Read or contribute a user review for Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM). Discover

I have been planning and managing large enterprise networks in the DoD for years and have been provided some decent tools and some not so decent. After some bad experiences with over-hyped tools I resorted to gathering system information via command-line interface and cut/paste from event logs. Solarwinds NPM provided the solution I was craving with Orion 8. Now using 9.5, it has become the tool of choice when it comes to planning, managing, monitoring, and reporting system outages. Deployed networks in the DoD are especially challenging due to the fluid nature of the battlefield and the requirement for IP-based communication in virtually all locations. As a primary service provider for large groups of warfighting organizations, I was able to increase my visibility and meet the customers' demands. As far as support, I had most of my needs met by using the resources available on Thwack and the NPM Admin Guide. But the technical support I got from the Solarwinds staff was superb! They took time to walk through any issues we had to really understand our problem and didn't back down until we had a solution. For a company the size of Solarwinds to outperform the industry giants in network monitoring says a lot!

The products itself is a great tool, the features are awesome and the ideas that went into it and are still being planned are brilliant. If I would stop here, I would give the product full five stars, however I would rate it between Fair and Good. The reason for that is that four months have passed and we were still not able to take it productive (because of major bugs). Sales does not respond anymore after we have purchased the product and support is not what we would expect. The "its not a bug, its a feature" philosophy is annoying. If NPM would get rid of all major bugs and provide a true high availability solution for the whole suite, it would be awesome! With 9.5.1 some major bugs have been fixed and I am hoping that with the next version we can go productive with NPM.

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.