SolarWinds NPM and Nagios XI are significant players in the network monitoring software market. SolarWinds NPM holds an advantage in terms of user-friendliness and integration capabilities, while Nagios XI stands out for its flexibility and lower setup costs.
Features: SolarWinds NPM offers comprehensive network monitoring with extensive customization options. Users value its scheduled scanning, broad vendor support, and mobile integration. The product’s flexible alerting and reporting functions attract positive feedback. Nagios XI provides robust extensibility through plugins and custom script capabilities, enabling substantial tailoring to specific user needs. It supports a wide range of monitoring tasks, with strong emphasis on customization and open-source flexibility.
Room for Improvement: Users suggest SolarWinds NPM could improve network discovery and mapping while reducing dependency on additional modules. It's considered resource-intensive and could benefit from more intuitive alert configurations and better browser compatibility. For Nagios XI, there is a call for enhanced UI design, easier configuration, and stronger support for non-standard plugins. Users also desire improvements in its incident management and business services monitoring capabilities, along with more robust clustering and failover solutions.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM is mainly deployed on-premises with hybrid and cloud options, offering robust customer and technical support via the Thwack community, though faster response times are desired by some users. Nagios XI, also primarily on-premises, is praised for its no-cost open-source variant’s suitability for smaller deployments. While knowledgeable, support could improve in response times and licensing processes.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM's pricing involves high initial costs, plus costs for add-on modules, but users report a solid ROI due to improved network monitoring and reduced downtime. The pricing is node and element-based, available in various tiers. Nagios XI offers a cost-effective, open-source base solution with optional enterprise packaging at competitive prices. Its open-source nature reduces initial costs, providing immediate ROI for small to medium deployments.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
The GUI could be improved. It's a bit too basic.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
We are using the free, open-source version.
The solution is considered expensive.
Pricing-wise, SolarWinds NPM is more expensive than PRTG.
The alerting system is very effective.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components, including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Third-party add-ons provide tools for monitoring virtually all in-house and external applications, services, and systems.
Nagios XI uses a powerful Core 4 monitoring engine that provides users with the highest levels of server monitoring performance. This high degree of performance enables nearly limitless scalability and monitoring powers.
With Nagios XI, stakeholders can check up on their infrastructure status using the role-based web interface. Sophisticated dashboards enable access to monitoring information and third-party data. Administrators can easily set up permissions so users can only access the infrastructure they are authorized to view.
Nagios XI Benefits and Features
Some of the benefits and top features of using Nagios XI include:
Reviews from Real Users
Nagios XI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its integration options and monitoring abilities, as well as its alerting features.
David P., a senior DevOps engineer at EML Payments Ltd, writes, “We use Nagios as a network discovery tool. We use Nagios to maintain our uptime statistics and to monitor our services. It has allowed us to be much more sophisticated in our monitoring and alerting.”
An IT-OSS manager at a comms service provider notes, “Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.”
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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