We have been using many SW products for many years, but we cut our teeth on NPM shortly followed by NCM. We, like most others, use them in conjunction for monitoring performance combined with backing up, logging, and monitoring configuration changes on all of our Cisco gear. (We also use NTA, SAM, Virtualization Manager, The Toolkit, and LEM).
NPM:
With NPM I monitor everything from server performance to interface stats of all network equipment. I have daily reports emailed to me and of course two different levels of alerts. I have critical level alerts that source from a different email address so my phone treats that alerting different than say a RAM or CPU spike. I do need to be woken up at 2 am after all if a node is down for more than 10 minutes.
NCM:
I started using NCM solely as a backup repository for my configs. Until then it was all a manual process. From day 1 I have had a nightly backup of all my configs and if a change has happened I receive an email detailing those changes. More recently I have started leveraging scripts and snippets to help me standardize things such as QoS, user access, VLAN naming, etc. It's so very helpful to be able to write a snippet of change and push it to every device that needs it in seconds. IT SAVES SO MUCH TIME!!!
Of course, the regulatory based reports along with the customizable baselines and policies makes finding devices that are out of policy or compliance a snap.
One of the greatest parts about it is that I can have some employees who have no Cisco CLI background make changes based on config snippets I create. This has been huge since we enabled port security on all of our switches. Now, I don't have to be the one to do all the port security work when a workstation or printer is changed.
Integration:
My favorite part about the integration of the two products is the real-time config change alerting. Using the Syslog on the Orion server in conjunction with the other two products, I have real-time alerting via email, including specifics of what was changed, every time a user exits 'enable' mode. This has been a huge hit with auditors and regulators. They are always surprised that I get alerted the second someone changes a config.
I love these products and have since the first day I installed them. They have done nothing but improve upon themselves over time.
Blessings be on NCM and NCP and blessings on SolarWinds and the gods of Thwack!!