SolarWinds NPM Valuable Features
MohitKumar
Senior Specialist at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The solution's interface is very user friendly and easy to navigate. We provide customers with access and they have no issues learning and exploring the solution.
Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization.
The solution always includes new features in their releases.
View full review »
Angela Bustamante
Monitoring and Process Analyst at Seguros SURA
I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is.
View full review »CP
ChrisPalmer
IT Infrastructure Analyst at Textron Systems Corporation
I find the NetPath to be very valuable. It visualizes that traceroute that you can share with anyone in the business. For example, when they say, "Hey, what's going on? The network's slow because my application or my server's having issues" you can show them this nice graph that visualizes where there may be congestion or if there isn't any congestion at all.
Its initial setup is simple.
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.
767,319 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Alan Arnold
Enterprise Operations Manager at University of Alabama at Birmingham
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.
View full review »
DarrinBryant
AVP Technology Network Engineer at LPL Financial
It is simple to use.
It can be agentless.
The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is.
View full review »BP
reviewer1214877
Senior Network Engineer at a mining and metals company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The most valuable feature of SolarWinds NPM is the performance monitoring to see the memory, and CPU utilization.
View full review »
Naglaa ELDeeb
Assistant Director, IT Service Excellence Quality Assurance at American University in Cairo (AUC)
This solution offers a very good view of our network and allows us to effectively monitor performance.
BB
reviewer1872705
Senior Network Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The alerting has been the biggest aspect we appreciate. In regards to utilization, it can be proactive in regards to addressing situations before some cases arise before the users even see them.
The initial setup is simple.
It integrates really well with the Cisco platform. We are a Cisco shop. I don't know how well it's going to integrate with us moving to Aruba or going with other vendor hardware, how well it's going to integrate, I guess we'll find out.
It is scalable.
Technical support is helpful.
The stability is good.
View full review »
Henry-Steinhauer
Systems Engineer at LifePoint Health
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.
View full review »
Devdatt Diwedi
IT Officer at Guardian Bank
It can be a monitoring tool that just monitors for us at the moment, checking what the issue is or where the issue is. It is managed by a third party. Basically, it just gives us a view of what the site is. We can see our server connection and whether it's up or not. It's just checking if the servers are up or not and if the network is up or not. It's not doing too much else.
The solution is very user-friendly.
When it pinpoints something, I will get an email alert. I'll immediately know what the problem is and be able to do something.
The pricing is great.
View full review »BO
BCOng
Corporate IT Infrastructure Manager at United Test and Assembly Center Ltd.
SolarWinds provides a good enterprise level of tools and covers the essential components. I like the new GUI.
View full review »MQ
reviewer1889832
Service Delivery Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM. We can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can use useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting. It is very helpful. Overall it was a very good experience.
View full review »
Umair (Abu Mohaymin) Akhlaque
Enterprise Solutions & Services Head at Duroob Technologies
It's a very good tool and a very stable tool.
For a medium-sized customer, it has everything that you're looking for.
It has all kinds of functionality that any network team or monitoring team is looking for. It's easy to integrate with any other tool, as it has an open database. It's easy to implement and has a very nice user experience.
View full review »AD
A.J. DiLorenzo
Senior Systems Administrator at Privia Health
I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable. The advanced alerting and notifications capabilities are helpful as well. Devices can be discovered automatically on a schedule, and grouped by vendor automatically, which makes it very easy to track down devices. The customizable dashboards and reporting are flexible and tend to come in handy as well.
View full review »
it_user577527
Manager, Enterprise Monitoring at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have a lot of “home-grown” apps to handle the interesting and challenging monitoring requests and alerting needs.
This product is extremely flexible and customizable. It will do just about anything you need it to do. Out of the box, there is a significant amount of monitoring you can do with very little setup. Then, with custom properties and some ingenuity, you can get it to do pretty much anything else. Additionally, there are a lot of ideas and support in their forum, Thwack.
View full review »SH
Dr. SureshHungenahally
Chief Executive Officer at Suraksha
The SolarWinds product is easy to deploy and the product features are quite granular. We can dig deep into the infrastructure and at the data level, or we can aggregate and come higher up and look at all the trends and analysis of what it provides.
View full review »NS
NishantShrivastava
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Though in SolarWinds NPM, there is no need to go into other interfaces and set up some settings with other parameters, SolarWinds NCM allows you to do so more easily. We just put the configuration and execute the particular IP, or you can just put the Excel sheet, where once the import is done, it shows all the IPs there, and so you just need to do the configuration and execute the IPs. The solution provides you with real-time data, including details like how many devices are completed, how many are left, and how many are getting errors.
PF
Pedro Farrell
Manager at Barbados Water Authority
The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable because we use the solution for monitoring. For example, a map that shows all of our switches, which make up our core infrastructure, and then the small firewalls that connect to the other locations so that we can see how our devices are running. Hence, the monitoring ability to create those maps and monitor everything on warmup is a very valuable feature for us.
View full review »RP
Reena Pandey
Consultant at HCL Technologies
I found a lot of valuable features in SolarWinds NPM, such as the customized application monitoring that allows you to customize any monitoring and script customization, and you also have the option to deploy and upgrade SolarWinds NPM online, which is very useful for my organization.
View full review »
Omer_Khan
ICT Design Manager at a hospitality company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced.
View full review »
Vijay Samant
Assistant Manager at Just Dial Limited
The most valuable features of SolarWinds NPM are network performance monitoring and the overall benefit for servers.
DS
Daniel Shine
Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD
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.
it_user227532
Senior Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
- How easy it is to get good metrics out of it.
- How extensible it is.
- There are many different ways to customize it to fit your environment.
Compared to many products, SolarWinds is very simple to use. When you add a node in NPM, it is easy to get it to start monitoring everything it supports and you very quickly see the results of this in the graphs and such. When you want to get some special things out of a box, let's say the number of connections on a ASA firewall, you can very easily add a UnDP, add it as a graph to your screen, and see the results right away. This is a real-world example, because the company I worked with was having Internet problems with our main firewalls due to maxing out the number of connections going through the box. Having it graphically presented makes it easy, though.
That was one way of customizing it, via UnDPs. Another, that I did a bunch of at my previous job, and ended up making generic versions of and posting on THWACK, is the ability to add new resources. Any given page within NPM can be customized by clicking "Customize" and you can add quite a few prepackaged resources to a page or change their order around to better fit you. You might even want to delete some. But, if you get to be a SW geek like myself, you start realizing that SW doesn't always display every bit of info that it has by browsing through the SQL tables and seeing what’s there. Nowadays, you can do this either directly with SQL, or via SWQL, which is a bastardized SQL that has pre-built relationships between the tables set up in a way that is very easy to leverage without complex joins and such in SQL. From that, you can do some very simple to very complex things.
An example of a simple thing I did, was I built a "CDP Neighbor" resource, which, if you click on the Node Details page, it tells you what devices are directly connected to it via the CDP protocol. Plus, SolarWinds made it simple for me to link to those nodes and you can basically traverse from node to node within SolarWinds looking at stuff.
View full review »RH
Russ Harland
Sr. Systems Administrator at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable features are ease of implementation, strong out-of-the-box reporting, and the ability to customize the GUI.
From a platform standpoint, the integration of NPM with the other SolarWinds modules is very strong, seamless, and valuable in presenting a single pane of glass for network, application, and database performance and availability.
We're a small enough company that it would be difficult for a single person, or even a small team, to attempt to tie data together from different software products in the way that SolarWinds does.
View full review »FQ
Furquan Qureshy
IT Manager at XYZies
What I like about SolarWinds is the application health monitoring system. It's a very good system, and I recommend it to big companies in the pharmaceutical or the banking industries, for example, with large networks and very critical servers.
The other valuable system is the DSS (decision support system). If there's a fault in the network, SolarWinds is basically capable of rectifying and resolving that problem on its own without any intervention from an IP assistant or administrator.
View full review »JZ
JulieZompanti
Assistant Director of Information Technology at TOWN OF CULPEPER
We use the top 10 dashboards on a frequent basis, as well as the ability to put systems in maintenance mode when we need to perform patching or other maintenance.
Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disk space statistics from servers and volumes.
CharlesGura
Sr Software Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
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.
View full review »
Muhammad Asif
Consaltant at a consultancy with self employed
Network performance is the main issue clients are facing. SolarWinds checks if a node is down, and we can set thresholds for performance metrics. For example, we set it up to get an alert automatically if a value is over 80 percent. It has a full dashboard that covers CP, hard disk, and node monitoring.
PM
Peter Mostert
Technical Support Specialist at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
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.
View full review »
RajeshB
Server and Network Monitoring Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
We use it to understand our historical reports, since we keep these reports for 365 days per our compliance requirements. We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future.
View full review »BA
Byron Anderson
Information Security Engineer at a cloud provider with 51-200 employees
- Ease of use
- Ease of training for others
- Good reporting
- Nice dashboard customization options
- Good map building capabilities
- Good integration with other SolarWinds tools to provide a “single pane of glass”
- Great support
- Great online community, “Thwack”
MB
Marcos Benini
Director of Operations at 802BR
The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools.
View full review »
BenjaminRafrafi
System and Network Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees
I like the tracking feature to track devices and see where they are connected. This is very practical.
View full review »RajeshB
Server and Network Monitoring Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well.
View full review »it_user216372
Systems Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
In my opinion, one of the most valuable features of this product is the level of customization. From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization.
View full review »SK
Satyam Kumar
SME Solarwinds at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
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.
View full review »GN
George Nel
Instrumentation Superintendent Systems at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees
The solution is quite customizable.
The initial setup is straightforward.
The solution is stable.
We have had a good experience with technical support.
The product is scalable.
So far, we have found the pricing to be reasonable.
It meets expectations. With a bit of SQL knowledge, you do manage to get a lot out of your reports.
View full review »it_user575310
Engineer, Infrastructure Applications at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
An easy-to-use interface for both admins and users is key. Adoption of any product can be constrained by a UI that is neither intuitive nor visually engaging. The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products.
View full review »it_user651858
Network Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
I find there to be three areas in which this suite provides significant value.
It integrates well as an ‘everything’ tool. We all understand the concept of “jack of all trades, master of none”, but SolarWinds tends to cover 80-95% of everything across every module they have. This means that if I have vendor A for product A and vendor B for product B, there’s a pretty good chance they can integrate it with the rest of their suite.
For example, they have a network monitoring (NPM) core module that integrates with SAM (Server and Application Monitor) and NTA (Netflow Traffic Analyzer). This gives you a very good first view of an environment. It’s very analogous to SCOM in how complete it is with Microsoft products, but with none of the limitations. For example, SCOM doesn’t handle network equipment very well.
With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server. They can all:
- Be monitored as if they are on-premise
- Handle syslogs/traps/logs
- Monitor most applications out-of-the-box with a lot of flexibility
- See who sends traffic to whom via NTA.
All of this tends to display on a single page for each node that I choose to monitor. Every tool tends to build on one another and SolarWinds does tend to highlight where the tools integrate and how.
With staff that has some technical knowledge, this tool is pretty intuitive out-of-the-box. Getting people to look at it may be one thing, but getting those that are at least at a helpdesk level of knowledge serves to take them very little time to orient, if the tool is set up properly.
They have a THWACK support forum that is incredibly useful. I remember the days of trying to search for Microsoft problems and running into support forum posts that range from "useless" to “actually something that would harm your environment” with an extremely high noise ratio.
With THWACK, the developers will often reply directly in the forums with helpful replies. The community is also extremely helpful and fairly loyal. I’d consider it to be more like how I imagine that the Splunk community functions.
View full review »KF
reviewer1682613
Solutions Consultant at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
SolarWinds' network and server application monitoring features are strong.
View full review »
Yoshiro Travezano
IM Infrastructure Specialist at Anglo American
Their support team is efficient, and it is easy to set up.
View full review »AW
reviewer1610928
Vice President Of Global Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
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.
View full review »RP
reviewer1585257
Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.
View full review »
Donald Bakels
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Adfontessoftware
What is good about this product is that the customers get real insights into the behavior of their network. They can see what is flowing over it. They will know what kind of data it is, like whether it is YouTube movies or if it is application information. This allows them to get an exact picture of how their network is being used.
it_user575286
Lead Network Engineer/Business Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I love the GUI. Almost everything is accessible through the web interface. It is very user-friendly. It is easy to drag and drop resources wherever you want them.
NPM also includes additional features that come in handy, such as a web SSH console, SYSLOG and trap collectors, and Wireless Heat Maps.
A new feature has now been included called NetPath. This allows you to see the status of a path all the way to an endpoint, even through the internet. This is awesome!
I like having the ability to add custom pollers for anything.
I also like how SolarWinds is integrating all of their products together so you don't have to go different places to get to each monitoring solution.
HA was also added, but there is still a little way to go with that.
View full review »it_user578952
Sr. Network Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The valuable features are SNMP monitoring of servers, CPU utilization, as well as memory and disk-space utilization.
Without NPM monitoring, we would be in a world of hurt and constantly responding to outages and unexpected downtime. NPM allows us to be proactive and fix things before they cause downtime.
View full review »it_user397317
Programmer Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees
- Extensible REST API
- Excellent technical support
- Mature product, strong brand, Gartner awards
- Custom MSSQL scripting support in both alerting and reporting.
- Support for a wide variety of makes and models of network equipment/appliances.
- Support for monitoring Windows, Linux, Unix, and some other server OSes.
- Consistent and constant application improvements.
MB
reviewer1765383
CTO-OSS product development at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
The solution ranks as one of the top five monitoring tools.
View full review »MR
Moshiur Rahman Khan
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly.
View full review »MD
reviewer1054686
Managing Director at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
What I've found most valuable about the solution is that it's scalable.
View full review »DN
DineshNekkanti
Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company
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.
View full review »it_user579462
Networks Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
The simplicity of this product is a valuable feature; everything you need is easily accessible and the maintenance is low. In addition, it is customizable which makes it possible to do anything you want with little work.
View full review »WK
Waseem Khan
Network/Systems Administrator at TRSP
The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring.
View full review »
KhalidOmer
Data Center Engineer at Arabianoud.com
WK
WILSON KEREBEI
CEO at WilCom Systems Ltd
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.
View full review »KD
reviewer742629
IT Expert & Data Center Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The error handling interface has been helpful.
Mostly, we use the bandwidth monitoring because we experience problems with the bandwidth.
View full review »DA
Don Abel, CISSP, CISA, CRISC
IT Director at Pattillo, Brown & Hill
- Performance history is the most valuable feature, especially when tracking down a problem.
- Root cause analysis is very valuable to us.
EL
ERIK LABRA
Technical Specialist, consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
SolarWinds core data is organized in a very good way. The solution can easily be interconnected with other management systems to get information not only from networking devices but also applications and servers.
View full review »TN
reviewer1396410
Senior Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there.
View full review »NK
Nouman Khan
Senior Solutions Specialist (Network & Security) at Ooredoo Qatar
The most valuable feature is the graphical user interface.
View full review »AN
Andrew Ntuyo
Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical
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.
View full review »it_user214254
Senior Network Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
- Real-time netflow data
- Highly customizable alerting & reporting
- Very large base of information, further customized by high compatibility with MIBs from many, many vendors, resulting in very customizable UnDPs
it_user212001
Network & Security Services Manager with 501-1,000 employees
- Easy monitoring of applications
- Networking
- Power
- Server infrastructure components
it_user171912
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Monitoring and reporting are valuable features.
View full review »SK
reviewer1271415
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
The solution is very good. Previously, in the solution, there was no more option for customizing the reports and the alerts. However, they’ve improved. Now, in the last two years, since 2021, they have had a new release, a new version, and there are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports.
Over the last couple of years, they have introduced features like NetPath and PerfStack. That is very helpful for any of the admins to troubleshoot issues to know precisely what is going on in nodes.
View full review »FA
Fazal Azeem
Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors
We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down.
In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.
View full review »reviewer1168221
Works at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation.
This solution has a very large and active user community.
View full review »JF
reviewer1008018
Manager of Network Services with 10,001+ employees
Dashboards are very useful.
View full review »it_user577878
SolarWinds Expert (Consultant) at a tech services company
The two most important features are SNMP monitoring capabilities and the beautiful web interface. SNMP is all about being able to access devices, it's a must have, and every monitoring tool will have these features. Not all monitoring tools will have a beautiful graphical user interface that includes charts and graphs and reports. It's very, very easy to read and work with. This is important because we are all humans, and we want nice things. We want nice gadgets and the people who are actually using SolarWinds are engineers. They are all humans, as well, so they want nice things.
It may sound trivial and pathetic, but it's really important. One tool can do a hundred times better than the other, but if the presentation layer lacks this beauty, then people just won't use it. They will be lost and they won't use it and they won't appreciate the complete power of the tool. The elegance and the way it's implemented is very important. It's very, very important from the elegance perspective alone, not just from a usability perspective.
View full review »it_user577521
Founder at a tech services company
Pretty much all of it is valuable, really. You buy NPM if you want to monitor devices and interfaces on those devices. It's mainly geared towards network devices, primarily; the ability of seeing uptime for the device and the interfaces; and also the new features that they've just added. NetPath and the high availability; those are pretty key in a lot of environments. That NetPath is amazing.
View full review »it_user153747
Systems Admin Team Lead at a government with 501-1,000 employees
When it comes to the new features in NPM 11, the most valuable addition for us is the deep packet analysis Quality of Experience dashboard (QoE).
View full review »GM
reviewer1289460
SOC Expert at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution is easy to use. It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical.
It's quite stable and reliable.
The reports are excellent. They give good graphical information. It gives a lot of great details about everything that's going on in my network and it's easy to read and understand due to its visual nature.
The scaling is quite good.
It's a very easy solution to set up.
OH
reviewer1029732
librarian at a educational organization with 10,001+ employees
The most valuable features are language support and technical support.
View full review »MH
reviewer1643823
Vice President, SaaS Operations at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
The most valuable feature of this solution is the monitoring capabilities.
View full review »SF
Suzanne Fisher
Help Desk Technician at NERIC BOCES
The most valuable feature of this solution is the alerts.
View full review »it_user578784
SolarWinds SME at a tech services company
It is hard to identify a single feature for each product as the three products function as a chorus to help me manage our IT throughout the enterprise. Nonetheless, here are the valuable features of each product.
NPM 12.0
The most helpful feature with in NPM is the NetPath Services. Having the ability to view the end-to-end view of the path for accuracy and availability provides me with the data to visualize an issue in the network.
NCM 7.5
With NCM, I am able to track the accuracy and changes to my networking devices to make sure configuration integrity is adhered to.
SAM 6.3
With the SAM application, the Application Health Overview feature lets me know that my production traffic is running as expected.
Having all 3 products tied together gives me the data I need to accurately pinpoint a problem within moments, instead of collating data from various applications and servers. The difference is five minutes with SolarWinds, compared to two hours without SolarWinds.
View full review »it_user577893
Quick Launch Team Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The most valuable features are:
- The new F5 Load Balancer dashboard and NetPath.
- The flexibility of the product to meet any organization’s needs, instead of forcing the organization to bend to the limitations of the product.
it_user347748
Senior Technical Analyst at CS Softwares.
The features I find most valuable are--
- Reliability
- Security
- High-tech development
- Collateral
- Essentially they deliver what they promise for the end-user
it_user171936
Works at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
It gives us an insight on what we need to monitor on our network. We get granulated data on where issues are occurring in regards to traffic latency and bandwidth utilization. Also we can monitor the health and functionality of our nodes on the MPLS.
Both the NPM and the NTA modules. We are able to track down information in regards what kind of traffic is being generated on our network and also help us determine what applications we can allow and what not to allow.
View full review »PS
PankajSoni
Sr. Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Its GUI is very user-friendly. No special training is required to use this product. It is very simple to use and has rich GUI performance reports.
View full review »it_user669324
Enterprise Monitoring Consultant at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
The ability to pick and chose modules per need, but at the same time close and seamless integration once deployed: While everything is pretty complicated and fast moving, we do not want the monitoring and management software to be complicated. That is the reason the ease-of-deployment and ease-of-use is extremely valuable.
View full review »it_user579453
Systems Administrator at a tech services company
One of the main features is ease of deployment. Adding new devices only takes a few minutes. This allows me to do my other duties.
View full review »it_user167964
Network Engineer with 51-200 employees
Alerts, reports, overview of network, graphical picture of WAN for support team, port level visibility, and ease of use.
View full review »it_user139116
Senior Network at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
As a large school district, I can tell you that NPM is very valuable to us. Being able to see the current status of all our locations and hardware at a glance is priceless.
View full review »it_user171930
Network Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Bandwidth utilization and netflow reports
View full review »MV
SolarWinds677
Information Technology Director at a transportation company with 11-50 employees
The most valuable feature is remote access and the fact that there are multiple options to choose from. These include VNC (Virtual Network Computing), RPC (Remote Procedure Call), and Splashtop.
View full review »DO
David Olusesan
System Administration at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The most valuable feature is the notification that we get, via email, when a device in our network goes down.
View full review »it_user577536
Analyst Network Operations at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
While the forums are one of the best things about the product in general, the most valuable feature of the product itself is the customization. We can make it do whatever it is we want it to do. The basics pretty much work for us, but sometimes we have devices that are a little bit different, I guess, so we have to look at them a different way. We're not just confined to what came out of the box. We can build our own monitoring pages; our own pretty much anything.
View full review »it_user167895
Project Manager and consultant enterprise IT tooling at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
- If you are almost in the dark, SolarWinds can give you a quick view of what you have and you can start basic monitoring.
- The user interface is good.
- You can build a live inventory of the equipment you manage.
- You can start structuring and digging deeper into Network Performance Management and Diagnostics.
it_user216399
Senior Network Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees
- Polling engines
- Alerts
- Backup configuration
it_user174651
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Historical interface statistics & historical storage utilization.
View full review »it_user7548
Consultant at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
* Link utilization graphs
* Top-10 charts
* Node/link status monitoring and alerting
* Historical reports
View full review »FA
FAHAD ALBAZ
IT Security Architecture & Implementation Manager at Banque Saudi Fransi
The interface is user-friendly, making it easy to use.
This is a comprehensive product that covers security, networking, and more.
View full review »it_user221865
Platform Engineer III at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
- Overall simplicity
- Solarwinds development of the product line
it_user174660
System Analyst with 10,001+ employees
Graphical presentation of IT data like Bandwidth Util, CPU/Mem Util. etc., Easy way to configure the monitoring etc
View full review »it_user175134
Senior Manager - Global Network Ops with 1,001-5,000 employees
NPM, NCM, NTA and VNQM.
View full review »NJ
reviewer1467909
Optical Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
SolarWinds NPM features that I have found most valuable are the reporting tools and the ability to create customized reports.
View full review »AA
Ali Alkhamis
CISO with 201-500 employees
One of the best features is the reports feature. We can get an editor's report for the last five minutes, fifteen minutes, hour, month, or more. And, the correlation data that we can get from the different resources of data from routing, routers, swtitches and samples is really a benefit.
View full review »it_user616932
Network Engineer at a educational organization
The ability to monitor multiple devices using SNMP v3 and HP Procurve SFlow as well as multiple setups for different technicians.
We only use SNMP v3 and all of our devices are HP. Not every technician needs to see everything or have control of everything.
View full review »it_user660639
Sr. IT Infrastructure Specialist at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
At the time, we did not have a central repository for network mapping. This product help us with this and allowed us to drill down on the elements in the maps to get more detailed information.
View full review »it_user83385
Network Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The email and GUI alert system that it has is the most valuable for me. It also features the IP address management with manages your IP subnets internally and externally all in one place. Also the customizable alert feature is really helpful if you want a specific monitoring and alerting to configure.
View full review »
it_user577329
Systems Management at a media company with 10,001+ employees
It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass. The user interface is logical and standardised; if you know one module, you know the others. Everything is customisable. Support techs are great.
View full review »it_user164031
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
With admin-level permissions, the "Manage Node" feature is the most valuable to me since my preference is to search via strings. It provides a quick visual representation based on searched strings but a lot of false-positives as well with certain vendors – Cisco being one of them, e.g. reporting “critical/warning" states on things that don't really matter to us such as voltages on line cards or in the backplane of devices.
View full review »EE
reviewer895845
System Engineer - Infrastructure Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less.
The agent that we use is also light and does not block server memory.
SolarWinds makes it easy for us to monitor our environment.
The reports that it generates are useful for creating documentation.
View full review »SM
Sue Mike
Solutions Engineer at Mesiniaga
Monitoring.
View full review »it_user384900
ENTERPRISE NETWORK : Team Leader: ICT Events Monitoring at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
- It is centralized with a dashboard.
- Global network device availability
- Availability alerts via emails and dashboard
- Alerts you when an IP conflict occurs
- Identifies the culprit by MAC address, device type, switch port, and Wi-Fi SSID
- Isolates the offender using a remote port shutdown
- Provides a centralized view on alerts, state, health and performance of the network devices.
- Real time network updates and easy to use
- Monitors packet loss, response time, and performance of devices
- In-depth traffic reports to pinpoint bandwidth issues before it affects end-users.
- Helps administrators to identify and fix bandwidth issues faster.
- Aids in capacity planning
- Auto discovery of devices
it_user656289
Head, ATM Management at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
- Reporting
- Alerts
- Network map view
- Netpath
- Interface monitoring
it_user4866
Works with 51-200 employees
Feature rich produce suite that addresses many aspects of BSM. Thwack community is constantly making suggestions and improvements.
View full review »
it_user608529
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Interactive network map dashboard.
View full review »it_user218772
PC Support Technician at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees
Network performance monitoring was invaluable.
View full review »it_user341982
Freelancer Information Security & SIEM Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
CRC monitoring for each port is a valuable feature for us.
View full review »it_user2871
Network Engineer at a university with 51-200 employees
Why do I recommend this product?
As compared with other products we found Solarwinds to be more robust and includes more powerful functions including:
-Scheduled scan of the network automatically discovers network devices and monitors the IP of the device, the name, machine type and polling method.
-Support multiple vendors so it will support lots of devices to be scanned.
-Mobile view for IPHONE, BLACKBERRY and ANDROID
-Microsoft active directory integration
For the above reasons our company has chosen it instead of Angry IP Scanner or solar winds engineering toolset.
View full review »
it_user174672
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at a wellness & fitness company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Interface details and the list of interface charts.
View full review »it_user1012662
Information Technology Infrastructure Architect at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great.
CC
technica379896
Technical Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The ability to be able to control the network equipment.
View full review »it_user1290390
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
This product has a lot of good network monitoring features.
View full review »it_user952677
Sr Network Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees
When you buy the product, there's a lot of things. You can configure a lot. There's some variable in the report so you can customize the alert that you get or what triggers you want to generate the alert. It is really very flexible. Reporting is also quite nice. You can write your own SQL.
Of course, if you have a small team and you have so many sites to monitor, then the
alerts will help you already. Let's say you're monitoring MPRs out there, you know
that the neighbor route could go down, so you know the site is already on a secondary
link instead of primary. You are aware of what's going on, or if things go down, then you
can react quickly.
it_user5550
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
1.NPM can help keep a watch on the network and devices like switches, routers, access point. It can monitor any SNMP enabled devices in real time.
2.NPM can easily scale up when your network grows beyond the usual limits and it can monitor the network and connected devices with same efficiency and speed. Scale up is primarily handled by Orion Hot Standby Engine which keeps a watch on the health and functioning of the primary NPM system.
3.The Orion website has the ability to run from machines other than the Orion server and allows additional web server to be added. This allows more users to access the Orion web portal without impacting the overall performance.
4. It supports multiple vendors and thus can monitor majority of the network devices
5. Microsoft Active Directory support
View full review »
it_user5157
Sr System Engineer at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees
Single page view of all the servers lets me monitor them at a glance.
I can expand and see all the details at as single click expand.
I can capture real-time visibility into network performance issues to quickly determine who, where and what is impacting the network.
Very easy to set alerts for unusual happening.
Highly configurable.
Graphical view lets us compare the values within a particular time frame.
View full review »
it_user1125
Network Engineer at a retailer with 51-200 employees
• Simplicity of Use, instinctive, lots of attributes, simple to Install and keep, economical, and makes network management easier.
• Sturdy network error and accessibility management.
• Well established SNMP based network performance check, which allows for adding wireless, Voice over Internet Protocols, and Net Flow checking support as required. It also offers simple and configurable custom attentive and reports.
• Network Performance Monitor can also receive Syslog output and SNMP traps for fault discovery and alerting.
• Alerting system of Network Performance Monitor is strong, supple, and comparatively simple.
• The product has module based pricing, meaning that you only have to purchase the required features.
View full review »
YP
Yashokanth Partkunan
Managed Services Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy to use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install.
View full review »it_user216402
System Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
- Polling
- Automatic ticket creation of server resources (CPU, Memory, Reboots etc.)
it_user168066
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
Multicast
View full review »it_user1023
Director of IT at a tech company with 51-200 employees
- Powerful network fault & availability management.
- Mature SNMP-based network performance monitor; lets you add wireless, VoIP, and NetFlow monitoring support as needed; provides easily configurable custom alerts and reports.
- NPM can also receive Syslog output and SNMP traps for error detection and alerting.
- NPM’s alerting system is powerful, flexible, and relatively easy to use.
- The product features modular pricing, so you can buy only the features you need.
View full review »
it_user1143
Network Manager at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Orion NPM is a mature and reasonably priced product. It is easy to deploy and configure, and has an excellent user and network mapping interface.
View full review »
it_user714
Network Engineer at a manufacturing company with 5,001-10,000 employees
We moved from nGenius to Orion NPM about 3 years ago and are very happy with the performance, features, and pricing, The company is very pro-active, as in adding additional features and being responsive to customer requests.
View full review »
it_user657369
Network/NOC Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
The most valuable feature is the ability to use a few custom properties to manage multiple nodes and alerts; thus, saving hardware resource usage.
View full review »it_user555
Network Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees
Quick to launch. No agents required. Many configuration options.
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.
767,319 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
Product Categories
Network Monitoring Software IT Infrastructure Monitoring Cloud Monitoring SoftwarePopular Comparisons
Splunk Enterprise Security
Datadog
New Relic
Zabbix
PRTG Network Monitor
Nagios XI
Cisco Secure Network Analytics
ThousandEyes
Mist AI and Cloud
Centreon
LogicMonitor
Fortinet FortiSIEM
Nagios Core
PagerDuty Operations Cloud
Buyer's Guide
Download our free SolarWinds NPM Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Quick Links
Learn More:
- Primary Use Case
- Valuable Features
- Room for Improvement
- Customer Service and Support
- Initial Setup
- ROI
- Pricing
- Other Advice
- PRTG vs. SolarWinds: Which is a better Network Monitoring Tool?
- Which is the best network monitoring tool: Zabbix or Solarwinds? Pros and Cons?
- Can SolarWinds NPM be used by network solution providers? What needs to be taken into consideration?
- What Is The Biggest Difference Between NETSCOUT and SolarWinds?
- What SolarWinds NPM alternatives do you recommend?
- SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor compared to alternative solutions
- Is Zabbix or SolarWinds NPM better for infrastructure monitoring?
- How does Solarwinds NPM compare with Dynatrace?
- What is the main difference between SolarWinds NPM and Riverbed NetIM?
- When evaluating Network Performance Monitoring, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?
