Pricey but worth its weight in (insert item here)... Must have tool.

Pros

Complete network monitoring tool. Allows you a near single pane of glass approach to you network. You have details and i mean details about every server, switch, I even have my consumable good inventory vending machines monitored with NPM. Detailed level for switch ports and routers, Cisco UCS, HP, DELL, and the list goes on and on. When there is no identified MIB, you can create your own. You can label your undefined items so they mean something to you. The Agent for servers installs on Windows and Linux and is SO EASY. It offers WMI, SNMP and ICMP monitoring as well as the agent which gives you several flavors to monitor equipment. Ease of use is good, interface is above average, and saving my score is 1000 out of 10

Cons

For me there is only one real things that gets me with NPM. Licensing. SolarWinds has a great set of products, but the licensing costs are really high. Even a small company needs this software but its hard to justify. The way they count nodes against your license total is in my opinion unfair. I think of a server as a node, and everything on that server should be covered as 1 node, but they see everything down to seems like the vlans on a switch port, but to be clear it is not counting vlans. However if you have 2 48 port switches, that is 96 nodes, you want to monitor, guess how fast your 100 node license gets used up. But the price to jump up is super crazy expensive. They need to rework that.

Solarwinds NPM Review

This product is great when tuned and customized properly. We use it for alerting via email and for NOC (Network Operation Center) setups. For those not familiar - this is when you set up a large monitor in a "monitoring " room to view network conditions in real time. Custom NOC views allow you to present pretty much any monitored information on a screen. It also allows you to configure a single display monitor (perhaps a 70 inch TV/Display) that scrolls through multiple screens of valuable information.

Pros

Allows for customized views and alerts to really lock down your essential requirements. (The problem is most users do not customize)

Cons

I do not like that they promote how easily you can roll out this software to start monitoring your network.
What they do not tell you that by doing a non customized quick roll out you will receive unlimited number of alerts to the point they will be ignored.
By default the system shows you too much irrelevant information and it alerts on way too many general conditions. BE Warned - without tuning the alerts you will get many false positive alerts.

Great network monitoring tool

I use NPM to monitor the health of the network routers and switches and the bandwidth used in the WAN links and switch uplinks. I also use it to monitor several Windows servers, including free disk space, memory and CPU occupation, the load of Hyper-V and VMWare hosts and the load, battery status and runtime of UPS devices.

Pros

It's very easy to setup and use and everything is configurable. It's really easy to configure dashboards and visualize every piece of information the way we want to. It can be used to monitor network equipment from a lot of vendors, as well as Windows systems and virtualization hosts and guests. Basically, anything it can connect to using SNMP or WMI.

Cons

It's not good at all to get information about endpoints. The information is unreliable: it doesn't find a lot of endpoints in the network, reports them with old IP addresses and in places where they are not connected anymore, etc.

network management in minutes

Pros

SolarWinds NPM (Network Performance Manager) is one of the most gratifying products to use. After installing on a server, you can literally in minutes begin collecting actionable network performance if you have previously configured SNMP on your network equipment. Most of the products integrate, building on each other and adding more value. I have always been impressed with how their new versions add significant features and value for just paying maintenance on the product. Their online training is also very valuable.

Cons

More advance features will take more effort to configure and generate actionable results. You can easily be overwhelmed by alerts and syslog if you do not make an effort to manage what you really need to see.

Good, Solid Network Monitor

Timely alerts and warnings that keep our network and server infrastructure running smoothly.

Pros

Once it's set up, NPM is pretty easy to configure and monitor just about anything with a network adapter/connection. We purchased the SLX version which means we can monitor as many nodes/elements as we want. Email alerts are timely and help us stay on top of outages and server capacities. Been using this for 5 years now and it just doesn't the job. Can't forget about the customer SQL alerts either. Great job here!

Cons

You need SQL server for this. If not using an Express version, that's more costs. The SLX version is expensive compared to other solutions.

NPM is a very reliable and powerful network monitoring tool

It can use some improvements, but still, in 8 years we've been using NPM on a service provider scenario, it has solved about 80% of our customers requirements for network monitoring. When complemented with other products from the same vendor, it provides maybe 95%, since there's always something than need a specialized tool.

Pros

In the world of enterprise network monitoring, NPM has one of the shortest learning curves, its web GUI is very inutitive and you can start monitoring your assets almost immediately.
It's support for different monitoring mechanisms (snmp, wmi and agent) provides adaptability to mostly any network.
It possesses a very robust engine to configure thresholds, events and actions, so you can get the proper reaction to different events.
SolarWinds provides a very complete ecosystem of network monitoring and management tools with seamless integration.

Cons

The licensing model is not the best for a service provider scenario and it seems like the vendor doesn't even consider this option.
Reporting capabilities are sort of buggy , specially when exporting complex and large reports. This tasks will also consume a lot of resources. There's an opportunity for the vendor to maybe decouple reporting capabilities to a BI module which can be deployed on an independent server, and maybe use for it a read only replica of the production DB.

Great asset to keep an eye on your network

We use it every day to keep track of our network device performance and VPN tunnels throughout our organization. I keep NPM up on a 28" monitor at all times. It looks great on a vertical monitor setup! We have been using this product for a very long time and it really works well!

Pros

I love the interface and the way you can setup and customize the dashboard. I love that at a moments glance you can see what's going on, on your network. Mostly I love the email feature for alarms and alerts when something goes down.

Cons

Setup is always complicated but doable even for a novice admin if you look through the manuals.

Excellent Network Monitor, Very Intuitive

You can trust this software to watch over the network while you perform other tasks. If there is an issue, you will be alerted immediately

Pros

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor gives you in-depth details about every server and switch. Once it is installed and configured, you just sit back, relax and engage in worry free monitoring of your network (unless of course it gives you an alert)

Cons

It is very expensive. The company that I worked for that used SolarWinds had no issue spending the money though, so after I left it was like leaving a family member behind.

Great product for Network Performance- but Software Experience a must

Pros

Monitoring for all endpoints available
Uses SNMP V1-V3
Alert notifications available for email distribution
dashboard for NOC or super user

Cons

Have to figure everything out yourself. Solarwinds does not provide much training on the configuration of the system to fully maximize it. The refer you to a outside consultant to setup the system. Support is pretty limited because many of the issues revolve around how it is setup. Which they would provide more training with the purchase of the product on how to fine tune the software for your needs

The Best of the Best

The ability to monitor, report. and alert on our Network Infrastructure.

Pros

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is by far the industry leader. The system is robust and offers real-time and indepth analysis of network interfaces, nodes, devices, etc.

Cons

The platform did some take some time to setup. Unfortunately, some of the alerting can be very vague. There are templated alerts, however, they do not fit the needs of our business. We spent countless man-hours in developing new alerting templates.

NPM is one of the better products

I am utilizing NPM, SAM and DPA to monitor our environment. NPM is used to monitor a mix of Cisco and Palo Alto equipment. We are monitoring nodes in about 12 sites (2 hubs and 10 spokes). Overall, the product is stable and features get added on a timely basis. If I had one gripe, I would wish that Solarwinds could move the product towards the cloud (ala Kaseya, LogicMonitor, etc). This would remove my need to run an application server and database.

Pros

Easy to use. Lots of features.

Cons

I wish the management and database were in the cloud and they used the "collector" model at the location to get the data.

Great tool to keep track of servers and when they are performing poorly, or not at all.

Pros

Right out of the box, admins can begin using this software. Alerts are already configured for common needs such as when a server goes down, or when it reboots. Disk space, CPU and RAM usage, etc.

Cons

Can be a bit difficult to discern which variables do what when formatting alerts and email notifications. First initial load of the portal takes a few minutes. After the initial load, portal loads fast each time, until the next day.

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor Review

This tool helps prevent major Server downtimes with a great alert system. Every System Administrator should have this. I can't count the number of times it has saved me.

Pros

The features I like the most about this tool are the fast and easy deployment and the high-quality monitoring and alerting. Very nice UI, also very scalable.

Cons

The element base pricing is very expensive, can quickly escalate.