For a network admin or security team, NCM can be very useful in keeping config parameters standardized, this can mean anything from ensuring the timezone setting is standard to ensuring SNMP or logging is set up as you want it. The alerting is good if you want a record of findings for audit purposes so that you can show that you are monitoring configurations, you are alerting when a config goes out of compliance, and a ticket is created to drive remediation. Alternatively one can choose to automate remediation by running a configuration change script but that scares me so we never used it, this is a me-problem and not a tool problem. Where it falls down is in the data storage architecture as we had constant problems with our server running out of disk, this seems to be because it does a lot of basic monitoring of the devices along with storing many, many copies of the configurations. This may have been a user-side issue, though NCM runs under the Orion app which is where the storage issues come from I think.
It is very well suited for quick speed tests, but it serves its purpose there and nothing else. The software seems to be offline nowadays, but it was useful when it was available.
For the purposes we use SolarwWnds, we get the functionality we need at a favorable price point. Additionally, we have easy adoption by our staff and any consultants we work with due to existing familiarity and/or experience with the product which brings some added efficiency to our onboarding process or project engagements.
The main reason why we selected the SourceForge speed test at my job was due the company's heavy and aggressive website whitelisting. The sourceForge speed test was one of the few tests we tried that was able to work fine within our restricted network. Plus it was easy to ready, even to my boss.
