SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.