SolarWinds NPM Reviews

This product is useful for monitoring our network devices.

It monitors bandwidth utilized on the network and tells us whether particular nodes or particular services are available or not. 

This product is of good caliber and we get better results by using it on our network.

Not many technical people are needed for administration.

The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring.

I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better.

We began using SolarWinds NPM a few months ago.

This is a very stable solution and we use it extensively.

SolarWinds NPM is scalable.

Up to now, we haven't opened any cases to tech support. Our local support is helping us to deal with the issues and if required, we will contact the vendor for support.

This product is easy to install.

A single technical person can deploy it.

We have a technical team aligned with our support SLA and they are helping us in this regard.

We pay a yearly licensing fee.

In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

What I've found most valuable about the solution is that it's scalable.

An area of the solution that needs improvement is the multitenancy. I'd like to see more features that deal with multitenancy in the next release.

I have been using the solution for a couple of years. 

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. 

There are issues with newer features so it can take a long time to adjust. The solution is in bad shape because of software hacks.

The installation takes about one day. However, it can take more than a couple of days to work with SolarWinds NPM or other products. The integration is part of the project.

We have specialists that take care of the installation. Usually you need two or three technicians to implement, depending on the company's experience. The main part is integrating the customization.

To get the positive business case within ROI, return on investment, sometimes also use the NCV, the net constant value.

There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer. I have customers that pay anywhere from 25K up to 200K, depending on the subscription model.

The competitors can be PRTG in combination with, for example, log monitoring features. There are lots in that space.

If you look at SolarWinds, it's a very traditional brand, and there are a couple of competitors who are far more modern, also in the layout. Some of the competitors have better visibility, and also have licenses more suitable for some customers.

We have a couple hundred customers using this solution.

Whether the solution is right depends on the customer's needs. What does he want? What is the company's strategy? What expertise does he have? Does the company have its own technicians? Does higher management have the strategy to help their specialists or not? 

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten.

The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well.

This product could improve by adding cloud monitoring. I want SolarWinds NPM to do much more integration, and have more involvement in cloud monitoring, like AWS or Google, or Azure. I feel like it requires lots of improvement for cloud monitoring in NPM.

I've been working with this product for almost ten years.

The support could be improved. Within the last two, three years, I would say the support has declined. It has degraded, but not that bad. We are still getting solutions, but sometimes, calls stay on hold. When we try to call the support team, it continues to ring on their side. About half of the time it gets connected very quickly, but the other half takes some time to connect. Sometimes I wait more than 10 minutes. It's not totally bad, as we are still getting support. Nowadays, we prefer to send emails to them, so whenever they have someone available, they can revert back to us and we can schedule a call with them.

The pricing is reasonable. In the last year we tried to look for different applications and those other applications are even more expensive. 

If someone wants to install this application, they need to be very specific what environment they want to monitor, whether they want to monitor in a hybrid environment or just cloud, or just on prem, because the setup is going to be quite different in all aspects. When it comes to installation, someone has to have a better understanding of what they're actually going to monitor, how many nodes they are going to monitor, how many network device they are going to monitor, etc. With respect to that, the licensing changes.

I would rate SolarWinds NPM an eight out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM is generally used for network monitoring for all of the switches, networking equipment, as well as physical and virtual servers in the environment.

We use the top 10 dashboards on a frequent basis, as well as the ability to put systems in maintenance mode when we need to perform patching or other maintenance.

Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disk space statistics from servers and volumes.

The interface can be a bit cumbersome at times. There is a steep learning curve if you wanted to get into it in any depth. 

I would say that both the installation and use of it can be complicated initially. It isn't for someone who doesn't have a lot of expertise or knowledge.  It does have a significant learning curve.

After the initial installation, the configuration is where more knowledge is required.

The reporting could be improved. 

I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it easier to create reports or have a larger assortment of canned reports.

I have been working with SolarWinds NPM for eight years. Most recently version 2020.

SolarWinds NPM seems to be stable.

In our environment, scalability wasn't really a factor. The environment we had, and the method we used for the initial install were sufficient.

In our organization, we had about 20 users consistingn of IT server and network engineers as well as business analysts.

This is a tool that we utilize on a regular basis.

Although technical support is adequate, it could be better, but that appears to be the situation in the majority of businesses nowadays.

I would rate them seven out of ten.

The initial setup was somewhere in middle.

This solution is maintained, deployed, and updated by a team of six people, and it is also automated for operating system upgrades. We have one or two server admins that are responsible for actual application upgrades.

I would recommend having a review with a SolarWinds tech first to make sure you understand the system requirements. It would be helpful to work with them also in regards to unique configurations. 

I would rate SolarWinds NPM an eight out of ten.

If a customer is looking for a monitoring box solution, a medium-scale customer, and he's looking for something that can manage servers, routers, storage, applications, basic monitoring for applications, to cover everything, then SolarWinds is the right choice. However, he has to be a mid-tier customer. He cannot be an enterprise customer. If they are an enterprise customer, then SolarWinds is not the right choice as it will start to slow down.

It's a very good tool and a very stable tool. 

For a medium-sized customer, it has everything that you're looking for.

It has all kinds of functionality that any network team or monitoring team is looking for. It's easy to integrate with any other tool, as it has an open database. It's easy to implement and has a very nice user experience.

One of the problems that SolarWinds has is when the data becomes too big, it will start getting slower. 

It's not at all for enterprise customers. I don't recommend enterprises to go for SolarWinds. They should go for a bigger tool.

They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers. 

I've been dealing with the solution for ten years as a partner at least. It's been a long time. I've used it for about a decade at this point in that capacity. I've been dealing with SolarWinds for almost more than 17 or 18 years, personally.

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

We have three to four customers on the solution.

It's best for a mid-tier company, and not a large enterprise. 

Technical support is okay.

The only problem that they have is that last year they had a security hack issue. That is something that was a big problem SolarWinds in the market, as everybody is scared to use SolarWinds. They still have managed customers. Still, I have to say, there are very few customers that they don't have SolarWinds.

Whenever I go for meetings for security or monitoring or anything, I find some engineers still using SolarWinds. They may not be using it a lot, however, they are still using it for more than monitoring. Still, people did lose customers over it. 

The initial setup is very easy and quite straightforward. It's not overly difficult or complex. 

The implementation is fast and doesn't take more than a month or a month and a half. 

We only need one consultant to handle implementation. 

We are able to handle the setup for our clients. 

The licensing process is pretty simple. it's not too complex. 

We've done a couple of implementations at this point. We're actually a partner. 

For a mid-tier customer, I would rate the solution at about an eight.

I'd recommend the solution t a mid-tier customer. I wouldn't if the company was quite sizable. 

Our installation is on-premises on a virtual machine. When we purchased NPM I was particularly interested in the features of Orion. We were going through a maturation process propagating the monitoring of applications throughout the server policy here at the university. It was more to monitor various applications that are primarily used for individual schools. For example, we have the school public health, and we have the school of nursing and they have different needs. You have all these applications like Banner and Canvas and other web-based applications that get used by particular areas. We are working with one application now for COVID-19. There is an application that has been spawned from that, but mostly our monitoring is for up/downtime, space, memory, availability, and those types of things critical for performance analysis. We are just now getting more into monitoring databases and a broader scope of applications as well.  

What I am mostly referring to is not the whole Network Performance Monitor suite. This is the actual operations monitoring piece of it. We have the network and we are responsible for set up and monitoring of those particular tools.  

We identified the five areas that we wanted to have be our key performers, like memory utilization, CPU utilization, and those core components. Just the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they were physical or virtual.  

We were looking at using DPA (Database Performance Analyzer) which is another component of the NPM and that looks like it takes care of an area we had not really dove into yet. But in talking to the DBA, they like another product that they want to use for the database monitoring. It is an Oracle product called OEM (Oracle Enterprise Manager).  

In talking to the DBA's, there was a lot of functionality that they were just used to and they had issues because they did not see some things that they thought were important but missing in the DPA product. That is the only thing I have run into so far with the product that seems to be a shortfall. Everything else is pretty good.  

I do not really have other suggestions for additional features beyond working on the development of DPA to make it a more complete tool. We are still learning the product.  

There may be some things that they could improve in the reporting aspect of the product. You can create custom reports and those types of things. But the product seems to be missing some depth in that area and it leaves a little bit to be desired. For example, the filtering system and formatting reports and things like that seem to have room for improvement. You are a little limited on the information available on that front and the utility could be improved.  

They do have some templates that you can use for report setup. It would be nice if you could maybe make your own. That might make it a little bit more easy to generate other reports that follow the way you like to do things.  

We purchased SolarWinds NPM (Network Performance Monitor) about three years ago.  

SolarWinds is a pretty good, stable product, but we have had some issues with support. That is especially true of the last release we upgraded to. There were some SQL issues that we were looking for them to help us out with and, finally, it took so long that someone on our internal SQL team had figured out what the problem was. So, I would say that the upgrades to the product itself from what we went through can be somewhat of a pain point and maybe there needs to be more rigorous testing.  

Typically, I don't think scalability is an issue. If you are talking about individual users, we have anywhere from 20 to 25 people across the typology. Probably one of the biggest users is a resource/research support group where they have various servers on the Orion Monitoring System. They actually take on their own responsibility and monitoring role for their servers. So, there are some groups that adopted monitoring through Orion, and then there are some other groups that have quite a bit more of a blasé approach to it and do not really think it is important.  

We have not had a lot of opportunities to use technical support. When we did I was not particularly impressed with their response time or expertise.  

The initial setup with Orion was somewhat complex. They do have templates in there that you can utilize, but most of those you are going to have to customize anyways. We found that it was easier just to go ahead and do our own.  

The way that I found it to be complex was that we had to do a lot of our own scripting to collect the data that we needed. Once you have got a template set up, you can pretty much populate that information to the Orion database, but I mean there is some pain to get started off. Overall we got involved in a year-long project where we were meeting on a weekly basis discussing all the issues. I think it took us a little over a year-and-a-half to actually declare success on the project.  

Only after that declaration of success were we able to get on to monitoring and dissemination of information to various users and get started with the monitoring. But our monitoring is a lot better than what it used to be. We were using Homegrown, Nagios, and Check_MK. People were not paying attention to alerts. I think the way we handle it now has really helped users mature in that way. We have still got a lot more work to do though.  

We started out with an implementation strategy, but there were some challenges when our directions got changed on us by senior leadership. We would have a plan and a direction and head down a path to implement those particular types of solutions. We would set up the alerting and monitoring and then three months later somebody would come up from an executive level and say, "Hey, we need to monitor this as well." So, we would have to make some changes just like any project. We had to learn to be flexible with it to meet people's needs, but having clearer goals from the outset would have made it easier and quicker in the long run.  

We did just about all the work on the implementation on our own with an internal team. Right now, I have got one person that is in charge of the actual product itself. They take care of all the changes, releases, upgrades, deployments, the agents, and those types of things. I have another individual who is responsible for creating tickets and disseminating the information to the owners of the server monitoring in various groups to get their alerts fixed. It does require attention but it does not take a large group for maintenance requirements.  

I do not handle the negotiations on pricing, so that is outside my realm of influence. I know that our initial purchase was about $200,000.  

One of the things I would suggest to people considering this product and products like it is having a clear agreement upon targets of what you really want to monitor. If it is applications or servers or whatever it is, it just makes sense to come at your choices with a plan. Implement that on the front end by picking out what is important instead of coming back on the back end and trying to do things after-the-fact.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this solution as about an eight-out-of-ten.  

I work as a technical consultant, and I suggest customers use SolarWinds NPM for cybersecurity monitoring purposes. We deploy it to monitor all network equipment, such as routers, switches, firewalls, and NetFlow within the network.

SolarWinds NPM is a very effective solution for monitoring. The interface is user-friendly, deployment is easy, and the support from SolarWinds is great, especially within India.

The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface and the ease of deployment. Additionally, the support from SolarWinds has been very helpful.

SolarWinds NPM should be more flexible to accommodate specific customer requirements quickly. It would be beneficial if their development team could develop solutions within a limited time, like three to five months. This flexibility is sometimes missing compared to local developers in India.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for two years.

The stability of SolarWinds NPM is very good; I would rate it 7.5 out of ten.

The scalability of the solution could be more flexible. I would rate it around 6.5 to seven out of ten.

Customer service is good, but there is room for improvement. Sometimes, customers look for on-premises support directly from SolarWinds rather than through third parties or partners.

Neutral

The initial setup is relatively easy. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate it eight to 8.5.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

SolarWinds NPM is used for searching equipment in the network, troubleshooting the network, and mapping the networking.

The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools.

SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for approximately three months.

SolarWinds NPM is stable.

The scalability of SolarWinds NPM is easy to do.

We have three or four users using this solution.

The support is very good for SolarWinds NPM.

The initial setup of SolarWinds NPM is easy.

The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000.

I recommend this solution to others.

I rate SolarWinds NPM a nine out of ten.

There are modules in SolarWinds NPM which are better than other competitive tools. However, some areas require new releases or updates. For example, there have not been many updates to cloud monitoring, containerization or serverless environments. In that regard, SolarWinds NPM is not as good as other solutions in the market.

It is a stable solution, and rate the stability a nine out of ten.

The scalability can be better.

The technical support has been a good experience.

The ROI has been good.

It is considerably cheaper compared to other tools and available technologies in terms of LMS or EMS.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. Regarding advice, I would recommend concentrating on gaining some expertise. A foundational or intermediate understanding of different network protocols and technologies would be helpful when using SolarWinds. In addition, understanding the underlying technology that will eventually be monitored or managed will be good.

We use this solution for checking databases and new devices that are added to the network. We test the L state of routers and firewalls.

The benefit of this solution is the reporting. We're able to report on and see our network in a graphical form. We are able to detect when a device is added to a network.

Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier.

I have been using this solution for two years.

This is a stable solution. 

We have not experienced any challenges with scalability. 

The support for this solution is satisfactory.

Neutral

The initial setup is not that straightforward and could be made easier. We have approximately 500 devices using this solution. We require only two team members for maintenance. 

I would recommend this solution to other users. I would rate it an eight out of ten.