advise people to only use it for monitoring or viewing traffic flows. Don't use the IPAM section, the DHCP section, or the DNS section.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM a seven out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM is a good tool. It's a strong monitoring tool that we use to monitor our network devices, routers, and switches.

I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is.

There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NPM. One is that their dashboard needs to be friendlier. We want them to take their dashboard to another level. For example: with our databases, we develop services and we want to put those on the dashboard, while making them more visual. This would be good to improve in the tool.

The integration of SolarWinds NPM with other tools is also another area for improvement. For example, we'd like to have the ability to manage the unit with other tools, because we need to have better control to manage the alerts. How can you load that capacity with only that kind of information?

We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure. You have to do a test, find what needs to be improved, then make the corrections on SolarWinds NPM. You have to be very attentive when using the tool, but it's an area to improve not just in SolarWinds NPM, but for any tool.

I've been using SolarWinds NPM for a year and a half.

SolarWinds NPM is a stable tool.

SolarWinds NPM is a scalable tool. My team likes working with it because they really like its scalability.

The technical support for SolarWinds NPM is very good. I'm rating their support five out of five.

The initial setup for SolarWinds NPM was easy. I didn't do the configuration, but I watched our installer very closely, and he installed the tool quickly. For example: if you have a new module or a new product, you can do the installation very quickly.

The deployment of SolarWinds NPM was done in-house.

We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices.

We have the SolarWinds NTA (NetFlow Traffic Analyzer), and we also use another solution from SolarWinds: the SolarWinds SAM to monitor some on-premise servers. It also monitors the GPU, memory, the availability status and processes. We are now monitoring databases, particularly Oracle databases, to check their status and also check internal information. We detect all this information and equip our system so that it has the information, and we're doing it manually because that doesn't happen automatically with SolarWinds.

We have 30 people who use SolarWinds NPM and they're part of the operations, network, and infrastructure teams that do the diagnostics when something is wrong. We also have team leaders and some managers that watch the data in real time, plus the configuration and monitoring teams. We have 2 engineers responsible for the deployment and maintenance of the tool.

As for plans of increasing our usage of SolarWinds NPM, we've bought more modules recently, and we keep using the tool to monitor our network and infrastructure, together with other tools. For example: we have some very practical tools that our monitoring team uses to make diagnostic alerts such as McAfee. At the moment, our main tool is SolarWinds NPM, and we keep using it, especially for monitoring cloud devices. This is very important to our organization because we've migrated to the cloud. If you're doing cloud migration, you have to picture how you can monitor devices on the cloud.

I would recommend SolarWinds APM to others looking into using it. We're using a lot of it. We also have the SolarWinds SAM, and I would recommend it for monitoring databases and servers, and you have to do a little development, but it's manageable. I would also recommend SolarWinds NPM because from experience, it's able to do its job.

My rating for SolarWinds NPM is nine out of ten.

I use NPM for traffic monitoring in my network. It monitors all my traffic.

It is good for notifications and monitoring traffic, especially since most of them are remotely done.

The abnormal traffic notifications are good. Most of them are remote, and it is very good for notifications and monitoring for the traffic.

The price could be better. The maintenance or upgrade system regarding the payment is not good. It must be upgraded and is not related to the additional support payment. 

Also, if I need to make a feature enabled, I have to buy another edition and include support, which is unnecessary for me.

I have been working with the product for six or seven years.

There are points where the system drops, and you need to restart or monitor the system itself. It is not a SaaS system; it is an on-premises system.

It is pretty scalable. I would rate scalability as eight out of ten, with no issues.

Customer service is linked to payments. If you do not have a license or renewal supported, it is not supported for you.

Positive

I also use Microsoft Defender as it is good. However, the user needs a license for any additional user in SolarWinds.

The initial setup is simple. Sometimes I do it by myself, yet at other times, I do it with a consultant from SolarWinds teams.

I did the setup with the help of SolarWinds teams at times and by myself at other times.

The price could be better, and the system has a payment structure linked with upgrades, which I find unnecessary.

I use Microsoft Defender at times due to licensing restrictions with SolarWinds.

I can recommend the product, especially for small or medium-sized companies.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.