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PRTG Network Monitor vs SolarWinds NPM vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

Network Monitoring Software
Network Monitoring Software
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Tochukwu Uzomba - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficiently monitor networks across regions with seamless setup and robust feature set
PRTG Network Monitor is easy to set up. Within a few minutes, it is operational. It is an all-in-one monitoring solution without extra costs. For example, we set it up for an insurance company with branches across Africa. We are able to monitor from Lagos without installing anything in the branches, using the agentless feature. We just put in the IP address and the parameter, and we monitor from those ends. Additionally, all the sensors are very useful. Most people are interested in the bandwidth monitoring sensor to see what bandwidth the users are consuming. The pricing is affordable compared to SolarWinds.
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.
Subhajit Nag - PeerSpot reviewer
The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow
SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The technical support seems to be quick, clever, and has a comprehensive knowledge base online, which is fantastic."
"The up-to-date graphs and the history are very good."
"It is nice to have one place where all the information is right there in front of us."
"Ease of set-up – it is quick and easy to add a probe and start collecting data from a device."
"From a network point of view, we can see the state of the network, as well as bandwidth usage and downtime."
"PRTG Network Monitor is easy to set up."
"PRTG has improved our visibility and response time to issues related to remote sites."
"Ability to create a dashboard inside software monitoring."
"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization."
"Monitoring capabilities are at a high level and it is easy to see utilization, access ports, and CPU memory in real time or through a lens for long-term visualization."
"The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products."
"We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its graphical interface and reports."
"The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools."
"SolarWinds NPM provides an overview of network monitoring, extending its capabilities to cover other aspects, such as virtual machines and servers. The platform has features like NetPath, which is particularly beneficial for end-users, offering insights into issues like latency, packet loss, and connectivity problems with routers, switches, or servers."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
 

Cons

"There's always room for improvement. The high availability feature is good, but it's an area that PRTG could marginally improve. For example, in PRTG, both servers have a different IP, but it would make things a lot easier if they were bound by a single IP."
"I am not sure the solution is giving me all the needed feedback that we need. When something goes off on our IT infrastructure, it does tell me. However, it would be nice if it gave more intuitive information, e.g., the hard drive has gone up by 60 percent in an hour."
"PRTG Network Monitor needs to enhance network performance monitoring. Moving towards observability, similar to what Datadog offers, could be beneficial."
"A room for improvement in PRTG Network Monitor is its sensors. Its application technology sensor, such as the IAS, .NET, etc., needs some improvement because it doesn't work as expected. For example, the IAS sensor doesn't give immediate information, and the information you get from it isn't of good value. The web GUI of PRTG Network Monitor also needs improvement because errors keep popping up if it's not been updated to the latest version. What I'd like to see in the next release of the tool is end-to-end topology mapping for the business model, and that should be required. There has to be a technical map. Technical mapping and topological creation are missing in PRTG Network Monitor, so I would like to see those in the future."
"PRTG does not allow us to scan devices like we can scan software or another problem in it. Also, I cannot draw graphical graphs in Woodview/look. Another problem is that we cannot draw a good diagram in PRTG."
"PRTG Network Monitor should provide syslog monitoring since it is not available at this time. There are very limited features as compared to other solutions."
"Technical support is an area with concerns in PRTG Network Monitor, where improvements are required."
"PRTG Network Monitor can improve the reports. In the reports, you have to give an alert for that SMS and email, the emergency calls and downtimes have to be reported accordingly. You have to enable email services or an SMS gateway service to receive more alerts at the proper time."
"It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately."
"We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure."
"I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility."
"Technical support and releases are not particularly reliable."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"In terms of scalability, there is room for improvement. When you start monitoring, if you have so many interfaces and you're trying to monitor them at a faster interval, or a shorter interval, you get to a point where you need to request another node."
"If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools."
"We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is comparable."
"PRTG Network Monitor is not that expensive, so I like it cost-wise. There's no additional cost apart from the standard licensing fees. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I would rate the cost of PRTG Network Monitor a two."
"Sensors on free version can run out quick."
"I rate the price of PRTG Network Monitor an eight on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low price."
"The price was pretty good, very competitive."
"I'm paying something like €1000 per year for the maintenance. I've got unlimited sensors."
"PRTG is now available as PRTG Enterprise Monitor, and the price varies depending on the total number of sensors the customer buys"
"All monitoring system is close to the same pricing scheme."
"When I compare the cost of CA Spectrum to that of SolarWinds NPM, the cost of CA Spectrum is way too high, and the cost of SolarWinds NPM is pretty low."
"SolarWinds NPM is very expensive, and we pay ten thousand yearly."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000."
"We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices."
"Quite highly priced"
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"The price is too high."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."
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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
48%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Educational Organization
55%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Educational Organization
38%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
PRTG network monitor is one of the best tool i have ever used for the monitoring. It have auto discovery option. it a...
What do you like most about PRTG Network Monitor?
The tool is integrated with our email for the alerts.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PRTG Network Monitor?
The prices are very high for PRTG Network Monitor. That's why I'm using the free100 sensor license.
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 needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and App...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Jameson Bank, Sidnix, RungeICT, MedicalAnimal, Truck-lite, GamingGrids, The Covell Group, Forsythn County Schools, NetMass, Musgrove Park Hospital, Lanes Health, Columbia Southern University, Vodafone, Intrust Bank
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
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