SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor

SolarWinds NPM is the classic on-premise network monitoring workhorse — auto-discovers devices, monitors routers, switches, servers, and WAN links over SNMP, and alerts you before users notice problems. TrustRadius reviewers love the reliable, customizable alerting and deep device visibility, but flag dated UI, element-based licensing that gets pricey, and the baggage of the 2020 SUNBURST supply-chain breach.

What is SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor?

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is the veteran of the network monitoring world — the product that has run inside thousands of enterprise NOCs since the early 2000s. It sits on a Windows server in your datacenter, automatically discovers your routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and WAN links, and polls them over SNMP to track availability, latency, packet loss, CPU, memory, and traffic. When something breaches a threshold, it alerts your on-call team by email or phone, zeroing in on the failing device so nobody has to wade through logs. TrustRadius scores it 7.8/10 across 619 reviews, and the praise is consistent: reliable, customizable alerting; deep per-device visibility; easy auto-discovery; and reporting that actually answers "what broke and when." The criticism is equally consistent: the UI feels dated, per-element licensing gets expensive as you monitor more granularly, and the platform is resource-hungry. Then there is the 800-pound gorilla — NPM rides on the Orion platform that was compromised in the 2020 SUNBURST supply-chain attack, which sent malicious updates to 18,000 organizations. SolarWinds rebuilt its build pipeline and added hardened signing, and many enterprises stayed, but it is a real factor in any modern security review. For deep, multi-vendor network monitoring with a big community behind it, NPM still works and works well — just price out the elements and review the security posture honestly first.

Key Features

• *Automatic network discovery** — Finds devices and builds topology maps without manual setup
• *SNMP & Syslog monitoring** — Deep health metrics on routers, switches, firewalls, and servers
• *Customizable alerting** — Threshold-based, nested-condition alerts to email and phone
• *PerfStack** — Drag-and-drop performance data correlation for troubleshooting
• *NetPath** — Hop-by-hop visualization of network paths for root-cause work
• *Network Insight** — Vendor-specific monitoring for Cisco Nexus, Cisco ASA, and F5 BIG-IP
• *Customizable reports** — Automated, scheduled reporting across KPIs
• *Wireless monitoring** — Coverage, availability, and rogue-access-point reports
• *Scalability** — Monitors thousands of devices from a single console
• *THWACK community** — One of the largest and most helpful IT monitoring communities around

Who is it for?

• Enterprises running large, multi-vendor networks who need deep device-level monitoring
• NOC teams that live by reliable alerting during on-call rotations
• Organizations that already run the SolarWinds ecosystem (NTA, SAM, NCM)
• Teams that prefer self-hosted, on-premise tooling with no cloud dependency

Who is it NOT for?

• Small shops watching budget — per-element licensing balloons as you add detail
• Teams that want a modern, cloud-native observability stack (look at Datadog or LogicMonitor)
• Anyone without a Windows server and capacity to spare for the monitoring host
• Security-sensitive orgs unwilling to carry the SUNBURST supply-chain history