SolarWinds NPM and Meraki Dashboard are leaders in network performance monitoring. While Meraki Dashboard excels at ease of cloud management, SolarWinds NPM offers a powerful and flexible suite of features, making it a preferred choice for complex environments needing customization.
Features: SolarWinds NPM is known for its configurable network performance monitoring, real-time visibility, and integration with Microsoft Active Directory. It offers strong support for multiple vendors and a highly active Thwack community for user support. Meraki Dashboard stands out for its comprehensive cloud management, providing single-pane visibility and easy configuration. Users find features like heat mapping, traffic analysis, and seamless integration with Cisco products particularly valuable.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM could benefit from enhanced network discovery accuracy, more flexible alert configurations, and improved resource utilization. Users also desire a more intuitive user interface. Meraki Dashboard users have highlighted the need for improved VPN client integration, more intuitive navigation, and enhanced user tracking capabilities.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM is typically deployed on-premises with hybrid options, offering strong technical support though response times could improve. Meraki Dashboard is praised for its smooth cloud-based implementation and generally positive customer service, though cost is a concern for some users.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM provides comprehensive functionalities at a reasonable base price, but costs can increase with additional modules. It offers favorable ROI through reduced downtime and better network management. Though Meraki Dashboard is considered expensive, its robust cloud features and ease of use provide cost-effectiveness by streamlining operations and reducing administrative burdens.
Meraki Dashboard is a comprehensive cloud-based platform that offers centralized management and control for all Meraki networking and security products. It provides a user-friendly interface, allowing administrators to easily monitor and configure their network infrastructure from anywhere. With real-time visibility, troubleshooting becomes effortless, ensuring optimal performance and minimizing downtime.
The intuitive dashboard offers a holistic view of the network, enabling quick identification of potential issues and proactive measures. It simplifies network deployment and scaling, with zero-touch provisioning and automatic firmware updates. The robust security features include advanced threat protection, content filtering, and VPN connectivity.
Meraki Dashboard also offers powerful analytics and reporting capabilities, providing valuable insights into network usage, application performance, and user behavior. With its seamless integration and scalability,
Meraki Dashboard is the ideal solution for organizations of all sizes, ensuring efficient network management and enhanced productivity.
SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.
SolarWinds NPM Features
SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
SolarWinds NPM Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.
PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."
Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”
A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”
Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”
Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”
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