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Nagios XI vs SolarWinds NPM vs Splunk Enterprise Security comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.6
Nagios XI saves time in system monitoring, offers long-term value, but some users find costs high despite management's approval.
Sentiment score
7.4
SolarWinds NPM delivers quick ROI with cost savings, enhanced efficiency, and improved network visibility for proactive management and profitability.
Sentiment score
7.2
Splunk Enterprise Security cuts costs and boosts efficiency with automation, threat response, and real-time insights, enhancing user satisfaction.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
For smaller organizations, other products may provide better value for money.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
Nagios XI support is professional and prompt, though costly, with comprehensive resources lessening the need for direct assistance.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM's support is knowledgeable but faces issues in response speed, sales tactics, and customization support options.
Sentiment score
6.7
Splunk Enterprise Security's customer service is praised for knowledgeable support but needs improvement in response times and consistency.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
If you want to write your own correlation rules, it is very difficult to do, and you need Splunk's support to write new correlation rules for the SIEM tool.
The technical support for Splunk met my expectations.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
Nagios XI is scalable for various environments, but complex performance and limited documentation challenge extensive infrastructures.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and adaptable, with flexible deployments but may need dedicated hardware for optimal performance.
Sentiment score
7.7
Splunk Enterprise Security scales effectively, handling large data volumes and diverse environments, though costs may increase with scalability.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
They struggle a bit with pure virtual environments, but in terms of how much they can handle, it is pretty good.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Nagios XI is stable with minimal performance issues, requiring occasional tweaks, and is ideal for large-scale infrastructure monitoring.
Sentiment score
7.5
Properly managed SolarWinds NPM is stable, with fewer issues in updated versions, relying on infrastructure planning and resource allocation.
Sentiment score
7.9
Splunk Enterprise Security is stable and reliable, but proper setup and careful capacity planning are crucial for optimal performance.
It provides a stable environment but needs to integrate with ITSM platforms to achieve better visibility.
It is very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Nagios XI requires better integration, user interface, documentation, and enhanced features for easier setup and improved management capabilities.
SolarWinds NPM faces challenges with accuracy, user interface, scalability, support, stability, resource use, and pricing concerns.
Splunk Enterprise Security needs better setup, integration, documentation, interfaces, access controls, data management, and pricing flexibility for improved user experience.
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.
Splunk Enterprise Security would benefit from a more robust rule engine to reduce false positives.
What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel.
 

Setup Cost

Nagios XI offers cost-effective monitoring with free and paid versions, though enterprise deployment may involve complex licensing and higher costs.
SolarWinds NPM offers competitive pricing but can be costly; complex licensing and additional fees may impact smaller businesses.
Splunk Enterprise Security's cost is seen as high, prompting calls for flexible pricing to suit different budgets and needs.
We are using the free, open-source version.
The solution is considered expensive.
Pricing-wise, SolarWinds NPM is more expensive than PRTG.
I saw clients spend two million dollars a year just feeding data into the Splunk solution.
Splunk is priced higher than other solutions.
 

Valuable Features

Nagios XI provides customizable, scalable monitoring with extensive plugin support, real-time insights, and integration, improving user experience and flexibility.
SolarWinds NPM offers easy deployment, intuitive monitoring, customizable dashboards, multi-vendor support, scalability, and community-driven enhancements for proactive management.
Splunk Enterprise Security offers robust data analysis, real-time alerts, and machine learning, enhancing threat detection and incident response.
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.
The Splunk Enterprise Security's threat-hunting capabilities have been particularly useful in later releases.
They have approximately 50,000 predefined correlation rules.
 

Mindshare comparison

IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Network Monitoring Software
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Amir  Said - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective alerting enhances network monitoring experience with an easy setup
We love Nagios XI due to the fact that JPS Web is very useful. JPS monitors the modem and performs switching, monitoring the computer, and performing switching. We implement some applications and traffic monitoring. The alerting system is very effective. For instance, if we have an alarm on some RAM storage if the traffic is cut or dropped.
MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.
ROBERT-CHRISTIAN - PeerSpot reviewer
Has many predefined correlation rules and is brilliant for investigation and log analysis
It is very complicated to write your own correlation rules without the help of Splunk support. What Splunk could do better is to create an API to the standard SIEM tools, such as Microsoft Sentinel. The idea would be to make it less painful. In ELK Stack, Kibana is the query language with which you can search log files. I believe Splunk has also a query language in which they search their log files, but once you have identified the log file that you want to use for further security correlation, you want to very quickly transport that into your SIEM tool, such as Microsoft Sentinel. That is something that Splunk could make a little bit less painful because it is a lot of effort to find that log file and forward it. An API with Microsoft Sentinel or a similar SIEM tool would be a good idea.
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
May 31, 2015
Nagios vs. Zabbix vs. PRTG vs. Spiceworks vs. Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor
I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
61%
Computer Software Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Educational Organization
58%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Nagios XI?
It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.
What needs improvement with Nagios XI?
The GUI could be improved. It's a bit too basic, and maybe having a GraphQL interface would resolve this. Also, there...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools ar...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of scalabil...
What SOC product do you recommend?
For tools I’d recommend: -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is a...
What is a better choice, Splunk or Azure Sentinel?
It would really depend on (1) which logs you need to ingest and (2) what are your use cases Splunk is easy for ingest...
How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitor...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Splunk has more than 7,000 customers spread across over 90 countries. These customers include Telenor, UniCredit, ideeli, McKenney's, Tesco, and SurveyMonkey.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: January 2025.
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