We compared Centreon and SolarWinds NPM across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Features: Centreon features a user-friendly interface with useful options for customization and manual configuration. Users like the solution’s flexible dashboards and the ability to create plugins. SolarWinds NPM is commended for its adaptability and extensive network surveillance functionalities.
Room for Improvement: Some Centreon users requested better documentation and more flexibility to customize reporting. Other areas for improvement include auto-scanning efficiency and integration. SolarWinds NPM needs improvement in edge computing capabilities and data reporting. Users also said the performance could be better and that they would like to see expanded IPAM functionality.
Service and Support: Centreon is highly regarded for its prompt and knowledgeable customer service that offers support in multiple languages. However, some customers feel that the lower levels of support are inadequate. While some customers described SolarWinds support as helpful and responsive, others reported delayed responses.
Ease of Deployment: Centreon's initial setup is described as time-consuming and complex. The deployment varies in duration depending on the IT infrastructure. Some users said SolarWinds NPM was straightforward to set up, while others perceived it as complex.
Pricing: Centreon's cost depends on the company's size. It is affordable and suitable for small companies, but it can be costly to scale up. The cost of SolarWinds NPM varies depending on the customer’s size and requirements. Some users find it costly.
ROI: Centreon delivers value by helping users identify and resolve critical issues fasters, which could yield large savings. Some users reported immediate benefits from using SolarWinds NPM in terms of security and business outcomes, while others have not.
Comparison Results: Centreon is a flexible solution offering a range of customization options. The solution has earned high marks for support and affordability. At the same time, users say the setup can be complicated and time-consuming. Others said that auto-scanning and integration have room for improvement. SolarWinds NPM is a customizable solution that’s easy to deploy and features comprehensive network monitoring capabilities. However, some users consider it costly and voiced concerns about technical support and user experience.
"We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"The single dashboard is a valuable feature."
"We are alerted on service impacts and not when something is down. We have saved a lot of time on non-business-hours intervention."
"We have all our tickets inside Centreon in real-time and can monitor a lot of ELP and CLN in real-time for application purposes."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to build an abstraction of service visualization. You can add services to an entity called Business Activities and you can see the state of these activities."
"We have the business activity monitoring, the map, and the MBI modules and they are all very good."
"In addition, the flexibility, customizability, and analytics of Centreon's dashboards are all very good. The dashboards help us see the whole network map, and that is quite valuable for us. In addition, the dashboards have helped to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time... The flexibility has given us the ability to add in our own monitoring metrics and that has been quite interesting and very useful for us."
"You can concentrate and orchestrate several other solutions from other vendors. You can consolidate those solutions all in one place, then maintain and monitor from that single point. This creates ease of use. It is a very powerful solution from this point of view."
"The most valuable feature is that we can manually configure everything we need. After it comes inside the interface of Centreon, you can display it. Because the interface is quite user-friendly, you can manually configure the configuration very deeply, which is very pleasant and useful because you can monitor and see everything on your service list, dashboard, or MAP. The most useful feature for me is that you can create your own plugin and monitoring query."
"Another feature we use is Business Activity, which provides us with an end-user perspective when a service is down or isn't working correctly. This is helpful when monitoring the KPIs. When we see a device or server that isn't working, we find the root cause."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the monitoring capabilities."
"The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring."
"We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."
"The connectivity of the solution is very good."
"One of the best features is the reports feature."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization."
"The technical support needs improvement."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"Sometimes, when the GUI and some of the search fields are being reset, and I return to the page, then I have to set them again. Therefore, some improvement on the UI and the filtering is needed."
"There are improvements that they need to make to their API. When we're using different systems and we want to disable monitoring for a specific server, we still can't do that through the API. That's something that's lacking."
"Improvements I would like to see include a discovery solution, better reports, and end-to-end monitoring."
"It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version."
"The most important issue is the capability to interconnect with other systems. It already exists for some of them. For example, the Stream Connector is something we use to populate data in another system. This kind of facility for connecting should exist for all products that it makes sense to have connected to a monitoring solution."
"Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French."
"Centreon is very bad with auto-scanning. It's very monolithic software. It doesn't have microservices and it only has basic clustering. You cannot, for example, have six or seven nodes for Centreon's cloud processes."
"Centreon technical support is only available during Central European business hours. When it comes to critical business solutions, there should be a 24/7 hotline that customers can rely on."
"The improvement would be that SolarWinds NPM thoroughly checks its patches before releasing them to the market. Better testing, alpha testing, and then releasing it to the market."
"We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future."
"An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited."
"The only thing that can be improved is to continually add to the existing capabilities of the product."
"It would be good to have high security."
"We are looking to change away from this solution because of the documentation and the solution doesn't have enough integration in our country. The documentation is too weak."
"The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market."
"We decided that we were no longer going to trust that their products have not been capitalized."
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Centreon is ranked 11th in Network Monitoring Software with 27 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 147 reviews. Centreon is rated 8.6, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Centreon writes "Proactive reporting guides our NOC on what needs to be fixed, saving them time". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". Centreon is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, Nagios Core, Icinga and Checkmk, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and Entuity. See our Centreon vs. SolarWinds NPM report.
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