I've been using SolarWinds products for almost 10 years now. The one thing that seems to outpace the value and technology is the price tag. SolarWinds Engineering Toolset was less than a grand, and still is, but required manual intervention to get it going or to ensure it remained operational. Today, things have changed significantly and now we have Web-Enabled products, running as services and accessible almost completely through a browser--virtually ANY Java-enabled browser. But holy cow it's significantly more expensive! The GUI is fine, and alerting, logging, filtering, and individual (albeit manual) reporting is fine. That's where I draw the line. The front-end still to this day operates as a college project where many Open-Source free tools are simply slapped together to impress the non-technical at an astronomical price with seriously lacking support. For the back-end of the product, the service has stopped many times (still does), and even SolarWinds Support doesn't know why. They throw patches at us (all unsuccessful). We've been advised to connect to a better database(s) and separate out resources to multiple Orion instances (klunky approach, but necessary)--again, no answers. The Reporting is very lacking. I cannot generate (or figure out how to) High utilization reports that actually depict more than a bunch of numbers (which mean nothing to Directors). Lastly, to SolarWinds: if SolarWinds wants to stay in the market much longer, please stop acquiring new features and fix the ones you have already. And for Pete's sake, TRAIN your support people!!

We purchased NPM SL00 and NetFlow TA and now I have Control of my network. This applications are powerful and easy to use, I now have more time for other things and I more efficient in my work and the network is monitored.Thk.

I've used SolarWinds Orion for about two years now and have found that it's even more versatile than the big hammer I keep in my garage! The web-based interface provides instant, constant updates as to the status of our network to Helpdesk staff, Tech Staff and Management, each can have their own tailored views with varying degrees of simplicity and varying levels of the "Ooooh, what's that!!?" factor, which is fantastic for an office with a large wall-mounted display. With a little bit of thought, we were able to create solutions to suit everyone in the department, from email and SMS notifications when rogue machines came online to interactive maps of network and server statuses. There's a lot of potential with this software and I know we've only scratched the surface.

I think Orion NPM is the best product out there in the market right now. As I mentioned the advantages in the Pros section, it is very easy to install and maintain. The web interface looks nice and clear. It definitely attracts outsiders with your network performance and alerts you when somethings goes wrong. The only thing I am little concerned is it would be more helpful if they included the Application Performance Monitoring also along with Orion NPM. But I think I am asking too much. I would give 5 starts without a doubt. I am saying it with an experience of working for 4 years with Orion NPM. Anyone who is looking for a monitoring software, I would highly recommend Solarwinds Orion NPM.

We purchased NPM two months ago. While we were excited to use the application, we have still not been able to deploy it as we discovered a major bug in their import tool. If your devices use SNMP strings with any special chars then your import will fail. It appears their code does not delimit special chars properly and all imports will fail. We have already opened up a ticket with the help desk but have not even been given a timeline on when this will be fixed. I look forward in using NPM once this gets resolved.