SolarWinds NPM Room for Improvement
MohitKumar
Senior Specialist at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support.
The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.
View full review »
Angela Bustamante
Monitoring and Process Analyst at Seguros SURA
There are some areas for improvement in SolarWinds NPM. One is that their dashboard needs to be friendlier. We want them to take their dashboard to another level. For example: with our databases, we develop services and we want to put those on the dashboard, while making them more visual. This would be good to improve in the tool.
The integration of SolarWinds NPM with other tools is also another area for improvement. For example, we'd like to have the ability to manage the unit with other tools, because we need to have better control to manage the alerts. How can you load that capacity with only that kind of information?
We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure. You have to do a test, find what needs to be improved, then make the corrections on SolarWinds NPM. You have to be very attentive when using the tool, but it's an area to improve not just in SolarWinds NPM, but for any tool.
View full review »CP
ChrisPalmer
IT Infrastructure Analyst at Textron Systems Corporation
So far, it's been pretty good, however, due to the whole solar flare thing that happened two years ago, a lot of cybersecurity and leadership's kind of looking to replace it with something else. We're currently just trying to find other info or anybody else who's comparable in terms of other network monitoring solutions.
Wireless monitoring needs improvement. We need to get a little bit more information from the thin clients or wireless LAN controllers than we already do. It's very minimal at this point and getting more information would be pretty vital.
There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better. It would help to present information - rather than trying to get the highest level of administrative access to present minimal information. There are a lot of aspects where they give you base information, however, for other necessary gleams of information, you may need to have high-low. For instance, for Linux servers, you need to have pseudo access to get the necessary information to monitor and that's kind of a hassle.
Buyer's Guide
SolarWinds NPM
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SolarWinds NPM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Alan Arnold
Enterprise Operations Manager at University of Alabama at Birmingham
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.
DarrinBryant
AVP Technology Network Engineer at LPL Financial
Their IPAM component is severely lacking. The process is extremely manual. It just doesn't get in there if you don't manually enter it.
It is not particularly DNS-aware. When it comes to DNS names, you pretty much have to configure everything manually. It will not grab anything on its own.
They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices.
View full review »BP
reviewer1214877
Senior Network Engineer at a mining and metals company with 5,001-10,000 employees
SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance.
View full review »
Naglaa ELDeeb
Assistant Director, IT Service Excellence Quality Assurance at American University in Cairo (AUC)
The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network. We would also like to show the number of devices which we need to improve our service.
BB
reviewer1872705
Senior Network Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation. There's not a way to turn me off from alerts easily.
There really hasn't been anything that we've needed that it hasn't been able to provide.
Henry-Steinhauer
Systems Engineer at LifePoint Health
We have replaced SolarWinds with LogicMonitor.
View full review »
Devdatt Diwedi
IT Officer at Guardian Bank
We were looking for some sort of endpoint monitoring as well. it would be nice if that was covered. We'd like to have more security when it comes to ADR.
We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future.
Sometimes, if the problem isn't on our side, it doesn't provide a very clear problem in terms of what the issue is.
View full review »BO
BCOng
Corporate IT Infrastructure Manager at United Test and Assembly Center Ltd.
The solution could be enhanced. It currently lacks integration with SMS services which is something we need. A cloud-based option would also be helpful so we can monitor at any time and from anywhere; for now, we need to VPN to our environment.
MQ
reviewer1889832
Service Delivery Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
SolarWinds NPM could improve the graphics of the interface and more customized reporting.
View full review »
Umair (Abu Mohaymin) Akhlaque
Enterprise Solutions & Services Head at Duroob Technologies
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.
View full review »AD
A.J. DiLorenzo
Senior Systems Administrator at Privia Health
The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application. The SolarWinds Orion/NPM installation comes with a few Windows client application “add-ons” that would be better served if they were built into the SolarWinds NPM web application. Another area for improvement would be better integration between Solarwinds NPM and Solarwinds NCM as it seems that Solarwinds NCM installs a separate version of NPM/Orion console.
View full review »
it_user577527
Manager, Enterprise Monitoring at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The SAM custom script for running component checks only supports 10 pairs of results. I am not sure whether this is a scalability issue. It would be nice to have the option to do more. We worked around it by doing a component check per pair as much as we needed.
The product is excellent at taking feedback, especially from the Thwack form, and implementing popular feature requests.
View full review »SH
Dr. SureshHungenahally
Chief Executive Officer at Suraksha
The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved.
View full review »NS
NishantShrivastava
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
The dashboard of the solution is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement. Having all the features and parameters under a single tab in the solution would be good. For knowledge-related purposes, SolarWinds needs to consider adding documentation to its portal to provide users with the upgrade command if they want to upgrade the solution and how to carry out the onboarding procedure.
I would like to see real-time visualization and monitoring, especially when attempting to connect globally where one router is in the USA and the other is in the UK. With real-time visualization, all the interfaces can be made visible properly, while the users also get more visibility and their network. If an interface goes down, then one can monitor the interface directly with the help of the dashboard provided in the solution.
PF
Pedro Farrell
Manager at Barbados Water Authority
The solution works very well for our current use case, but the price of the solution can be improved.
View full review »
AbdulKader Mohandes
Senior Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The integration with video apps could be better.
View full review »RP
Reena Pandey
Consultant at HCL Technologies
An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data.
SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed.
Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature.
I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.
View full review »
Omer_Khan
ICT Design Manager at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The improvement would be that SolarWinds NPM thoroughly checks its patches before releasing them to the market. Better testing, alpha testing, and then releasing it to the market.
Vijay Samant
Assistant Manager at Just Dial Limited
SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license.
If we want to have more polling engines it will cost an additional 20 Indian rupees.
View full review »DS
Daniel Shine
Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD
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.
View full review »it_user227532
Senior Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The module UIs can have different features based on what module you're in. I'd love to see feature parity between them. Selecting nodes, for instance. In NPM, you can use one criteria for grouping, while in NCM, you can group in multiple levels.
More granular permissions! I'd like to see a role-based system where you can granularly apply permissions for administrative tasks and be able to assign these roles to people. Just because you need to edit a node doesn't mean you should have full admin permissions!
View full review »RH
Russ Harland
Sr. Systems Administrator at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would like to see stronger integration with SolarWinds LEM. This would be a nice-to-have integration at this point. This is really the only product with which it is not integrated.
When one looks at the entire suite of SolarWinds products, what we've seen
over the past several years is an ongoing theme of integration - as
modules like SAM, NCM, IPAM, VMAN, DPA, and others benefit full integration
into the base NPM product - allowing a user to leverage
application/database-specific performance metrics into views, reports, and
alerts.
When I say that LEM would be a nice addition, that's precisely what I mean is
- right now, there is no method for view integration, correlation, or cross-platform data sharing between the LEM appliance and our NPM
installation.
In other words, say I'm looking at the Node Details view on one of my domain controllers. It would be excellent to have one of the
widgets in that node details page pull in the last XX events LEM has on
the node in question.
FQ
Furquan Qureshy
IT Manager at XYZies
The evaluation time for the product is too short especially for large corporations.
View full review »
Ankur_Yadav
Solution Architect at Accenture
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.
View full review »JZ
JulieZompanti
Assistant Director of Information Technology at TOWN OF CULPEPER
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.
View full review »
CharlesGura
Sr Software Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
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.
View full review »
Muhammad Asif
Consaltant at a consultancy with self employed
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.
PM
Peter Mostert
Technical Support Specialist at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
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.
View full review »
RajeshB
Server and Network Monitoring Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
At this moment, we are facing some problem with Zoom and our web content sync. We are having trouble with the quality of our user experience. A lot of users are reporting that their calls and screen shares are getting disconnected, and it is happening very frequently. Therefore, I would like to monitor the Zoom application from SolarWinds NPM. Unfortunately, it doesn't have this capability right now, and I had to find another application for this.
We would like a single application from SolarWinds that incorporates all their products.
View full review »BA
Byron Anderson
Information Security Engineer at a cloud provider with 51-200 employees
- More automation around node additions and management
With regard to this I am looking for a faster way to add nodes. Currently we deploy nodes in bulk into different environments for our clients and having the ability to have monitoring deploy equally fast would be helpful versus having to spend a significant amount of time manually adding each system. I did recently open a Feature Request for this HERE
- Adding multi-tenancy into the product
We are a hosting provider and we give our clients access to Orion to see their nodes. Orion is not a multi-tenancy platform by design so I am continually challenged to provide clients access in a way that limits them to only see their stuff. In a more true multi-tenancy platform, it would be easy to choose what a client sees and what they don’t and not have to worry if there is a way to work around or break free of the limitations.
- Providing more monitoring capabilities for public cloud such as Azure, AWS, etc.
We are a Hybrid Cloud service provider and we work very closely with Microsoft and Azure. Currently, I am able to monitor nodes in Azure just fine, but I don’t have a good way to monitor PaaS based services.
View full review »MB
Marcos Benini
Director of Operations at 802BR
SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery.
View full review »
BenjaminRafrafi
System and Network Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees
The console could be more user-friendly. It would be better if SolarWinds updated the user interface.
View full review »RajeshB
Server and Network Monitoring Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »DP
Dale Partridge
Senior Executive IT Program Manager at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
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.
View full review »it_user216372
Systems Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers (which have no connection to the public internet). Also, if you add a new license and don’t remove the old one first, NPM will recognize only the expired one and ignore the new one, which prompts an additional call to support.
View full review »SK
Satyam Kumar
SME Solarwinds at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »GN
George Nel
Instrumentation Superintendent Systems at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees
There are still huge concerns about security. The image of Solarwinds NPM took a huge knock due to SUNBURST and SUPERNOVA. Security experts are still concerned. I would suggest that Solarwinds put more effort into rebuilding trust with the customers and the market.
View full review »it_user575310
Engineer, Infrastructure Applications at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
- Real-time analytics is the major weakness of the SolarWinds NPM platform today. They've done a fantastic job enabling the collection of data. Users are now demanding the ability to generate their own graphs, views, and so on; all of this must be done by an admin today.
- Scaling to the enterprise level is also an issue. SolarWinds NPM officially supports up to 100K elements (the number is unofficially about 50% higher), but enterprise customers could scale beyond that limit. However, this would only be applicable to environments with extensive interface monitoring requirements (where every interface is an element) or there is a node count > 10,000. SolarWinds is committed to growing that threshold in the near future, but no official announcements have been made.
- Enterprise customers would also like to see high-availability and fault-tolerance. HA v1 was implemented in the latest release at an additional cost. FT has yet to hit the current release but is something we regularly discuss on the Thwack forums.
it_user651858
Network Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
I feel there are two areas of improvement. One of which SolarWinds employees will probably roll their eyes about and the other one that maybe they didn’t realize:
- If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools.
- For example, if you don’t have the storage module, you won’t be able to even do the basic monitoring (interface, memory, CPU, etc.) for a NetApp device that you can do for other device types that are covered in other modules. Install SRM and suddenly it works, like magic!
- I’m OK with the concept of “you have to pay for the storage monitoring if you want to do storage monitoring”, but this becomes an issue in certain areas depending on what modules you license. This is also something that people may run into the hard way if they didn’t realize that this was the case.
- Some of the older components are in need of updating, which is something they’re focusing on more and more. But there are some areas where new tools work this way and old tools work that way. Some of these have gone away little by little, like classic report writer (which was on the server itself requiring RDP) and the old “advanced alert manager” which required the same. In today’s environment, having to RDP to the server just to do things that you’d do on the front end doesn’t quite make sense. There are some that still exist, though they are lacking some modern features.
KF
reviewer1682613
Solutions Consultant at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot.
At the same time, some tools don't have the ability to customize, so SolarWinds is ahead of the competition, in that regard. I would also like to see more support for software-defined network platforms and enhanced API monitoring capacity.
View full review »
Yoshiro Travezano
IM Infrastructure Specialist at Anglo American
The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear.
View full review »AW
reviewer1610928
Vice President Of Global Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »RP
reviewer1585257
Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The solution should make things easier to set up on a node by node basis. When turning on the network scanning to try to set up nodes, it has a tendency to grab everything in site, every port on a firewall, for example. One should have the option of picking through these before they're automatically added, so that there should be no need to go through them manually and delete them. The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work. Once the nodes have been added, there is a need to go in and delete them manually.
I cannot think of additional improvements that are worth mentioning. The solution does a pretty good job all around.
View full review »
Donald Bakels
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Adfontessoftware
I see a tendency in the industry that a lot of software is going into the cloud. Customers now have to install it on-premises or they could install on-premises software in the cloud. That is also possible. So I see a tendency that software is becoming more cloud-related and I think that it is valuable for customers. SolarWinds should continue in this direction.
As far as areas that can be improved, we already have NetPath functionality. Maybe that can be improved even more to add more options for visualization.
it_user575286
Lead Network Engineer/Business Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I think there needs to be more granularity in the permission sets in almost all of the SolarWinds products. I want to be able to specify almost everything that a specific user group can do. I am being a little picky with this, as there are some permissions that can be set. I just want more.
The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like.
View full review »it_user578952
Sr. Network Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would like to see NPM become better able to create dependencies automatically so that we won’t receive alerts for all devices.
For instance, if the power goes out at one of our locations, it would be nice if we could receive a summary alert. The alert could describe the possible causes of a power outage because NPM ‘saw’ our UPS at the site go into battery mode and then eventually it ran out of power. Intelligence like this would be a HUGE addition to an already great product.
I can’t really think of any else. SolarWinds is constantly improving and updating the product and we LOVE every aspect of it.
View full review »it_user397317
Programmer Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees
- Failover functionality does not exist without the purchase of the "Fail Over Engine (FoE)" license.
- Software upgrade and installation procedures are time consuming, especially for large/multiple site installations. Consulting the support matrix for software versions and modules is critical.
- Multiple server software upgrades still require a planned downtime outage window for the entire NPM instance regardless of the size of installation even if using the Failover Engine module.
- Each NPM polling server require a full Windows Server with GUI operating system to install and administer.
MB
reviewer1765383
CTO-OSS product development at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
KPIs should correlate and combine in one simple report.
The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible.
View full review »MR
Moshiur Rahman Khan
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The time monitoring could be improved from every five seconds to every second. If they can move to an every-second basis, then it will improve the monitoring analysis.
I would also like to see the security system updated to prevent virus attacks.
MD
reviewer1054686
Managing Director at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »DN
DineshNekkanti
Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company
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.
View full review »it_user579462
Networks Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
I enjoy their latest revamp of the alerting feature. However, I still think there is a little more that can be done there.
View full review »WK
Waseem Khan
Network/Systems Administrator at TRSP
I would like to have a Syslog server module for this product. That would make the solution better.
View full review »
KhalidOmer
Data Center Engineer at Arabianoud.com
My team has had a lot of issues with support.
The solution should offering monitoring for the database and for the TC (traffic controller).
View full review »MA
MohammedAlkhabbat
Network Administrator at Libyana Mobile Phone
There is a customization feature, but it is not a good feature. While it's somewhat good, it is too complicated.
The aesthetic widgets should be dynamic widgets, so the customization can be even more customizable.
View full review »WK
WILSON KEREBEI
CEO at WilCom Systems Ltd
Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier.
View full review »
Juan Pr
IT Professional at NTT Security
I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility.
View full review »KD
reviewer742629
IT Expert & Data Center Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
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.
View full review »DA
Don Abel, CISSP, CISA, CRISC
IT Director at Pattillo, Brown & Hill
Stability is an issue. We have installed SolarWinds (Server 2016) on a dedicated physical server and as a virtual machine in a brand new Hyper-V environment with brand new servers. We only monitor five firewalls and 30 servers. In both installation scenarios, SolarWinds randomly starts reporting falsely that devices are down. We have to bounce the server, and then it behaves for a while. SolarWinds support was no help. So, we are looking for a replacement.
EL
ERIK LABRA
Technical Specialist, consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
I think the graphical environment, the GUI still has to be improved. Other tools like Power BI provide a more graphical dashboard for executives to show what's going on with operations. SolarWinds has the data but the representation needs to be enhanced for an executive view. It requires a large amount of customization to get to a point where you are able to have something concrete for the upper management team.
For additional features, I'd like to see something more in automations, the graphical interface, and some dynamic dashboards or at least the ability for integration with some dashboard tools.
TN
reviewer1396410
Senior Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It has covered everything, so no improvement is required at their end. The only thing is the price.
View full review »NK
Nouman Khan
Senior Solutions Specialist (Network & Security) at Ooredoo Qatar
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.
View full review »AN
Andrew Ntuyo
Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical
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.
View full review »it_user214254
Senior Network Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Because SolarWinds is built upon a SQL database, some level of SQL query knowledge is necessary if one really wants to take customization of alerting/reporting to a deeper level. This is really difficult for someone who
- Doesn't have the time to devote to this
- Doesn't have a strong background in any sort of software development/coding
it_user212001
Network & Security Services Manager with 501-1,000 employees
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.
View full review »it_user171912
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I faced a problem with GRE over IPSec tunnel traffic, it was not showing Netflow enabled traffic and without IPSec tunnel traffic Netflow was working fine.
View full review »SK
reviewer1271415
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
If we go for the NT license, then we have to purchase the NPM, Network Performance Monitor. That is a dependency. In all of the SolarWinds products now, there are only these products. For example, Net Traffic Analyzer is a product. If we go for the licensing, then we have to purchase a Network Performance Monitor. There's dependency there. If they could combine everything into one product, that would be very helpful.
The NT is the enhanced version of the NPM. They have not put a license on the different monitors of the NT. However, they have to include in the same manner in the NPM itself.
For NetPath services, right now, we have to manually install the events in the nodes. If there was something from the console side, we could post the event to the nodes. If there was automation, that would be helpful. Already there's automation for other types of things or in other features, like for communication of the nodes. However, for the NetPath feature, if we could automatically move the event from the console side to the application side, that would be a great feature.
View full review »FA
Fazal Azeem
Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors
Even though SolarWinds NPM provides monitoring for a vast number of vendors and products, they do not support all of them. They should keep in mind that due to ongoing threats and daily malware attacks, companies have deployed network security and hired security professionals who are doing penetration testing. Certain devices provide ongoing security features, which can keep our network secure.
Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM.
View full review »reviewer1168221
Works at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API.
Network automation is a hot topic now, and SolarWinds needs to be focused on developing the product with that in mind.
View full review »JF
reviewer1008018
Manager of Network Services with 10,001+ employees
SolarWinds should have integrations back into products like ExtraHop, VIAVI, Riverbed, and NETSCOUT.
View full review »it_user577521
Founder at a tech services company
It’s tough to find areas with room for improvement, because they are always improving on it. I guess making the universal device pollers and the custom pollers a little bit more user friendly to the complete beginner would be useful. An awful lot of my clients don't have an awful lot of experience with SNMP. Going through the wizard to create these new pollers is quite cumbersome if you don't understand what you're doing. A lot of people just give up and not use it. Making them a little bit easier to understand for those who don't understand SNMP would be ideal. It would be a lot of work but that would useful.
View full review »it_user153747
Systems Admin Team Lead at a government with 501-1,000 employees
From a QoE point of view - I'm really grateful it was released so that we could get started taking advantage of the features. The one thing that would make it even more helpful would be to allow us to define our own applications. But having said that, I posted a feature request on the thwack community and got a response from SolarWinds within a half hour, asking for more details about my feature request.
View full review »GM
reviewer1289460
SOC Expert at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
If SolarWinds integrated with other solutions, for example, something like in a SIEM, security operations system, it would be more useful for customers. It would be ideal if they could integrate more with security solutions down the line.
There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country.
View full review »OH
reviewer1029732
librarian at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
An area for improvement would be the use of modular licenses, which are not practical for big clients.
View full review »MH
reviewer1643823
Vice President, SaaS Operations at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
If they did some type of synthetic monitoring, it would have been better.
View full review »SF
Suzanne Fisher
Help Desk Technician at NERIC BOCES
It is difficult for stakeholders to translate technical requirements, which results in difficulties selecting a platform or implementing a solution.
View full review »it_user578784
SolarWinds SME at a tech services company
I would like to see more information on design, customization from the community, and a better certification department.
View full review »it_user577893
Quick Launch Team Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Two or three of the core functions are still nested in Win32 apps on the server; but it seems that the foundation was laid in the current website for porting those functions over in the near future.
View full review »it_user171936
Works at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
So far I am satisfied with the result but I am still learning how it works.
View full review »PS
PankajSoni
Sr. Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
They should increase its accuracy rate as SolarWinds's monitoring accuracy is not good if you compare it with other tools, like NNM/ScienceLogic/Zenoss.
View full review »it_user669324
Enterprise Monitoring Consultant at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Some features are missing (which will be in any product out there) but there is a community that either provides workarounds or the ability to request the improvement.
View full review »it_user579453
Systems Administrator at a tech services company
NPM comes with a tool called Network Atlas. Currently, it can only link switches to switches and only if all the corresponding ports are monitored. I would like it to figure out next-hop devices, which other tools like NetBrain can do.
I would also like to see better mapping of devices and how they connect to one another.
View full review »it_user167964
Network Engineer with 51-200 employees
The admin web site could be a lot faster.
View full review »it_user139116
Senior Network at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would say the NPM toolset has room for improvement. I haven't seen the benefit of integrating it into NPM.
View full review »it_user171930
Network Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
IPAM. We wish it would work with Cisco CNR and help us manage all of our DHCP servers from a centralized platform.
View full review »MV
SolarWinds677
Information Technology Director at a transportation company with 11-50 employees
This pricing for this solution needs to be better.
I would like to see integration with antivirus or other security endpoint solutions. There are only one or two solutions that they integrate with.
View full review »DO
David Olusesan
System Administration at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The user should be able to customize the dashboard to their own requirements. Right now, we have to design separate dashboards for visualization. For example, there is one for the environment and another for the infrastructure. I would like to design a single dashboard that contains my visualized environment, my physical environment, my services, and my processes. This would make the job of monitoring easier.
Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution.
The reporting is in need of improvement.
View full review »it_user577536
Analyst Network Operations at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
The price is probably an area with room for improvement. It's not the least expensive option out there, but it's a decent balance. I'm pretty certain my supervisors would say that.
As odd as it might be, I'd like it to not be as advanced. I'd like a text mode, almost.
View full review »Donald Bakels
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Adfontessoftware
The solution could be more secure.
View full review »it_user167895
Project Manager and consultant enterprise IT tooling at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Scalability: In general, the scalability for most organizations is OK.
The product is also used by larger companies and TELCOs. They encounter scalability and stability issues. You need a dedicated person or team to keep everything under control.
View full review »it_user216399
Senior Network Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees
All the software has room for improvement, nothing is perfect.
View full review »it_user174651
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Reporting functions are limited & difficult to modify.
View full review »it_user7548
Consultant at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Better support and integration for vendors other than Cisco.
View full review »FA
FAHAD ALBAZ
IT Security Architecture & Implementation Manager at Banque Saudi Fransi
Having more technical and support resources available in Saudi Arabia would be helpful.
View full review »it_user221865
Platform Engineer III at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
It needs group views with performance metrics. They do certain ones well, but not filters to a custom group view.
View full review »it_user174660
System Analyst with 10,001+ employees
Solarwinds SAM needs to improve application monitoring for critical applications like MSSQL, Oracle, Exchange etc. They need to add more monitoring parameters.
View full review »it_user175134
Senior Manager - Global Network Ops with 1,001-5,000 employees
EOC.
View full review »NJ
reviewer1467909
Optical Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »AA
Ali Alkhamis
CISO with 201-500 employees
It would be nice to manage all network devces from just one single platform, instead of going to different platforms.
View full review »it_user616932
Network Engineer at a educational organization
The speed needs improving. If you have a very large network and are monitoring a lot of devices the dashboard responds slower.
View full review »it_user660639
Sr. IT Infrastructure Specialist at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Reporting: Generating reports could be improved.
NOTE: This is related to the version 9.5. I believe they are on version 12.1 and this may have been addressed.
View full review »it_user83385
Network Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Perhaps they could hire more tech support for this awesome product. I had a difficult experience in their support, not technically but the availability of the engineers. Since they are so little and the bulk of demands for their support is huge, I would have to wait in line to get a response because my ticket is not network down impacting. It took me about 3 months to finish this customization.
View full review »
AV
reviewer1079667
Systems Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications.
View full review »it_user577329
Systems Management at a media company with 10,001+ employees
Time: A worldwide deployment can be confusing for dispersed users with non-local times. Each node should have a local time (with summer offset if appropriate) & each user should view & report in their local time. This means that the database must record metrics in Universal Time and that each node must be assigned an offset with user viewing based on their local time. It’s a significant re-write, but is essential to attract global customers.
View full review »it_user164031
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
I honestly haven’t given thought to areas that need improvement since I spend a lot more time monitoring the network than optimizing NPM and features; nowhere enough time-wise to nit-pick and test every little thing. So far for what I have done with it, it has worked, getting there wasn’t always the easiest – usually a lot of trial and error based on research.
View full review »EE
reviewer895845
System Engineer - Infrastructure Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The integration needs to be improved. SolarWinds has many modules for things like application monitoring and network performance monitoring, but sometimes they are not as good as others that are being used. This means that we use other tools and eventually, we want to integrate them into SolarWinds. It might also be the case that we have other tools, like Splunk and Windows Event Collector, and we want to integrate them but can't.
View full review »SM
Sue Mike
Solutions Engineer at Mesiniaga
More MIBs.
View full review »it_user384900
ENTERPRISE NETWORK : Team Leader: ICT Events Monitoring at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
We need to investigate technology changes everyday.
View full review »it_user656289
Head, ATM Management at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
I would like to see continuous improvement on the reporting and graphical views of customized portals.
View full review »it_user4866
Works with 51-200 employees
There isn't a great deal of flexibility to create custom metrics that can be discovered easily or custom aggregation schemes.
View full review »
it_user218772
PC Support Technician at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
We had issues pinpointing the exact location of a problem due to configuration of a particular bandwidth. This was due to the Cisco firewall configuration.
View full review »it_user341982
Freelancer Information Security & SIEM Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
The security information and event management could be improved.
View full review »it_user2871
Network Engineer at a university with 51-200 employees
-New, web-based interface lacks some features of traditional GUI.
-Increases the processor load if it operated for a period of time.
Solarwinds is a strong company in the network monitoring, management and configuration market -- it has a lot of products and one of the most famous is solarwinds TFTP server. Solarwinds engineering toolset is a set of products that include all monitoring and management network programs combined in one software package. Solarwinds network performance monitor is a strong product that combines management (SNMP), monitoring (SYSLOG) and configuration of routers and switches. It is also very effective to analyze the link bandwidth and network device performance such as CPU utilization and memory.
View full review »
it_user174672
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at a wellness & fitness company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Overall speed of the software could be improved... as it is incredibly slow at times. Polling for items that are in a down state seems to take a long time. This affects up time reporting and metrics.
View full review »it_user1012662
Information Technology Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The UI needs improvement, although in the latest version we installed I've noticed it has gotten better.
Improvement also is required the monitoring of multiple interfaces from different devices.
View full review »CC
technica379896
Technical Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It would be helpful if they were tied up with one of the hardware vendors so we wouldn't have so much to set up. Another feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows.
View full review »it_user1290390
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
The interface could be made more user-friendly. There are lots of features but using them is a little bit difficult. For somebody doing network monitoring for the first time, it is quite difficult to use. For example, they could add better dashboards.
View full review »it_user952677
Sr Network Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
I think it's a great product. It has ease of use. Just add the IP with the correct credentials or SAS and multistring, and you can already collect all that information including you have NTA, then you're going to have NetFlow. Anything that has an IP that you want to monitor up or down, they can monitor it. If you have SNMP support, they can also collect the information for you.
Also it supports IP SLAs, so you can have even more information from a remote site. You can monitor something like the performance, like mid-latency and the like. You can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible, a flexible solution. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL if you need to.
Also' maybe if SolarWinds would have something you may subscribe to that would be like a polling engine on your site, so all the reporting would go directly to SolarWinds, They could then manage the database and everything else. That would be a nice asset to have.
The only other issue I have is that sometimes when upgrading, it becomes complicated to manage the upgrade.
View full review »it_user5550
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
1.The user interface is not intuitive enough and needs improvements in certain parts.
2.The web interface does not have a good support for some browsers like Google Chrome. It officially supports IE and Firefox.
3. Windows Vista systems are not officially supported from SolarWinds.
View full review »
it_user5157
Sr System Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
User Interface needs improvement as it is not very attractive.
I was not able to properly monitor my SNMP based online UPS.
View full review »
it_user1125
Network Engineer at a retailer with 51-200 employees
• Bulk Node attach is chaos
• TCP Service Monitoring
• Unable to perform stop or edit for several events
• Slightly costly
• Latest web based interface does not have some characteristics of the traditional Graphic User Interface.
• I am having a problem with putting up a reliance structure.
View full review »
YP
Yashokanth Partkunan
Managed Services Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
It would be good to have high security. This is a concern after the attacks.
They also need to focus more on the application side.
View full review »it_user216402
System Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
They could make the process of adding various devices easier and more intuitive.
View full review »it_user168066
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Map section and Bandwidth.
View full review »it_user1023
Director of IT at a tech company with 51-200 employees
- New, web-based interface lacks some features of traditional GUI.
- One of the problems I've had in the past, is building out a dependency structure.
View full review »
it_user1143
Network Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Resource utilization is heavy so you need to analyze the server before using it for multiple roles. We are unable to use web console to configure new alerts.
View full review »
TZ
reviewer1140936
Business Consultant. at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
It would be nice if SolarWinds added some technical protocols like Modbus. The market needs a simple solution for monitoring a technical device.
View full review »it_user714
Network Engineer at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
1. The constant flow of new features and re-designing of the product sometimes presents bugs that were not identified. 2. Most of the primary support people in Austin do a good job, but they also have outsourced support that also responds to tickets .. and they can be very frustrating to deal with.
View full review »
it_user657369
Network/NOC Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
Dependencies: Created dependencies are not visible for management/editing by default until some tweaking is done. It would be better if this is enabled by default.
View full review »it_user555
Network Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Network discovery missed many devices. Network mapping & topology was not accurate and does not update automatically. Alerts can not be configured differently for different device categories (e.g., alert comms guys about routers; network people about switches, etc.). While Orion offers many options, many features must be purchased as separate modules.
View full review »
Jayesh Ramaiya
Network Analyst at RAMAIYA LTD
The solution's customer service is not very good because the support takes too long. The solution needs to provide better training videos, especially on creating individual reports. It would be good if reporting were made easier with SolarWinds NPM.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
SolarWinds NPM
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about SolarWinds NPM. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Buyer's Guide
Download our free SolarWinds NPM Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
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