SolarWinds NPM Reviews

One of my clients is a bank. SolarWinds is primarily used in banking to limit network downtime to less than one or two minutes. All the ATMs are connected with SolarWinds, so the bank can respond quickly when the network is down. You only need about three or four people monitoring this software at a time. SolarWinds is deployed on-premises for security reasons. Banks do not allow cloud solutions for this purpose. 

Network performance is the main issue clients are facing. SolarWinds checks if a node is down, and we can set thresholds for performance metrics. For example, we set it up to get an alert automatically if a value is over 80 percent. It has a full dashboard that covers CP, hard disk, and node monitoring.

Each model has different features, so clients need to purchase a separate model for SQL monitoring, database monitoring, network traffic analyzer, HTTP traffic, etc. So each feature they need is in a different model, but customers would prefer an all-in-one solution.

I have been working with SolarWinds NPM for two years.

SolarWinds is stable. We sometimes have crashes here and there because we are monitoring so many features and routers.

SolarWinds is easy to scale.

We don't use technical support because we handle everything in-house. We already make customized dashboards, reports, notes, etc. ourselves.

I used PRTG, but it's not used in any banks. About 80 percent of banks I know use SolarWinds. PRTG is mostly popular in manufacturing companies. It's cheaper, so manufacturers can easily afford it. 

Setting up SolarWinds is somewhat complex because the data is encrypted and banks require so many policies. The reporting and dashboards are also complex. 

SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost. 

I rate SolarWinds NPM seven out of 10. 

SolarWinds NPM is used to monitor our devices' to see uptime, availability, and performance.

SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by proactively indicating if we are low on resources for a particular server.

The most valuable feature of SolarWinds NPM is the performance monitoring to see the memory, and CPU utilization.

SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for approximately 10 years.

SolarWinds NPM is very unstable. We often have website loading issues. We have to call support, and they fix it. Then a month later, we're going to have the same problem.

SolarWinds NPM can be used at multiple locations, and increase the capacity as needed with additional licensing. It's very scalable. 

We have three people using this solution. It's used globally at all our sites and we plan to increase our usage in the future.

SolarWinds NPM technical support is very responsive. They're available by phone, which is a plus.

I did not use a solution previously.

SolarWinds NPM's initial setup was straightforward. It took about a year to complete the full process of the implementation. The strategy we used was we worked on the setup of vCore and Microsoft Azure, and then for each of our sites, we did afterward.

We did the deployment in-house.

I have not seen a substantial return on investment with SolarWinds NPM.

We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees.

I rate the price of SolarWinds NPM a three out of five.

I have evaluated other solutions, such as PRTG Network Monitor and WhatsUp Gold. We choose SolarWinds NPM because it had better licensing and architectural options.

My advice to others is to follow the best practices.

I rate SolarWinds NPM a seven out of ten.

The solution has good support they're constantly improving it.

We are a mining company, and we use this solution to monitor our system operations. We monitor the truck service, and we have the network devices installed onto the equipment.

Their support team is efficient, and it is easy to set up.

The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It is stable.

Their support is good.

It was easy to set up. It took less than a month.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate it an eight out of 10.

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. 

We were using it to monitor network devices and the monitoring of certain servers.

It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations.

They were pretty good at keeping up with things.

We have replaced SolarWinds with LogicMonitor. 

I had been working with SolarWinds NPM for five years. We stopped using SolarWinds in December of last year when it was revealed that they had been hacked with the supply chain hack and we turned it off. We began a fast-track process of trying to find something else that we could use to replace SolarWinds. We decided that we were no longer going to trust that their products have not been compromised.

At the time, we were using the latest version.

We experienced the typical ones that happen when a parameter is not well understood and that it is implemented, you end up causing issues.

The scalability was complex. 

We had 99 facilities that were a hospital holding company, and we have some 90 other facilities that we are the corporate headquarters of. In monitoring each of those different hospitals, there would be challenges with getting to all of those devices because of firewall rules.

The faculty would use it on a regular basis. There were approximately 90 users.

We contacted technical support all of the time. They were fine.

At the time I had been with the company for just over six years. They had only been using SolarWinds.

I have also been using VMware for a long time, and we are implementing vROps for alerting and monitoring.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

It seemed that they nickeled and dimed you for everything that you were doing. There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price.

I would not recommend implementing SolarWinds because of the hacks, it is just not trusted.

Before they had the hack, the intrusion process I would have rated them a six or a seven but after the compromise, I would rate SolarWinds NPM a zero or one out of ten.

My team uses SolarWinds to do some of the network monitoring. I look at the reports.

One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives.

False positives or positive falses are a concern because you want to be as accurate as possible and get them down to zero, which is what you want on your network. Once a week with the reports there, is always a false positive or vice versa where it's showing that it's up and really it's down.

We are looking at how we can overcome that issue. Is it a work issue, or does it come from the tool itself? It will show that something is down when it's up and every once in a while if something is down it shows that it is still up.

We would like to be able to pull information from the vendor's OEM. It would be helpful to have crosswalks or if it could have a running list that goes out of models, software, and it can pull out the end of life, or end of service life dates. Also to suggest the recommend current version to use, that way you can do the comparisons without having to do a manual search. That would be beneficial.

Similar to other tools, I would also like to see a graphical map of your network that highlight in green, red, or yellow, and if you see a specific device you can click on it and it will help you drill down on the details of that device.

There are other things that it should be able to do, such as when it comes to monitoring the infrastructure and my server, and there are issues developing like the circuits degrading or latency is increasing it should give you a notification to know what is going on, rather waiting for the device to go down which at that point it would be too late. You want to be able to do proactive monitoring and reaction.

We want to get to a monitoring level where if it is monitoring the server, the CPU, or the storage level you could have presets where it will identify and give you warnings to say that you are at 70% or 80% storage capacity. This would allow you to get ahead of it before you run out. 

It would be the same for the CPU utilization and knowing if it is running 20 or 30% premiums normally or is it running at 90 or 100% and you have to add CPUs.

It could let you know if you have other tools or applications that are running too hot or if they need to be changing out that tool or is it something else.

To have something in place where it can help us to do some analysis and be proactive would be helpful.

I don't use this solution, I oversee a team who uses it.

We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM. 

We had one problem, but it wasn't a stability issue, it was a hack that occurred earlier this year that affected everyone using SolarWinds. After that, it took a bit to get it stabilized to where it is now. 

Our team that has worked with technical support hasn't had any complaints. It goes pretty well. 

I am familiar with several tools.

They will be putting NetScout on their network to look at some of the differences and to look at the pluses and minuses of each of the two tools.

I would rate SolarWinds an eight out of ten.