SolarWinds NPM Scalability
The solution is scalable but dependent on appropriate licenses.
View full review »SolarWinds NPM is a scalable tool. My team likes working with it because they really like its scalability.
View full review »CP
ChrisPalmer
IT Infrastructure Analyst at Textron Systems Corporation
It's possible to scale, however, it comes at a cost. You have to go through them and there's a whole nother license piece that costs a large lump sum to grow your polers to start importing more if your initial server is getting towards a limit. It's scalable, with the caveat of it's going to cost you.
We have about ten to 20 users. It's a mix of network analysts, CIS admins, storage administrators, and application administrators.
We do not plan to increase usage at the moment, mainly as we're pretty much utilizing it as much as we need to, however, it is pretty much monitoring our entire environment or maybe couple hundred switches, some routers, couple hundred servers, and applications and things like that. We pretty much monitor our whole environment and our environment's not really growing anymore. We're pretty good right now.
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.
Typically, I don't think scalability is an issue. If you are talking about individual users, we have anywhere from 20 to 25 people across the typology. Probably one of the biggest users is a resource/research support group where they have various servers on the Orion Monitoring System. They actually take on their own responsibility and monitoring role for their servers. So, there are some groups that adopted monitoring through Orion, and then there are some other groups that have quite a bit more of a blasé approach to it and do not really think it is important.
SolarWinds NPM is not very scalable.
We had 10 users.
There was only an IT engineer that was responsible for upgrading.
There was only one administrator. The rest were read-only.
View full review »BP
reviewer1214877
Senior Network Engineer at a mining and metals company with 5,001-10,000 employees
SolarWinds NPM can be used at multiple locations, and increase the capacity as needed with additional licensing. It's very scalable.
We have three people using this solution. It's used globally at all our sites and we plan to increase our usage in the future.
View full review »This is a scalable solution. A few months ago I had a problem with the number of nodes on the system itself. We have the SLX NPM license which is unlimited and I can add an unlimited number of nodes. It seems there was a limitation on the one server. When I contacted support, they told me that I either need to delete some nodes or add another server to scale.
BB
reviewer1872705
Senior Network Administrator at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We've got about nine different Sys admins that use it on a day-to-day basis, at different locations, to check on different things.
View full review »The scalability was complex.
We had 99 facilities that were a hospital holding company, and we have some 90 other facilities that we are the corporate headquarters of. In monitoring each of those different hospitals, there would be challenges with getting to all of those devices because of firewall rules.
The faculty would use it on a regular basis. There were approximately 90 users.
View full review »We just have one user on the solution who monitors it. Three of us can cover it at any given time. It's web-based.
View full review »BO
BCOng
Corporate IT Infrastructure Manager at United Test and Assembly Center Ltd.
The scalability is good, we currently have around 2,000 users.
MQ
reviewer1889832
Service Delivery Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
The scalability of SolarWinds NPM is good, and it is simple. We have approximately 5,000 nodes.
View full review »We have three to four customers on the solution.
It's best for a mid-tier company, and not a large enterprise.
View full review »AD
A.J. DiLorenzo
Senior Systems Administrator at Privia Health
We setup a standalone instance of SolarWinds NPM. However, SolarWinds NPM offers a couple of different HA architectures that will allow you to scale locally (within the same data center) or globally (across multiple data centers in different geographic locations).
View full review »We have not run into scalability issues.
View full review »SH
Dr. SureshHungenahally
Chief Executive Officer at Suraksha
It is a highly scalable product. Users can use something like F5 or load balancing. That gives you failover and similar infrastructure for disaster recovery as well. It's very, very scalable and stable product.
Usually, NPM users will be fewer as they're all network engineers. The solution doesn't require hundreds of users. We have about eight to nine. However, we deploy SolarWinds with a lot of clients. If you look at our clientele and our own user base in NPM, we must have had more than 100 users on this product between clients.
NS
NishantShrivastava
Consultant at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users. When I joined my current organization, I saw SolarWinds NPM handling 10,000 devices, including the backup, storage, and everything else. SolarWinds NPM never had any performance problems, like hanging or lagging issues, and this may be because the solution only has a few features in it.
PF
Pedro Farrell
Manager at Barbados Water Authority
The solution is scalable, and there is currently only two staff utilizing the solution in our organization, but we have plans to increase usage further.
We have a fairly small environment, but this is because we only have about 15 switches, some servers, and our remote locations, so we're using a couple of hundred nodes altogether, but we can scale up to probably thousands or even tens of thousands because there is room to add additional servers. I rate the scalability a nine out of ten.
View full review »SolarWinds NPM is scalable.
View full review »RP
Reena Pandey
Consultant at HCL Technologies
SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution.
View full review »We were able to quickly expand and include any other active equipment or any new buildings which became requirements. We were able to easily take into consideration everything and set it up.
The scalability of the solution is good. It is easy to do.
I would recommend this solution to enterprise-sized companies.
View full review »SolarWinds is easy to scale.
View full review »DS
Daniel Shine
Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD
I think the solution is easy to scale although it does require a lot of resources. When we initially set it up, we had about a quarter of the resources that we currently have and we set it up too conservatively which caused a lot issues. When the consultant reset it, we quadrupled the amount of resources that the system has. We have about 10 people that get alerts and are actively involved with the system. The system requires about 10 staff hours for maintenance, updates and verification that everything is working.
As we refine it to monitor services, we are going to increase the usage. So right now we have it monitoring a database server, but we're not monitoring all of the services within that server. So we might have 30 databases in there. We're not yet monitoring each of the individual databases.
We haven’t had scalability problems so far. The different jobs I've been in have had very different environments in terms of scale and this solution works at any level.
View full review »RH
Russ Harland
Sr. Systems Administrator at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We did not have any scalability issues. We're monitoring thousands of elements across three continents with one poller and we have had no scalability issues.
View full review »FQ
Furquan Qureshy
IT Manager at XYZies
It's a very scalable solution because you can install different pollers.
View full review »The scalability can be better.
View full review »JZ
JulieZompanti
Assistant Director of Information Technology at TOWN OF CULPEPER
In our environment, scalability wasn't really a factor. The environment we had, and the method we used for the initial install were sufficient.
In our organization, we had about 20 users consistingn of IT server and network engineers as well as business analysts.
This is a tool that we utilize on a regular basis.
View full review »SolarWinds NPM is scalable.
View full review »The scalability is good.
View full review »MB
Marcos Benini
Director of Operations at 802BR
The scalability of SolarWinds NPM is easy to do.
We have three or four users using this solution.
View full review »SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution, but it costs a lot. As long as you pay, you can scale it as much as you like.
View full review »This is one of the strengths of NPM. As our infrastructure grows, NPM is able to grow organically to accommodate it. Scalability is as simple as spinning up another VM, installing the product, and ensuring connectivity to the primary instance of NPM.
View full review »MR
Moshiur Rahman Khan
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
This product is scalable by purchasing extra modules for more servers.
View full review »GN
George Nel
Instrumentation Superintendent Systems at a mining and metals company with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is there. If you need to scale the solution, you can.
View full review »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 (every interface is an element) or a node count >10,000. SolarWinds is committed to growing that threshold in the near future, but no official announcements have been made.
Virtualization Manager can scale almost infinitely, but we found that it performed best, especially when integrated with the SolarWinds NPM framework, with more moderately sized vCenters rather than a fewer large vCenters.
View full review »Scalability is something that isn’t quite straightforward for new admins. But, you can either:
- Install an additional poling engine on a second server for more scalability
- Install an additional polling engine on the PRIMARY app server for more scalability (stacking)
KF
reviewer1682613
Solutions Consultant at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
SolarWinds offers some options for scalability, but there is a bottleneck on some features. I hope the scale of NetFlow can be increased. Also, SolarWinds uses the Microsoft SQL database, which doesn't allow distributed architecture or scaling options.
View full review »AW
reviewer1610928
Vice President Of Global Operations at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
It's easy to scale. I'm probably an avid fan and I'd say it's easy to scale.
We have around 100 to 150 people using it at our company.
View full review »RP
reviewer1585257
Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The solution is very scalable. I've never seen a problem with this.
I don't have any plans to increase the usage in the future. I would not say that the solution is being extensively used, as we're not necessarily monitoring everything that we could, there being no need for some of this in our environment. I would make use of the performance monitor should I wish to dive deeper into a running system for detailed analysis.
It is a very scalable solution as well. It is meant for large businesses but small and medium-sized businesses can also use this product. They can all use it, but I see more and more big companies — enterprise companies — coming to use this software. This includes data centers, global industries, banks, other financial institutions, insurance companies, and big brand names.
I have NOT encountered any scalability issues. I have always speced out at least double of what was required at that time. This has allowed me to add more and more to the SolarWinds architecture. SolarWinds does scale very easily with additional pollers.
View full review »We did hit the maximum number of resources for a single poller. However, all we had to do was purchase an additional poller to scale out NPM to support our growing environment.
View full review »Yes, every once in a while. SolarWinds defines 'scalability' in the same manner as 'monitoring capacity' --- which is incorrect. This is a huge issue and is one of the hits against the rating I gave NPM.
View full review »MB
reviewer1765383
CTO-OSS product development at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees
Our customer does not have broad scaling needs. They have fifteen users and the solution works fine with no issues in this small environment.
View full review »MD
reviewer1054686
Managing Director at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
The solution is scalable.
View full review »DN
DineshNekkanti
Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company
The solution has the potential to scale. I'm not sure if my company has tried to do so or if they plan on doing so, so I can't speak from any personal experience.
We are actually in the process of replacing a lot of items. This solution didn't do the things we expected, so don't know the likelihood of scaling it in the future, or continuing to use it.
For the most part, our IT teams are the ones that are on the solution. Not everyone in the company is on it.
View full review »NPM has scaled in pace with my business.
View full review »WK
Waseem Khan
Network/Systems Administrator at TRSP
SolarWinds NPM is scalable.
View full review »The scalability of the solution is okay.
Currently, we have ten people in our organization using the solution. They are mostly admins.
View full review »MA
MohammedAlkhabbat
Network Administrator at Libyana Mobile Phone
It is scalable, but my network is not that big. We have just a few nodes.
View full review »WK
WILSON KEREBEI
CEO at WilCom Systems Ltd
We have not experienced any challenges with scalability.
View full review »KD
reviewer742629
IT Expert & Data Center Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is very good for physical machines. For virtual machines, the scalability is challenging.
We have 10 users for 2000 devices. Most of the users are admins.
We have no plans to increase our usage.
View full review »TN
reviewer1396410
Senior Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's scalable. We see expansion there. More than 500 users are currently using it.
View full review »NK
Nouman Khan
Senior Solutions Specialist (Network & Security) at Ooredoo Qatar
We have eight users including an operations analyst, system analyst, and support engineers.
View full review »AN
Andrew Ntuyo
Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical
In terms of scalability, there is room for improvement. When you start monitoring, if you have so many interfaces and you're trying to monitor them at a faster interval, or a shorter interval, you get to a point where you need to request another node.
If you have a router that has over 400 interfaces, you need a very robust server. If you don't you'll end up running into issues.
Yes, but only due to our own willingness (or unwillingness) to deploy additional polling engines. We're actually researching this feasibility right now, so that we can support a greater number of devices globally while maintaining a centralized "pane of glass" for administration.
View full review »No, additional polling engines can be purchased at any given time.
View full review »No issues with stability.
View full review »SK
reviewer1271415
Senior Technical Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees
We are using one in five total devices connected to that SolarWinds. We are using an AP, Additional Polling engine that will scale the solution. Scalability is there.
Only the licensing part is different. We have to purchase more licenses on that part. Currently, we are monitoring 12,000 nodes. If we want to go to the 13,000 nodes, then we have to purchase one additional license, the Additional Polling license.
We have about 50 people using the solution. They are system admins. In the North, the solution is used vastly. In the South, the solution is used by the different departments. I'm not part of the South. I'm part of the North.
We do have plans to increase usage.
View full review »FA
Fazal Azeem
Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors
Scalability-wise, it is very good.
View full review »We are a larger and dispersed company so there are many, many network nodes monitored by NPM. It has been able to expand and scale to manage that well.
View full review »The most important point I'll make is that SolarWinds markets its product as an out-of-the-box, click-click-click, do-it-yourself solution. It may work like that for very small organizations, although very small organizations will probably go for Nagios or other free tools. For larger enterprises, this is not the case. Just clicking next, next, next to discover nodes, and everything just works, is not the case. It appears to be working, but when you go beyond that and start to understand how the workflow operates, how people respond to alerts, who receives them, who is not receiving them, how to manage thresholds and many other issues, they all add to a much larger picture. That then becomes a not-out-of-the-box solution.
To work with it properly, you need to have extensive skills and knowledge around the SolarWinds product. I'm not saying that you need to be a geek who knows coding and APIs. But you do need to be well aware of what's possible. That helps you set up SolarWinds the way the client wants. Once it's set up, running and maintaining it takes pretty much no time. It functions almost on automation. This is why I think there's still a huge need for consultancy work. Organizations need experts to deploy SolarWinds and to help them to define exactly what they need. Then the organization can manage themselves. They just need to be properly trained.
Many times I have seen SolarWinds installed and then it would sit for years doing nothing simply because the people there don't know what to do and there's no time for anyone to actually to dig in and make a masterpiece out of it. It probably shouldn't be advertised as an out-of-the-box solution.
SolarWinds has scalability solutions and it's completely extendable and expandable and the licensing model is just beautiful. I love it. It can be as cheap as a few thousand pounds, which is very affordable to smaller organizations. It can also be as expensive as tens of thousands of pounds, which is still very, very cheap even for enterprises and bigger organizations. If you compare it to other solutions, it's at least 10 times cheaper. The scalability models are beautiful and there are no problems whatsoever handling a large amount of work. If you need more nodes, you can always add more servers and expand your platform with an additional poller. There's always a way to manage it.
It's really useful that you can have additional pollers. I think you can have up to four, but I can't remember off the top of my head. It's great to be able to add in pollers, if you get to the point where your existing poling engine – that you have when you install the product the first time – is swamped.
They are going to be releasing in the future branch, smaller pollers, which would be really handy for people who have lots of little branches but don't want to go to the expense of paying for a complete new poling engine for each site. That's going to be cool, so I know they're building on additional bits. It's as scalable as you need it to be.
View full review »GM
reviewer1289460
SOC Expert at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The solution can scale well. It's not a problem if a company wants to expand it.
Currently, we have more than 50 users on the solution.
View full review »MH
reviewer1643823
Vice President, SaaS Operations at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
You could question the scalability. It could be improved.
View full review »Once I got my pollers deployed to different areas of the globe, the system functioned better.
View full review »I have worked with some of the largest SolarWinds deployments in the world. It seems that we are always able to push the product far enough to cover the needs of any organization.
View full review »Scalability was not a problem. We only monitor nodes that matter most on the environment. This makes managing the environment easier. Less is more`
View full review »PS
PankajSoni
Sr. Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
No issues in the tools.
View full review »SolarWinds has come a long way to provide scalability. What initially used to be for small enterprises is now much more expandable and can accommodate larger enterprises. The implementation is easier by deploying additional polling engines (of course, with limits like in any other product).
View full review »I haven’t had any issues with scalability. There is plenty of documentation available to help with it.
View full review »Yes, the more items I added the slower it became. But this was corrected once I split the servers apart. I had NPM and NCM on the same server.
View full review »I have not encountered any issues with scalability. In fact, I find that NPM is very easy to scale to your needs.
View full review »No. The performance problems that we have experienced at times are due to hardware limitations.
View full review »MV
SolarWinds677
Information Technology Director at a transportation company with 11-50 employees
We only have between one hundred and one hundred and fifty nodes, so it is difficult to judge the scalability of this solution based on that.
We have two people in the company who are responsible for this solution, and it is used on a daily basis.
We do not plan to increase its usage because we do not expect to increase the number of workstations or network devices.
View full review »DO
David Olusesan
System Administration at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
We have had no issues with respect to scalability. As we get more devices, routers, and servers, we simply add them to SolarWinds for monitoring.
There are nine people that manage this solution and receive email alerts. We have six people with read-only access in our NOC department, and there is also an admin console that the remaining three people are managing.
View full review »We had scalability issues. We have several additional servers, too, so upgrading is kind of a pain, but that's with all the other modules, too. NPM alone is pretty quick.
View full review »The solution is scalable.
We have many large global customers using this solution.
View full review »You need a lot of polling engines for larger networks (50K+ interfaces). This will consume additional resources, such as licenses, support, and patching.
View full review »No issues encountered yet.
View full review »Not much, but I have had issues with our SQL database becoming fragmented over time & having to engage a SQL expert to address it.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »FA
FAHAD ALBAZ
IT Security Architecture & Implementation Manager at Banque Saudi Fransi
In terms of scalability, it is very much so. It is not determined by the number of end-users for this type of solution, but rather, by the capacity of network flow. This is something that we expect will increase in the future.
View full review »None yet.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »We have deployed it in distributed model with EOC. EOC has been a pain. We are keen to move to Centralized Deployment which we are yet to test and see if it overcomes limitations of EOC.
View full review »NJ
reviewer1467909
Optical Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
The SolarWinds NPM product is easy to scale.
View full review »AA
Ali Alkhamis
CISO with 201-500 employees
It is very scalable. For years we have not had a problem with scalability.
View full review »We had some scalability issues. The cost for monitoring interfaces is ridiculous.
View full review »I had some performance issues but they were due to the need for addtional pollers.
View full review »
No issues with scalability. It can accommodate as much nodes so long as you update your hardware all together.
View full review »
AV
reviewer1079667
Systems Architect at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability has been adequate.
We have multiple users using the solution with various roles, such as network administration, server administration, and reporting users.
We have plans to increase usage. We are currently leveraging the internal infrastructure aspects of the environment. We're going to expand it and we purchased additional infrastructure to expand the visibility across multiple areas.
View full review »I have only rarely encountered scalability issues.
View full review »Yes, polling more frequently yields a near exponential increase in resource utilization which becomes a problem on virtualized platforms resulting in excessive queueing on poller engine(s). While Solarwinds support virtualization they prefer dedicated hardware by some of their documentation; pretty expensive when you consider Solarwinds software, licensing, and then dedicated hardware to boot. Virtualized deployments also seems to yield a slower experience when browsing the web front-end, this could be due to the uniqueness of our corporate network though.
View full review »EE
reviewer895845
System Engineer - Infrastructure Lead at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I think that it is easy to scale.
View full review »We encountered an inability to display graphical views of some customized reports.
View full review »There are some issues when trying to monitor multiple networks with the same IP ranges. The solution for this is to purchase additional modules.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »There were issues with scaling it.
View full review »Yes we did.
View full review »Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing.
View full review »We did not test scalability during the PoC. There were four or five network operators and the infrastructure included more than 200 devices.
View full review »I only use a single instance at the moment, but I see there are some things there like HA that is quite interesting. Of course, it will cost more to support, but if the company wants it, then maybe yes.
View full review »YP
Yashokanth Partkunan
Managed Services Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
It is scalable.
View full review »It's very scalable and customizable.
View full review »TZ
reviewer1140936
Business Consultant. at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
It's very easy to scale. The scalability is brilliant. If you need additional monitoring resources or if you need to plug in your secondary data center, it takes thirty minutes. It's easy to use.
We have not encountered any scalability issues.
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.