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SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) vs. SolarWinds Observability

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds NPM

    Score7 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds 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

    SolarWinds Observability

    N/AN/ASolarWinds Observability is a SaaS offering purpose-built to enable DevOps teams to have unified and correlated end-to-end visibility across the technology stack, from the infrastructure, database and application to the end-user experience. It helps organizations meet service-level agreements (SLAs) and user satisfaction service-level objectives (SLOs). The observability offering helps make it easy to understand and has holistic oversight into service delivery and the individual component…

    $60

    per year 1 gb at starting at 1 day retention (more retention options*)

    Pricing
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds Observability
    Editions & Modules
    NPM
    $1,638
    per year
    Logs
    $60
    per year 1 gb at starting at 1 day retention (more retention options*)
    Digital Experience Observability - Synthetics
    $120
    per year Packs of 10 uptime checks
    Infrastructure Observability
    $180
    per year Per Host (Containers 10:1 Host)
    Network Observability
    $180
    per year Per active network device (With an IP address)
    Application Observability
    $330
    per year Application Instance
    Database Observability
    $840
    per year Per physical or virtual database instance
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds Observability
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
    Additional Details—*Log retention available in 1, 7, 15, 30, and 60 days (for more than 60 days retention, talk to sales).
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds Observability
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    91%
    Would buy again
    31 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    94%
    Delivers good value for the price
    32 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    33 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    28 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    97%
    Implementation went as expected
    29 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds Observability
    Network Performance Monitoring
    Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) and SolarWinds Observability
    Feature
    SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
    8.2
    231 Ratings
    0% above category average
    SolarWinds Observability
    -
    Ratings
    Automated network device discovery7.8210 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network monitoring8.8231 Ratings00 Ratings
    Baseline threshold calculation8.6201 Ratings00 Ratings
    Alerts9.4228 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network capacity planning7.9188 Ratings00 Ratings
    Packet capture analysis7.2130 Ratings00 Ratings
    Network mapping7.1190 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customizable reports7.9212 Ratings00 Ratings
    Wireless infrastructure monitoring7.6153 Ratings00 Ratings
    Hardware health monitoring9.4215 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds Observability
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    Score9.9 out of 10
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    Score8.2 out of 10
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    PingPlotter
    Score9.3 out of 10
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    Score8.4 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nmap
    Score10 out of 10
    NetBrain Technologies
    Score9.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds Observability
    Likelihood to Recommend
    10.0
    (237 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.4
    (27 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    9.1
    (21 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.0
    (28 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Online Training
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    7.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SolarWinds NPMSolarWinds Observability
    Likelihood to Recommend
    SolarWinds
    Solarwinds NPM is well suited for medium to large networks, it may be a bit heavy for the SOHO environment as most of the tools and reports are designed for monitoring KPIs which may not be critical for a small shop. NPM can handle large networks with several sites and mixed technologies ranging from networks, server systems, storage devices and SLA reporting.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Pros
    SolarWinds
    • Out of the Monitoring of almost all Network Devices.
    • Build custom pollers to monitor which is not supported out of the box.
    • Further you can alert on these custom metrics and Out of the box metrics.
    • It provides you great dashboards, Reports features.
    • You can integrate it with any MoM layer tools either using its API or sending out traps.
    • Out of the box Integration with Service Now ITSM Tool.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Cons
    SolarWinds
    • The software upgrade process is a little hairy and has caused me trouble on occasion.
    • The server that it needs to run is a bit of a resource hog along with the SQL server.
    • Some additional features like the network map are a bit clunky compared to some other products that we use.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Likelihood to Renew
    SolarWinds
    The entire IT staff relies on NPM in its daily operations. It would be impossible for us to maintain our level of service without it. If SolarWinds gets to proud of their product and begins to over charge for it, we would be forced to reconsider and use a different product. But as it stands it is worth the price to renew it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Usability
    SolarWinds
    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.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Reliability and Availability
    SolarWinds
    Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    SolarWinds
    Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    SolarWinds
    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.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Online Training
    SolarWinds
    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.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    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.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    SolarWinds
    We selected SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor because of the capabilities of the product versus the price. The tools also work well with their other products and support is fairly good. We have never had a problem when we needed to make a call.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Scalability
    SolarWinds
    From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    SolarWinds
    • 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.
    Incentivized
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    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds NPM Screenshots

    Screenshot of Network monitoring software used to reduce network outages and detect, diagnose, and resolve multi-vendor network performance issues.Screenshot of See relationships for routers, switches, interfaces, volumes, and groups, updated automatically without user intervention to maintain the network, not network maps.Screenshot of Reduce visibility gaps into critical network switches, firewalls, and load balancers with Network Insight for Cisco Nexus, Cisco ASA, and F5 BIG-IP.Screenshot of Reduce the flood of unnecessary network alerts. Create alerts based on simple or complex nested trigger conditions, defined parent/child dependencies, and network topology.Screenshot of Identify dead zones and improve wireless coverage. With its network monitoring tool, users can access out-of-the-box wireless reports, including wireless availability and rogue access points.Screenshot of Configure alerts by calculating dynamic baseline threshold data with network performance monitoring software.

    SolarWinds Observability Screenshots

    Screenshot of SolarWinds Observability Home PageScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability APM ServicesScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability KubernetesScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability InfrastructureScreenshot of SolarWinds Observability DEMScreenshot of SolarWinds Database Observability