SolarWinds NPM Reviews

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.

We primarily use the solution for network health.

The ease of deployment is great. I also would say that it gave us good capabilities to tune alarms. 

I'm overall a huge fan of Solarwinds. To me, it's a top quadrant for a solution and I would be pushing for it internally were it not cost-prohibitive for startups.

The solution is stable.

The scalability is good.

The initial setup is easy.

The downside was the expense. At large, large companies, that's okay. However, at companies like mine where we're building a tech startup, it can be cost-prohibitive.

They've had some issues with security, and confidence in their product is probably down.

Technical support can be slow to respond.

I would like to see more of a focus on edge computing and edge device monitoring.

I've used the solution for several years.

The stability is good. Aside from the very public hack, from a user's standpoint, it's good.

It's easy to scale. I'm probably an avid fan and I'd say it's easy to scale. 

We have around 100 to 150 people using it at our company.

We didn't always get the responsiveness that we needed in terms of the level of urgency. If it was something where it was potentially project-related and very time-sensitive, they didn't match our level of urgency which could be frustrating. 

That said, overall, when it came to deployment or wanting upgrades or improvements or changes, that we would get good support. 

Still, for incidents where you are in a mission-critical and you have an incident that you need assistance with, they weren't always as quick to respond.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward and simple. A company wouldn't have any issues with it. It's somewhat easy to deploy, however, I'm not the engineer. I was the business leader. I just know that I never received any complaints.

The solution is expensive and may not be very affordable for startups or smaller companies.

We're just customers and end-users.

We are likely using the latest version of the solution. I cannot speak to the exact version number.

We use both the public and private cloud deployment models. 

I led a team of several hundred engineers who used SolarWinds every day. I would be involved in making the decision of a product to go through. Once they came in and recommended me their top three, I would choose it.

I would advise potential users to first take a look at some of the newer vendors on the market who may be a little bit more nimble and are coming out of the box with a focus on edge and edge devices. SolarWinds has a heavy, heavy background. There are lighter options. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

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.  

We use the product for network monitoring. 

SolarWinds NPM provides an overview of network monitoring, extending its capabilities to cover other aspects, such as virtual machines and servers. The platform has features like NetPath, which is particularly beneficial for end-users, offering insights into issues like latency, packet loss, and connectivity problems with routers, switches, or servers. NetPath helps identify where the network path is disrupted or experiencing problems. For instance, if accessing Google services encounters issues, NetPath can pinpoint where the problem lies.  Another valuable feature is that it provides real-time data on device performance, including resource utilization, RAM status, and responsiveness.

The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support. 

I worked with HPE for about six to seven months in 2016. It had similar features to SolarWinds NPM. However, the deployment process was complex.

Deploying SolarWinds NPM is a straightforward process. The deployment steps include extracting the files, mounting them on the server, and deploying them. The documentation provided by SolarWinds is clear. 

While I haven't extensively worked with ManageEngine, I've observed some of its features, and customization stands out as a strong aspect. ManageEngine can be a good option for those with budget constraints, as it offers similar features to SolarWinds NPM at a more affordable price. I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We used SolarWinds for network switches, routers, firewalls, and servers, and to collect performance data for items on a global scale. We have 1,000 to 1,500 users.

The ability to customize the views and dashboards is nice. SolarWinds also allows us to access the data via the API. That's probably the feature I liked the most.

It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately.

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for four or five years.

SolarWinds was pretty stable.

SolarWinds NPM is scalable.

SolarWinds provides good support.

Setting up SolarWinds NPM was relatively straightforward. There is always some complexity, but it's usually pretty straightforward. Two technicians were able to set it up.

We set up SolarWinds NPM in-house. 

I rate SolarWinds NPM eight out of 10. I recommend taking advantage of the online training that's available. Get an account on THWACK, the online user group. It's good for getting help.

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.