SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

What do you like best?

A few great things about NPM - NetPath, Network Insight for Cisco, F5, Palo Alto, Dynamic Maps, Layer 2 and Layer 3 topology discovery..

NetPath is a great hop by hop analysis tool and very useful for troubleshooting network delays, configuration issues, packet drops along the path taken to reach a particular service being served at a TCP port level.

Network InSights for various devices are adding more value - eg. Cisco ASA HA topology, Cisco stackable switches, Site-to-Site VPN's, F5 load balancing.

Dynamic Maps 2.0 are much better than the erstwhile Network Atlas.

What do you dislike?

It's not actually a dislike but more of customization flexibility - ability to chose colors, fonts etc on Dashboards, Maps etc.

Need of a common discovery engine across all Orion modules. (This pertains to other modules under Orion like IPAM, UDT, NCM and NTA)

SolarWinds can help by increasing and creating more ready to pick widgets that can be just a drag and drop to dashboards.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Consider the whole stack of Network Modules on the SolarWinds Orion platform rather than NPM as a standalone product. The other modules are real value adds to help you on the journey to Monitor, Manage and Analyze.

NPM & VNQM for Monitoring

NCM & IPAM for Managing

NTA for Analysis

Addons like UDT help with troubleshooting.

The Network monitoring can then be enhanced to include Servers, Applications, Storage, Virtual & Cloud.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

The ability to identify hardware issues like power supply failures, cooling issues etc has reduced hardware replacement times.

Performance monitoring metrices have been configured to proactively trigger alerts of different types - email alerts, SMS alerts, Slack messages. This helps with preventing issues from occuring.

Dashboards for various teams have helped with monitoring the right components. The flexibility to include charts, graphs is very useful.

Comprehensive reports of different types availability, utilization, status etc have been able to address all audit and compliance needs.

Creation of users with different roles and responsibilities make it easier to ensure that only the desired users have the rights to view components allocated to them.

NetPath has also helped with identifying bandwidth and latency issues with Service Providers - both Internet as well as Intranet (MPLS leased circuits)

Device Views give a nice visual depiction of the node under monitoring and hence eases the strain of going through logs and other data.