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SolarWinds NPM vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
vRealize Network Insight
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
38th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
41st
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
46
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.8%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.
NiteshKumar1 - PeerSpot reviewer
The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web
The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support has always been great. They are very responsive. We've been satisfied with their level of support."
"The benefit of this solution is the reporting. We're able to report on and see our network in a graphical form. We are able to detect when a device is added to a network."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users."
"The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds NPM are network performance monitoring and the overall benefit for servers."
"SolarWinds is user-friendly with a manageable console."
"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."
"Also, the ability to troubleshoot all the way across the NSX part of it to the physical and actually watch the packets go through and then see where the bottleneck is or where the interruption is. We run queries on the network flows within the application to find where they are in it and it graphically tells us how the packets are actually going through the system."
"The initial was straightforward. You can have it up and running in one hour."
"I find it user-friendly and intuitive. With the GUI interface that we do use on a regular basis, it's easy to navigate, it's easy to see, easy to query. We get reports. It's easy to use."
"compare-to-competition; I would recommend the product. I don't think there is any other product like this on the market right now."
"It allows you to see traffic that you couldn't otherwise see, which is traffic within your Layer 3-bounded network, meaning east-west traffic. It's hard to get that any other way."
"I like being able to see the flows coming in and out of the product. In terms of monitoring network flows, we use it to verify whether or not different servers/applications should be communicating with each other."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"By doing dependency mapping, it makes migrations more efficient. There are less outages that require engineers to spend additional hours troubleshooting the migration failures."
 

Cons

"The aesthetic widgets should be dynamic widgets, so the customization can be even more customizable."
"Application Performance Monitoring should be included in this solution."
"SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot."
"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."
"This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API."
"The integration with video apps could be better."
"SolarWinds needs to be improved such that it is on par with the leading products in the market."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
"After Broadcom acquired VMware, I would rate their support at five or less in many cases. It's difficult to find necessary documentation, open tickets, and get support."
"I would like to see more reporting features, more dashboards."
"The product is slightly complex use, while still being user-friendly. It could use more training modules, as it is not a straightforward product."
"The solution can be improved by making it more compatible with other brands, allowing for better integration."
"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."
"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."
"In a very general way, I would like to see an improvement in interoperability with third-party product, from other vendors."
"The only reason I would not give it a nine or a 10 is for cost reasons. It seems to be one of those things that really belongs as part of the product inherently and not as an add-on. That would be my only concern."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
"Most of the licenses are perpetual, and the annual maintenance charges are not high."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."
"The solution has reduced the time that we spend on other products. For example, with NSX, we were able to quickly find things that we would normally spend days trying to figure out."
"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."
"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."
"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."
"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."
"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."
"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."
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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
21%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring...
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 scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer ar...
What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?
The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?
Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.
What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?
Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...
 

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Arkin
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. vRealize Network Insight and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.