SolarWinds NPM Review

• Easy monitoring of applications
• Networking
• Power
• Server infrastructure components

We are frequently able to attend to issues before our user community and customers are aware that a problem exists. We are also able to provide interfaces to our service desk and other users customized for their needs.

The stability when multiple modules are added could be addressed. We have the need to restart the monitoring solution on a weekly basis as we've combined NPM with a variety of other SolarWinds utilities.

I've used it for nine years.

No issues with deployment.

Yes, as noted above, the solution is not always stable and generally requires a weekly reboot. We do own a wide variety of SolarWinds products that are integrated with NPM.

No, additional polling engines can be purchased at any given time.

They have an excellent sales team however, they do not negotiate maintenance. So while you may get the product for 75% off list price, you'll pay 20% of list for maintenance every year. Once they have you on the product, they get their money back on the 20% maintenance on list every year.

First level usually doesn't get any further than running through the installation wizard, next, next, next. I've run into some scenarios where we've been requested to "start fresh" with data which is not a good resolution. We generally push for escalation and work with second and third level support/developers.

We used What's Up Gold at one company, which wasn't as feature rich, and Nagios at my present company which was quite expensive in terms of custom programming to get what we want out of the solution.

Quite easy, the "next, next, next" GUI installation with the addition of a standard SQL database usage made installation quite seamless and easy.

All in house.

I couldn't tack a dollar figure on this without analyzing all incidents/service requests entered based upon information obtained from SolarWinds. We do have recognition that profitability is affected at a rate of approximately. $58 x 700 = $40,600 per hour for each hour that either warehousing or manufacturing systems are unavailable.

We did an evaluation of continued Nagios utilization costs vs. purchasing of the complete SolarWinds package.

Examine all the products on the market and choose the solution that requires the least amount of interaction with the most amount of usable data. I haven't looked recently so I cant comment if this is that package or not.