SolarWinds NPM Benefits

BP
Senior Network Engineer at a mining and metals company with 5,001-10,000 employees

SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by proactively indicating if we are low on resources for a particular server.

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AD
Senior Systems Administrator at Privia Health

SolarWinds NPM allowed the IT department to take a more proactive approach to troubleshooting, and gaining insights on device availability. We were able to use the integration with Storage Manager and Virtualization Manager to gain valuable insight into our storage and virtualization environments. We were able to readily pull reports on device availability, and other metrics, to provide to our senior management staff and external security auditors.

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it_user577527 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager, Enterprise Monitoring at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

With custom properties and the alerting flexibility, we’ve been able to customize the alert trigger and reset logic to meet the needs of our users, as well as eliminate the likelihood of making mistakes in the operations center.

We used to be fraught with scenarios, such as:

  • Only call if the alert doesn’t clear after 45 minutes.
  • Ignore that alarm.
  • Don’t call on that night.
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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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
NS
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

My customers have experienced benefits from SolarWinds NPM since it supports Akamai Guardicore, Akamai Synthetic Monitoring, and VMware-based device monitoring. In general, SolarWinds NPM integrates smoothly with every solution. The integration part of the solution might not be as easy as it seems since one may have to enter some commands in JSON format in the integer part. The templates are already set in the solution, but there is a need to change the parameters, values, and IPs. After the aforementioned steps are followed, integrating the solution with tools like Tableau, Power BI, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Teams for notifications and alerting an incident becomes easy.

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AbdulKader Mohandes - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I like the NPM and SAM features. 

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DS
Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD

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

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it_user227532 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Before NPM, we had to spend quite a bit of time using freeware tools, because there wasn't anything that offered the features we needed at a price point we were willing to pay. Most were far too expensive. Because of this, we only monitored some key devices and links. With SolarWinds, it’s easy to monitor everything and, with a little setup, everyone can help out. NTA brought things up a notch. Rather than seeing there was too much bandwidth being used and trying to guess what it was through diagnostics on the device and guesswork, we can see what is consuming all the bandwidth and easily relate it back to a specific user or device.

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RH
Sr. Systems Administrator at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We no longer have to ask questions about who is using bandwidth/CPU, what application is driving that usage, and how our databases perform as a result of that usage. We have completely eliminated any blind spots in the operation of our core networks, applications, and platforms.

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RajeshB - PeerSpot reviewer
Server and Network Monitoring Manager at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

This solution provides us with proactive reports.

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BA
Information Security Engineer at a cloud provider with 51-200 employees

We were able to unify our entire company under one monitoring solution that works for everybody, saving a ton of time and significantly speeding up problem-resolution time.

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it_user216372 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

It has helped to provide a user friendly interface for support to drill down and see where the issue lies and remediate issues quickly. We have other solutions that might have features NPM does not but the front end could look confusing to an inexperienced user. With NPM, we are able to fine-tune what the support accounts look like so users only see the things they need to do their jobs effectively.

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MR
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance.

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GN
Instrumentation Superintendent Systems at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees

Solarwind NPM gives you a quick overview of the OT environment. This greatly  improves response times on down equipment.

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it_user575310 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer, Infrastructure Applications at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

We used a monitoring platform from an enterprise vendor that was so complex to manage that we struggled even to deliver the base infrastructure monitoring services. This is not a unique position as many IT departments manage by the mantra of "Nobody was ever fired for recommending [insert enterprise vendor here]".

In a few short years, SolarWinds has empowered us to provide robust infrastructure monitoring, including a converged view of our servers, both the physical and virtual servers, and the storage and application environments.

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it_user651858 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Systems Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

In a more recent example, we rely on this tool to let us know when a site is about to go down, before it does so.

We do this by monitoring when interfaces drop (multiple connections to a site) or when interfaces have received errors. Both typically occur before a site goes down entirely. It has helped us a ton to actually be proactive and not simply wait for customers to call.

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RP
Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

An improvement the solution has brought to our organization is that it enables us to track down what I call brown outs in a multi-host, multi-guest virtual environment. It allows us to see why and when this occurred and to know what else was transpiring at the time that we had received an end-user complaint of the system running slowly. 

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it_user575286 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Network Engineer/Business Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I have been able to customize so many things using SolarWinds. I have set up baseline configurations and quickly remediated devices against them. I am using the SYSLOG and trap functions for my non-priority devices. I have NetPath set up to cloud services, so that I know who is at fault when something is down, such as a website, email services, and SaaS.

SolarWinds has also allowed us to be proactive, because now we can spot issues before the user tells us.

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it_user578952 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Network Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

On a fairly regular basis, we have servers whose disk drives begin to run low on available space. NPM alerts us when disk space is getting low. We are then able to free up space or add additional storage to avoid a problem that would be caused by running out of available space on the disk.

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it_user397317 - PeerSpot reviewer
Programmer Analyst at a leisure / travel company with 10,001+ employees
  • Our ability to locate the source of a network issue has dramatically reduced our mean-time-to-resolve.
  • Helped us to consolidate different network and server monitoring needs under one product.
  • Low administrative maintenance compared to alternatives. The system simply 'works' most of the time. Our previous tools required constant maintenance by admins just to keep them running.
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it_user579462 - PeerSpot reviewer
Networks Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

NPM gets information out fast, so troubleshooting time is reduced.

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WK
Network/Systems Administrator at TRSP

This product is of good caliber and we get better results by using it on our network.

Not many technical people are needed for administration.

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KhalidOmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Center Engineer at Arabianoud.com

It helps us figure out how to fix problems faster than we were able to before.

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KD
IT Expert & Data Center Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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

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DA
IT Director at Pattillo, Brown & Hill

The data available per device is particularly valuable when trying to determine what caused a problem.

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it_user214254 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Being a global company with many highly-sensitive manufacturing lines and process control environments, SolarWinds consistently delivers real-time and accurate views into the deepest parts of our environment. Though my role is 100% network-side, SolarWinds has greatly benefited our team of systems-side admins as well.

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it_user212001 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network & Security Services Manager with 501-1,000 employees

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

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it_user171912 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Previously with RTGS software we manually retrieved monitoring reports and checked downtime but with SolarWind NPM reporting is automatic and very good with auto email and message features and because of these great features even late at night or on the weekends our network team knows which link is down.

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SK
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

If there's a connectivity issue, the packets have dropped, or the traffic is going through any of the routers, you can see where that is just stuck.

The individual’s bandwidth we do not know. For monitoring purposes, we can find the exact amounts through this NPM, Network Performance Monitor, and Network Traffic Analyzer. We can see who is using how much bandwidth and where the traffic is stuck. It provides visibility to show what the issue is in our network.

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FA
Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors

We had been having some issues recently with network choking at a specific time, and we had been working on multiple things to identify the root cause. Using those methods, we were unable to trace it.

We decided to install a tool that would show us where the issue is being produced, and we can monitor our internal and external network traffic. We are able to determine whether the issue is being caused at the ISP end or our internal network, and with the help of SolarWinds NPM, we were able to track down the root cause of the issue.

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reviewer1168221 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees

This solution has scaled as we have grown.

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JF
Manager of Network Services with 10,001+ employees

We consolidated five different products into a series of applications which helps us monitor our production network.

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it_user577878 - PeerSpot reviewer
SolarWinds Expert (Consultant) at a tech services company

There are multiple examples of how SolarWinds improves how the company functions. The most obvious is that the engineers are much more willing to keep an eye on network health and to work with the dashboards. That leads to faster resolution of problems and better communication between the teams. Instead of explaining and spending a lot of time, they can simply send the link to SolarWinds and directly access what they need.

Additionally, there is the flexibility to automate or semi-automate functions completely. As a result, we don't need as many people as before when we were working on the reactive side of things. If our service desk had five people before, now we have none. Infrastructure engineers handle most service desk functions, such as ad-hoc or BAU tasks. But we don't need dedicated service desk people anymore.

I work for multiple clients, so I'm just giving examples from them. Some clients do need to maintain service desk functionality as a business function. SolarWinds certainly helps to reduce the workload on the front end at level one and level two escalation. Clients have much more free time to focus on the things they like doing and leaving all the mundane tasks to SolarWinds to sort out. It's a definitely time saver. I love everything about SolarWinds.

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it_user577521 - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder at a tech services company

Since NetPath came out, I use it to basically check that my internet is working as it should be by adding in, through NetPath, paths to my cloud-based applications, to things like Amazon, and also to things that we use quite often in the office, and make sure that there's nothing wrong with our ISP. That's actually been quite useful because we have seen an issue with their networks and they have resolved. It's just having visibility of the entire networking estate for myself and for my clients; that's the main benefit of it and it's probably the best product out there.

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it_user153747 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Admin Team Lead at a government with 501-1,000 employees

There's so many times where we get a question such as – “Is the network running slow?” It's really helpful being able to configure the deep packet analysis to say we want to look at these servers and just these particular applications - and get rid of the other noise. Before we started using NPM, we could get this info with Wireshark but it was incredibly painful getting it.

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SF
Help Desk Technician at NERIC BOCES

This solution allows us to monitor physical and virtual devices and applications.

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it_user578784 - PeerSpot reviewer
SolarWinds SME at a tech services company

These three products have provided us with the information we need through a single interface to identify issues from server to network to remote site. They provide us with the intel we need to make better decisions on improving our network while reducing costs through under-utilized paths.

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it_user577893 - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick Launch Team Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

The most common feedback I receive as a consultant is how the product ultimately finds issues and bottlenecks in the enterprise that the engineers were previously unaware existed. Also, issue resolution speed is always improving!

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it_user347748 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Analyst at CS Softwares.

We use it to create guides for end-users. We install SolarWinds on cloned virtual machines and offer free access to partners of my company.

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it_user171936 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

We were able to determine if end users were using the network to do work related stuff or otherwise and reduce bandwidth hogging for non-business related activities on the network.

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it_user669324 - PeerSpot reviewer
Enterprise Monitoring Consultant at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

Proactive alerting helps prevent outages to meet our SLA, as well as in forecasting.

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it_user579453 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at a tech services company

We are now able to respond to problems before the customer is even aware of them. As an example, our VPN router had a memory leak which was going to start causing performance problems. We were able to get ahead of the complaints by restarting the device. We didn’t need to wait for a complaint from a remote worker.

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it_user167964 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer with 51-200 employees

By finding out about problems or potential problems quickly and having a great view of my entire network.

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it_user139116 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network at a educational organization with 1,001-5,000 employees

We use the alert feature of NPM to send emails and text messages to our organization when various network or server equipment is not reachable or performing correctly.

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it_user171930 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a logistics company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Our bandwidth consumption continues growing. We need to be aware of overutilization of our circuits. SolarWinds helps us have visibility to the most relevant issues in our network and makes our problem solving process much faster and easier.

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MV
Information Technology Director at a transportation company with 11-50 employees

This solution has improved our organization because it saves time, in that I do not need to visit every workstation in order to update it. I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates. I can also help customers remotely.

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DO
System Administration at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments. We also use it to monitor our services. When a critical service goes down, SolarWinds will send us an email alert. It also supplies us with information that makes it easier for us to find the root cause.

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it_user577536 - PeerSpot reviewer
Analyst Network Operations at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

It has improved my organization’s efficiency, as far as our awareness. We add something new in our network, and we can start to monitor it within a few seconds. We can be alerted on it any time after that. It's pretty easy to not be caught off guard.

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it_user167895 - PeerSpot reviewer
Project Manager and consultant enterprise IT tooling at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
  • It helped to bring a basic monitoring in place that could be a platform for additional information you need to manage a large IT infrastructure.
  • IT network visibility can help the organization a lot.
  • It provides a buy-in from other IT groups (database, Windows, applications)
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it_user216399 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Basically, it helps in monitoring the device status. It helps locate in which region the network is down so that we take immediate action to restore it.

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it_user174651 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I have been able to catch network/server issues before they became critical. It also enables me to free up disk space on a critical drive before it completely runs out of space. Tickets can be pro-actively opened with carriers when we see CRC's and errors on interfaces. Lastly, I can quickly identify spanning tree and/or routing issues by watching syslog & trap messages.

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it_user7548 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

This product was used by our 24/7 NOC engineers and helped them in quick response to network status changes, investigation and narrowing down of performance degradation incidents. It was also used to report customer bandwidth utilization and provide evidence in customer queries and claims.

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it_user221865 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Engineer III at a insurance company with 501-1,000 employees
  • It's provided us with a quicker turn around time for diagnosing and remedying a failure or issue
  • The pre-built templates for Windows are outstanding
  • If you're new, they tell you what the metrics mean and the possible solutions
  • You can also modify baselines it to your environment.
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it_user174660 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Analyst with 10,001+ employees

This tool can monitor all IT Infrastructure i.e. N/W, Application and basic OS monitoring, Hardware Monitoring etc. Also we can integrate all Solarwinds Solutions on same console called EOC which will helpful for Data Center Operation teams to monitoring.

Also the graphical reports and content of reports also helps the client and OS/Applications teams to measure the challenges in advance.

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it_user175134 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager - Global Network Ops with 1,001-5,000 employees

Implementing this product has given us detailed visibility and understanding of our network. Small teams are able to manage large enterprise with this tool.

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AA
CISO with 201-500 employees

If we need to plan the network, or measure our network utilization, SolarWinds enables us to do so. 

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it_user616932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a educational organization

Technicians are aware of issues and 90% of the time exactly what caused the issue. Repairs can be scheduled ahead of time and RMA’s can be filed without the technician having to drive to the site only to find out it is a bad power supply or fan in a switch or server.

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it_user660639 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. IT Infrastructure Specialist at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It provided visibility into network performance, which at the time we really did not have.

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it_user83385 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Before we were using the Microsoft DHCP server to manage our IP addresses. However, it was not configured to replicate all throughout the domain so the IP address database and allocation is outdated and we are not sure if this is still active or not. Upon using the IPAM feature of Solarwinds we manage all IP addresses centrally in one location and it is cloud based so we can access it wherever we are in our intranet. I also liked the customizable alert feature because i was appointed to configure and monitor alerts for all the power supply on Cisco devices only. I made series of testing and research and I was successfully able to configure and implement an alert specifying the monitoring of power supplies of Cisco devices only, ie, excluding any other devices. View full review »
AV
Systems Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by providing a proactive approach to understanding the current trends in the environment, utilization of the resources, and providing inventory reports of the environment. This has helped us stay ahead of the cost for new infrastructure requirements as well as licenses.

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it_user577329 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Management at a media company with 10,001+ employees

It can be selectively focused. At one stage, it simply highlighted full boot volumes, and steadily increased to now analysing poorly performing web pages & SQL queries. It’s what you need it to be & when you need it to be that.

Server stability dramatically improved, additional bandwidth was purchased where needed, and ESX resource was clawed back to be re-assigned, so system performance was improved and new hardware purchases were postponed.

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it_user164031 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

It improved the way our organization functions by being a consolidated product which I was able to do a lot of the initial data entry and organization with – unfortunately I have not had time to dedicate to figure out every bell-and-whistle with the NPM product. I’ve deployed rules for SNMP traps, syslog alerts, and other advanced alerts to send emails based on certain parameters – sadly these have been on an “as-needed and as-time-permitted” basis which has been lacking lately.

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SM
Solutions Engineer at Mesiniaga
  • Single pane for monitoring
  • Scalable
  • Creates new business opportunities.
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it_user384900 - PeerSpot reviewer
ENTERPRISE NETWORK : Team Leader: ICT Events Monitoring at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

The old version was a proprietary system, had limited device visibility, no centralized SysLog, SNMP v2, had per campus monitoring system, no Wi-Fi visibility, and had limited licenses compared to the new version, which is multi-vendor, has a customized dashboard, centralized SysLog, SNMP v3, Centralized Monitoring System, Wi-Fi visibility, and Enterprise Licensing.

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it_user656289 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head, ATM Management at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

With reporting, we are able to spool ISP WAN links availability for the month and make necessary deductions based on the service level agreement we signed with the service providers.

Alerts have also helped us to improve network performance, keeping everyone on their toes in resolving downtime before it is escalated.

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it_user608529 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Provides instant visibility to our support team across all the networks we monitor, allowing us to zero in on the most urgent issues and easily identify root causes of problems. 

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it_user341982 - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelancer Information Security & SIEM Consultant at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees

Today, the webapps are getting worse for showing all items. Sometimes your browser will not respond.

My recommendation is to create separate console-based applications, especially for network operation centers.

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it_user174672 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Infrastructure Engineer at a wellness & fitness company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Being able to provide a history of interface behavior helps the organization in a multifaceted way. Current productivity and interface forecasting.

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CC
Technical Head at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network.

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it_user952677 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Network Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 10,001+ employees

It can even support Windows or monitor a Windows server, even on the application level, because they have this module called Server Application Monitor. You have WMI support. You can even monitor performance centers. You can also look at the process monitors, if it is processing or not. It's quite powerful. 

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 other stuff.

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it_user216402 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at a recruiting/HR firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

We can sometimes fix a problem before it is even recognized by our user community based on the thresholds we set up for various resources on a production server.

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it_user168066 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

We are a small ISP in FL. Having this tool has been helping us a lot with time responds critical outages and troubleshooting.

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it_user657369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network/NOC Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
  • Improved, more detailed service monitoring and reporting.
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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.