Nmap is a free, open source network discovery, mapper, and security auditing software. Its core features include port scanning identifying unknown devices, testing for security vulnerabilities, and identifying network issues.
$7,980
Every Three Months per license
SolarWinds NPM
Score 7.4 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.
$1,638
per year
Pricing
Nmap
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Editions & Modules
Nmap OEM Small/Startup Company Redistribution License - Quarterly Term Maintenance Fee
$7,980
Every Three Months per license
Nmap OEM Mid-Sized Company Redistribution License - Quarterly Term Maintenance Fee
$11,980
Every Three Months per license
Nmap OEM Enterprise Redistribution License - Quarterly Term Maintenance Fee
$13,980
Every Three Months per license
Nmap OEM Small/Startup Company Redistribution License - Annual Maintenance Fee
$14,980
per year per license
Nmap OEM Mid-Sized Company Redistribution License - Annual Maintenance Fee
All perpetual licenses include a six-month trial period during which you can cancel for any reason and receive a full refund of all money paid (including maintenance). The term license is only a 3-month commitment and cal also be terminated with full refund during the first 30 days of the initial quarter.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Nmap
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Features
Nmap
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Nmap is the ideal solution if you are working alot in network environments. If you come to grips with the syntax and the most-used features (the online community helps alot), you will be able to much more quickly and thoroughly troubleshoot networks or check for security vulnerabilities, for instance. It is free to use and is available for Windows and Linux, so I would say it is very much warrented for any network administrator or sysadmin to take it out for a spin.
NPM is well suited for small to medium-sized organizations. It does the basic functions of a network monitoring suite very well however some of the more advanced features aren't as straightforward. Basic up/down email alerts work well but there are obviously many solutions that do this as well. I wouldn't recommend NPM for very large organizations because the server needed to support that many devices.
exporting, There's a serious lack of ability to export the information in a readable format to present to VPs and such. I always find myself doing a lot of data massaging to get it in a pretty format
some scans can trigger sensitive IDS/IPS
SYN scans can be particularly aggressive and cause problems on remote systems.
Reporting needs to be improved as there are more misses than hits in obtaining the intended output. CA eHealth reporting was much better and robust in comparison.
MIBS certification is one more challenge as every-time we have to request support for the addition of OIDs. The UNDP option is great but needs to be more flexible and robust.
Bulk discoveries, especially subnet-based, choke up the entire CPU and memory processing on the virtual infra. The discovery Wizard stalls in between without showing any error message for a considerable amount of time.
Having multiple APEs makes administration (Patch, Upgrade, etc.) more difficult and complex. Any change in permissions on Application Folders and AV exclusion takes time in diagnosing and isolating the APE.
Rabbit MQ and Cortex services frequently get corrupt, and we are unable to find a permanent fix for that.
We gave it a 10 because there seems to be nothing on the market that comes close to all the features that SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor gives us. All of the features that come with SolarWinds helps to make our IT department more efficient and gives a better ROI for our company.
Nmap uses are very practical and I don't think there is a better tools for what Nmap does. It is open-sources that therefore there is no cost to use it. It offers a number of benefits, including but not limited to network mapping, port scanning and more. It is very reliable as a network scanning tool.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is quite an extensive product, covering all our bases and requirements. There are a lot of customizable options and features which you can work with for their alerting which is really useful. I haven't found anything yet which I thought SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) could do, but it actually couldn't so overall it works nicely and does the job.
There is a very large support community and a robust selection of add-ons and scripts. Once you get the use down this is one of the most powerful tools and you can find anything you are looking for as far as examples on the web. While not having official support its not lacking by any means.
In all of the times that we called support, someone at SolarWinds had the answer for us in a timely manner. Through thwack and other internet searching, we have been able to resolve all of our issues that arose to our satisfaction. The support staff have always been knowledgeable of their products or had a fellow support staff member to rely on to get the needed answers.
The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.
Make sure your inventory is accurate. Stand up some virtual machines for testing prior to installation. Make sure your database and its credentials are setup. Think about things you want to monitor that may not be obvious - UPS units, Door hardware, PBX systems, Fabric Channel switches, firewalls, routers, switches. Try to setup SNMP on these devices and have an IP that you will assign to the new server. If you do that it will go well.
A similar but more basic alternative is available on Android, called Fing. It's very useful for diagnosing issues on networks when you only have your mobile device to hand.
A graphical user interface alternative to Nmap, is Zenmap. It's the official GUI for Nmap and does use Nmap under the hood. It makes things a bit more 'point and click'.
We use NPM along with PRTG Network Monitor. While NPM is great at monitoring network devices and network links and some aspects of the servers, PRTG provides more in-depth monitoring for Server systems, applications and application ports such as Web Ports etc. PRTG also provides a more comprehensive Root cause analysis.
NMap being free of charge has a positive impact on our budget. It is an enterprise-class tool that anyone can download and use.
NMap, both command line and GUI, is a very advanced tool that is easy to use, so there's very little learning curve involved, which has a positive impact on productivity and security.
A valuable feature that is a huge time saver is that you can compare scans. This saves hours of searching manually for differences in scan results. Faster results means faster mitigation of problems, which can be a real money saver.
SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server.
SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time.
We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business.
