SolarWinds NPM Reviews

We have a data center that is used by multiple clients and we need to see how applications are performing when clients are on our network. The NPM tool is used to analyze what different applications are consuming, in terms of bandwidth.

The most valuable feature is the graphical user interface.

SolarWinds needs to be improved such that it is on par with the leading products in the market. There are better products available, albeit more expensive.

We have been using SolarWinds NPM for three months.

This is a mature product and the stability is quite good.

We have eight users including an operations analyst, system analyst, and support engineers.

We have been in contact with technical support and they are good.

SolarWinds was the first product of this type that we used.

The initial setup is straightforward. The implementation took about two weeks in a controlled environment. We had no problems with the installation and connecting to our devices.

We did not require assistance for the deployment.

One person is suitable for deployment and maintenance.

It is not an expensive product.

We will probably continue looking for a better product.

This is a product that I recommend, although it requires technical skills in order to use it.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

This solution has many different roles in our company. There is the application support group who configure it for monitoring specific services within applications and our desktop or operations group which monitors toner in laser printers. My group, which is primarily networking and servers, use it for bandwidth monitoring, server processor utilization monitoring, and for disk space monitoring. So we use it for a lot of different things. There are probably 200 services that are being monitored within our financial system to make sure that it is running optimally. I'm an infrastructure supervisor and we're customers of SolarWinds.

The outcome of using this solution is that we've been able to become more proactive on really resolving issues before users know that there's a problem. Outages have reduced by probably around 90% because we're able to take and proactively add space to a disk or add processors to a server before users know there's a problem. It means we can take something down at night and fix it, rather than disrupting work in the middle of the day. 

The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.

This is a complex product to set up and I think it's really too detailed and could be simplified. It's a change from their older product which was very easy to set up and manage. The new one is more difficult because it's far more detailed. The solution does everything we ask of it, but it takes a long time to deploy.

Additional features and improvements would be to simplify initial data gathering so that we can deploy easily and then refine it over time. Ideally, we'd like to be able to get something up and running in a week and then go through and decide, for example, to monitor things on one particular server and not necessarily on others. They could possibly create a generic installation and then let us go back and refine it. We spend a lot of time without having all of our equipment monitored because it takes so long to initially set up each server. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

I think this is a very stable solution.

I think the solution is easy to scale although it does require a lot of resources. When we initially set it up, we had about a quarter of the resources that we currently have and we set it up too conservatively which caused a lot issues. When the consultant reset it, we quadrupled the amount of resources that the system has. We have about 10 people that get alerts and are actively involved with the system. The system requires about 10 staff hours for maintenance, updates and verification that everything is working.

As we refine it to monitor services, we are going to increase the usage. So right now we have it monitoring a database server, but we're not monitoring all of the services within that server. So we might have 30 databases in there. We're not yet monitoring each of the individual databases.

We have very few issues that require technical support, we only contact them a few times a year. They generally resolve things pretty quickly and our issues are generally related to improving deployment. 

We used to use a product called ipMonitor, which is a much simpler solution. It's one-tenth of the cost and we used it strictly for alerting. It would tell us when a server was down, but not that the server was running at 70% utilization for the previous week. ipMonitor was strictly a something is working or a something is not working solution.

The server configuration for installation took about a week. And then another two to three weeks to get it installed across all of our servers. We're making modifications every day. We initially set it up ourselves and then about two years after the initial installation, we hired a consultant to redo the installation and make it more efficient because it wasn't initially configured optimally. It's the amount of detail you need that will determine how much time you spend setting something up.

Our ROI has been in the savings in downtime during business hours.

Our annual maintenance fee is USD $15,000. 

HP had a similar product that we looked at but it wasn't nearly as universal as SolarWinds products. HP has a product to monitor servers and a product to monitor networks, but they don't have one product that does both well, SolarWinds monitors everything very well.

I would recommend taking into consideration that you will need more server resources than you think. Knowing that means you can save on having to rebuild the whole environment later on. We ended up going from one server to four servers and it's running much better now. Don't skimp on the server resources you get with the application.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution to try to monitor all of our AWS services, including the servers and the cloud. We use both, and this actually helps us with monitoring and certain applications.

The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.

I expected more from the solution. I thought it would be just like the Orion Platform. On Orion, for example, you can spot all the different widgets and everything from the dashboard. This solution is less simple. There are charts and lines and numbers. It might be helpful if the solution offered some more extensions, like a log that could add up your display on the dashboard.

I have mixed feelings about the solution. I started off thinking that this would be a replacement to all of our other dashboards, like Cloudworx. However, it didn't show me that promise. I wouldn't want to replace the other dashboards that we started with because it wouldn't generate reporting. It would be helpful if it would help visualize information better.

There needs to be more integration of widgets, especially for reporting purposes.

The solution would benefit enormously from more automation, especially around reporting.

SolarWinds NPM has been in our company for two years now, but we have just recently started to utilize the solution effectively. We've begun to get the full effect of the product, I would estimate, only in the past few months.

The stability is weak in comparison to other solutions. CloudWatch is far better in the stability aspect. The solution is a bit slow.

The solution has the potential to scale. I'm not sure if my company has tried to do so or if they plan on doing so, so I can't speak from any personal experience.

We are actually in the process of replacing a lot of items. This solution didn't do the things we expected, so don't know the likelihood of scaling it in the future, or continuing to use it.

For the most part, our IT teams are the ones that are on the solution. Not everyone in the company is on it.

Technical support has always been great. They are very responsive. We've been satisfied with their level of support.

We didn't previously have any other hybrid platform to monitor. We were just using CloudWatch for our AWS services. With SolarWinds, we have the potential to take a look at everything across the board. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was really smooth.

I personally did not handle the deployment part, however, the rest of the team who supported me had handled the process and it was my understanding that they didn't have any issues.

I don't deal with licensing or pricing, so I wouldn't be able to guess how much we pay for the services or if they are monthly or yearly. I'm not sure what our license agreement looks like.

We just use the product. We're not consultants or resellers.

I'm not sure of which version of the solution we are currently using. It may be the most recent.

I do believe that in the future, users will gravitate towards using one solution for monitoring all the servers and applications. However, right now this product needs a lot of plugins. Currently, a lot of improvements are needed before the solution gets to a good place in terms of usability.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We primarily used the solution for routers and switches.

The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.

From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. I think it was kind of a neat feature they added. However, it obviously depends on who's using the platform. I use it as a troubleshooting tool mostly for historical data. That's kind of why I have a monitoring system. We rely heavily on that. We are supposed to be on 24/7 so if some resource is knocked out we can just do troubleshooting using historical data. Performance Analyzer was one of the core features I thought was pretty cool.

The idea that you can automatically trigger alerts from the TRAPS received is still something that still hasn't really taken off or worked properly. We have to manually go into the database and create SQL queries or SQL queries, to be able to match those and trigger those as alerts. On the engine itself, the Orion platform, just being able to receive the TRAP and generate the alert or something like an alert is a manual process.

We have all of these other networks that rely heavily on their own vendor protocol for monitoring, and then what the vendor has in place is just a place to be able to northbound, whatever it received to another server. 

It becomes tricky when you're trying to, for example, dry contact monitoring for power, etc. Those are not necessarily your network, they're using dry contacts. Just analog. The vendor needs to get all the information, and then put it into a format that actually works to be able to be received by other networks.

Basically, it's just important to have some sort of TRAP alert generation. There's no point of us trying to do queries into the database.

Before I joined my current company, I had been using SolarWinds for about six years.

The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes.

In terms of scalability, there is room for improvement. When you start monitoring, if you have so many interfaces and you're trying to monitor them at a faster interval, or a shorter interval, you get to a point where you need to request another node.

If you have a router that has over 400 interfaces, you need a very robust server. If you don't you'll end up running into issues.

I've never really reached out to technical support. I understand that it's alright. The very few times I've needed assistance, I was able to get some things from the SolarWinds page and their knowledge base. That's where almost everything you would need is found. 

For the most part, I've not had issues that required me to go past their knowledge base. The other thing is, when people do try to reach out past the knowledge base, the support staff always bounce back with a question like "Hey, did you check the log?" It can be frustrating because obviously you've looked and that's why you're calling. Because the answer isn't there.  

For the most part, they do a great job of having people share stuff on their knowledge base. Once you get access to that, most of what a general user would need is on there, if they running into something. The few times I've actually worked with support, it was in relation to something that was related to an enhanced feature. The experience, overall, I'd say has been okay.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

It's easy. A user can download the file, then they simply click the installer and it provides simple step-by-step click-through style instructions. It's been very intuitive for the most part. Before installation, it's important to consider space requirements, resources for the server, etc. before jumping in. Users will also need to consider (if they're running netflow) whether to save the data on the email server or not. It's possible to run out of space that way, however. There are various guidelines, however, at the end of the day, the installation process isn't complex in and of itself. 

I no longer work at the company that uses Solar Winds, so I don't have information about what they were paying or what they pay now. The current package I'm using myself is a free package as I do a comparison between PRTG and SolarWinds.

We're in the process of doing a comparison between SolarWinds and PRTG. 

At my old company, we were always using the current version of the solution. We'd like to keep up to date with the latest releases. The company even changed over when there was a move from a 2012 Windows server to an updated version of Windows (16).

We had a single server located in one location and all the other devices were networked. Sometimes SolarWinds was used as a slot receiver and trap receiver for some of those devices that have their own "NMS" (network managed system). It's not really proprietary, but we had a northbound interface to be able to send syslogs or TRAPS. SolarWinds was used as the one central location to be able to receive and process alarms and alerts for any trigger actions.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. The solution is kind-of expensive, but at the end of the day, it's quite robust. It has several great functionalities. It has groups, maps, almost everything. It's just a matter of the price point that makes it somewhat prohibitive.

The primary use case of this solution is for network monitoring.

The biggest thing for me is that it provides enough information for me to monitor. It alerts and provides you with the information that you need.

SolarWinds is one of those tools that work across the spectrum with different products, such as Cisco HP.

It is very customizable. I am quite happy with what it gives me.

I can say that SolarWinds is good on the market, but it's also expensive. The price is an issue.

It would be nice to have the device tracking software as part of the Network Monitoring suite. If you go with Spiceworks, which a free shareware product, they will give you all of that type of information. They will tell you that this is all of the features you have and this is what is up and what is down, and they will tell you if the device is a laptop or if this computer is plugged into this port, which is handy. SolarWinds has that tool, but it's an additional license.

Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product.

The market is always changing, but one thing that would add value would be analytics. Many put that into a SIEM-type solution, but from a network point of view, if I had analytics on my network to expand with then it would be helpful. I would say normally this port does this much traffic and over the last six months it's doing that much traffic, and then all of a sudden, today, it's doing an amount that isn't normal. It means that something is wrong in your environment and you can start an investigation.

When you are dealing with a large network, there is a lot of information coming through. If you had a system that did some sort of analysis and collating of information into smaller blocks, you could quickly look at a dashboard and say these are ten points I need to go and look at because these are things that are not 100% correct in the environment.

I have been using SolarWinds for about ten years.

We have four or five users, and we have approximately 150 devices that it's monitoring.

I have contacted technical support once or twice. I logged a ticket and they responded quite promptly, and they tried to help me with it.

The only time that I have had any issues was when I was upgrading. I had one surprise in my ten year period. When I upgraded to a new version of the product, the upgrade failed. It leaves you in a position where you can't go forward and you can't go backward. You're stuck. You almost have to reinstall it from fresh and start over, which is not a great point to work from. You would like to keep all of the history and information that you have built.

It's expensive and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing.

They have additional modules, for instance. They have a device tracking software that is an extra module. It tells you which device is connected to which port on your switch. It's a module that you have to pay extra for, at about $2,000.00 to $3,000.00.

It becomes expensive when you add all of these modules, just trying to do work with basic network tools.

We don't have any plans to increase usage in the future, but we do have some additional plans on providing it as a service to other companies. That said, I don't think that we will be changing anytime soon.

I have recommended this product more than once. It's one of the better products on the market, and it also has an extensive suite.

If people are looking for network monitoring software, and are willing to pay for it, and don't want a free version, I have always said that SolarWinds is one of the better options.

I think that there is room for improvement. I have seen other products that do similar, where some elements are better and some are worse. I think that it's a good all-round product, but it can be better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use it for our network LAN and some problem that we saw in our switching networks.

We had some interfaces where the SFP Ports were having some problems after a while. We found which of the SFP Ports was having the error and changed it, so the bandwidth become okay.

The error handling interface has been helpful. 

Mostly, we use the bandwidth monitoring because we experience problems with the bandwidth.

SolarWinds is not an all-in-compassing product. We need other products like Cisco and HPE to work with it.

It couldn't find the error to the problem because it was missing detail in the reports. The reports that we received from it weren't clear.

We aren't getting the solution that we need from the device.

We are looking to change away from this solution because of the documentation and the solution doesn't have enough integration in our country. The documentation is too weak.

The stability is very good.

We use it every day. We use it as a monitoring tool.

One person maintains the solution.

The scalability is very good for physical machines. For virtual machines, the scalability is challenging.

We have 10 users for 2000 devices. Most of the users are admins.

We have no plans to increase our usage.

We haven't called the technical support team. 

There wasn't enough SolarWind's documentation to fine tune the system.

For networks, we prefer to use Cisco Prime.

For service devices, we use HPE OneVIew. This is helpful for HPE services.

The enterprise setup was complex because we have too many devices (about a 1000 routers). It is very challenging to tune all these devices.

Maybe the support team didn't train us well on how to use the product. We might need experts to train us.

Deployment took about six months.

We deployed it ourselves. For deployment, two people worked.

It is expensive.

We are having some problems. Our network can't find the problem. We will probably go use Cisco Prime.

We have also considered switching to Zabbix due to its support and deployment.

Some solutions are open source and free.

Our primary use case for SolarWinds NPM is for network monitoring and SNMP traps.

SolarWinds NPM features that I have found most valuable are the reporting tools and the ability to create customized reports.

With regards to suggested areas of improvement for the product, I would like to see the price come down, and in addition I think the network element mapping tool is not as robust as it should be. 

I have been using SolarWinds NPM for 5-6 years.

SolarWinds NPM to date has been stable for me. 

The SolarWinds NPM product is easy to scale.

I have utilized SolarWinds technical support to help with issues, the experience is adequate for the the level of support we pay for. 

The initial setup of SolarWinds NPM is complex in my view. There are many knobs, dials and buttons to push, and it can take several days to get familiar with the product and it's functionality. 

Approximately 50 users utilize SolarWinds NPM within my company. 

The most valuable features are language support and technical support.

An area for improvement would be the use of modular licenses, which are not practical for big clients.

I have been using this solution for seven years.

The initial setup varies but can be quite complex.

This product is priced quite highly. Its licenses are available yearly, and the calculation of costs is quite complex.

I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.