Centreon vs SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Centreon
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (11th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th), Cloud Monitoring Software (12th)
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic ...
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2024, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Centreon is 3.2%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is 0.8%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Unique Categories:
Network Monitoring Software
3.5%
Cloud Monitoring Software
6.4%
Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)
3.2%
 

Featured Reviews

Leandro Pereira Rodrigues - PeerSpot reviewer
May 8, 2023
The dashboards help to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time
Centreon's dashboard is good. Centreon's dashboard provides a single view of all our customers. When there is a problem, Centreon notifies us and works with us to resolve it quickly. Centreo's dashboards help to improve our visibility and ability to proactively ensure the right data is available at the right time which is important. We use Centreon's plugin packs to communicate with our telecom locations in Brazil when the host does not have Centreon integrated. Centreon's ready-to-use connectors and integrations are essential because they provide a comprehensive overview of our organization, which allows us to quickly resolve client issues. Centreon helps me organize our hosts by stage and monitor our clients. Centreon is the best for helping monitor our IT infrastructure from cloud to edge and providing holistic visibility. Centreon helps us align our IT operations with business objectives by identifying problems and resolving them quickly and permanently. Centreon helps us measure service performance by modeling IT service maps for business-critical IT workflows and metrics. This allows us to see the hierarchy and discover problems. Centreon is a valuable and important tool for addressing these issues. Centreon helps to consolidate all alerts, KPIs, and business maps as well as manage metrics across domains. We can seamlessly integrate with the client's network.
Alex Kinyanjui - PeerSpot reviewer
May 24, 2024
Used for traffic devices to manage networks and create automated workflows
We identified the very important skills. This capability allows us to isolate and analyze elements that consume resources, enabling us to allocate dedicated resources. It has also allowed us to classify network devices based on their resource consumption, ensuring they don't overuse the available resources in the pool. Additionally, it helps us plan and reallocate resources for other needs. The alert system in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is effective for maintaining network stability. The solution will undergo some integration. Once you have completed the integration, you won't need to intervene frequently. You can create automated workflows to send the data to the lab, enhancing its capabilities. 64 people are needed to do maintenance within an organization for traffic analyzers. SolarWinds needs to enhance its automation. If the automation were more advanced, it would be even better. Despite this, it's still quite effective from the endpoint perspective. Overall, I rate the solution an eight 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

"Centreon helps me detect where the problem is quickly. When we resolve a problem quickly, this lowers our overall costs."
"The downtimes feature is helpful. If the ISP is doing some maintenance on its network, we have the option to put downtime on the devices or the services, so we won't get any false alarms."
"I find the product's scalability to be one of the most valuable features since it allows us to add unlimited devices for monitoring and to set up additional polling servers without additional license cost or downtime in our monitoring."
"What I like most about Centreon is that it is very flexible and customizable, based on the user and/or business needs. Centreon is very flexible when it comes to monitoring parameters. We can use scripts found on the internet or scripts created by our infra/apps team. Also, the data visualization features are very simple and straightforward, yet very informative."
"The dashboards are valuable because they ease troubleshooting and viewing. It becomes easier to locate the source of a problem... The dashboards make it easier to communicate with our clients. They don't want to see the alert console, they want to see a beautiful dashboard representing their network and their business and to watch it in case something is wrong in their environment."
"Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and avoid downtime."
"Valuable features include the ability to schedule downtime, intensity or depth of monitoring which it does, different plugin packs, Centreon MAP, Centreon BI."
"E-mail alert notifications are valuable."
"The software management tools are very useful for our customers."
"The most valuable feature is the alarm that is set up to trigger based on bandwidth utilization."
"With SolarWinds, we are now able to accurately gauge bandwidth consumption."
"The solution helps manage networks."
"I like that it is able to monitor multiple devices and it's vendor-agnostic."
"As it offers enterprise solutions, it has all the essential features for business."
"This solution gives us important information about the utilization of protocols, particularly in terms of how often they are used."
"SolarWinds has improved our organization because whenever a device is down, we get an alert."
 

Cons

"I would like to see an improvement of the communication with big data systems, because Centreon is a monitoring system. In our point of view, Centreon should be a part of a source for a big data system, not a big data system itself. So, it should be easier to add data from the Centreon system to a big data system. For example, it should be able to teach machine learning."
"I would like to see a better UI, one which is more responsive."
"I would like to see more plugins. That is something it needs. There is also room for improvement through dynamic thresholds, or self-discover thresholds. I would also like to see a discovery feature that could map the whole network environment and automatically suggest things."
"Improvements are needed in the area of cloud monitoring, as that's a newer feature."
"During the initial setup we faced some issues. Part of it was because we had to become more knowledgeable in the solution. There are some gray areas and if you don't know the product well you may have issues. Another part of it was some bugs that we came across, although that's part of every software solution in IT nowadays. But the initial setup could be easier."
"It is necessary to improve service monitoring of database services in the free version."
"This solution lacks service monitoring in the cloud."
"Opening a ticket on the website of Centreon can be difficult for my colleague, but not for me because my English is good. However, my colleague doesn't speak English well, as our company is in Quebec and our first language is French."
"It is a scalable solution, but it is costly to scale. Therefore, I would rate scalability at eight out of ten."
"The Atlas module that is used for building the network map is very bad."
"The licensing should be more realistic so that we can adjust the number of nodes according to my needs, rather than in fixed increments."
"It does not flow. It cannot do our metric performance monitoring. So it is very limited. They can do it but in a very limited fashion. It is only good for SNMP-based alerts."
"It is very slow to pick the dynamics of the network."
"It's not a cheap product, so the pricing could be improved."
"As people always complain about the pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, it's an area for improvement in the solution. People find it expensive. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is support, as it could be better."
"Customer Support is quite complex."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you need basic monitoring without dashboards, just monitoring, the plugins are very useful and really cheap. If you want a more complete solution with dashboards and reporting, the EMS solution is great and it is not that much more expensive. It's a good value. Really good."
"For more complex tasks, we use prepaid support days and ask Centreon to come onsite."
"Centreon is always available to develop new plugins when needed. The most important thing is that their maintenance account yearly subscription fee includes the fact that they will maintain the new plugins that you requested them to deliver."
"Their licensing model is really easy. You have one license and you have access to all the features, compared to other tools where you have to purchase add-ons."
"It's quite expensive when you use the Enterprise version, but if you compare it to other providers, it's more like a middle-of-the-line product. It's always good to have a price that is lower, but I would say the price is okay because we get very good support and if we have any other issues we can always contact them. There has never been a time when I didn't get help from them."
"The price is not too high. Licensing is driven by how many hosts you monitor, but because you can run the agentless version, you don't have to declare every host to Centreon, one at a time. That means you can drive your infrastructure supervision with a very low number of declared hosts."
"It is perfect and very cheap if you are a little company or startup. After that, it is quite expensive for a big company."
"In terms of licensing, you have to think through if the components that need licensing are really needed. For example, the Map module: If you don't need a map to be shown, I don't see a point in paying for those licenses, if you just use it a couple of times a month or a couple of times a week... You can use the Centreon free version and get the main features. The licensing part is, I would say, only for bigger customers who have the option to pay more and who really need those kinds of modules, fancy reports, etc."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"SolarWinds' pricing structure is the primary reason why some customers opt for another solution such as ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer. In NTA, you are charged per port, meaning that if you have a 24-port switch you will be charged for 24 individual nodes. ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer, on the other hand, charges per switch, such that if you add a switch, the entire switch will count as one single node."
"I don't have information on the licensing cost for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer because it's bundled with another SolarWinds solution. My organization has seven different models and pays for the license yearly. My organization also had to deploy additional pollers, but the cost wasn't very expensive, though I can't give the exact numbers."
"While the pricing is fair, it could be better."
"For our environment, we pay approximately $25,000 USD yearly."
"We have licenses for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer. In terms of pricing, its license is not that expensive versus other tools such as HP."
"The price of this solution is exceptional."
"Licensing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is paid yearly, and there are no additional costs that you need to pay apart from the standard licensing fees because you don't need to purchase another solution to make SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer work. Pricing for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is more expensive than other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Government
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
64%
Computer Software Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
4%
Government
3%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Centreon?
Centreon's most valuable features are preventative maintenance and cost-efficiency. Everything is monitored, and we get a log before the system fails. We have an opportunity to fix the issue and av...
What needs improvement with Centreon?
Prometheus provides the ability to automate the backup of my infrastructure. This automatic backup capability allows me to integrate it into GitLab for versioning, among other functionalities. Thus...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
I have worked from 1973 with all kind of systems in large enterprises across the world. And have experience with all kind of software in monitoring from infra to end to end, it depends on the funct...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer?
The product is not too expensive. The license is renewed yearly. When it comes to support for NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, it might cost extra. Usually, we pay for support each year, and it lasts for ...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer?
In terms of improvement, it can be complex to set up and configure, and the user guides provided can also be complex, especially when dealing with certain configuration aspects. Improved SQL capabi...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Netflow Traffic Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbus, Bollore, BT, Canal Plus, Kuehne Nagel, Limagrain, LVMH, Oberthur Technologies, Orange, Darty, Addax Petroleum, Plastic Omnium, Auchan, Valeo, Saint Gobin, Clarins, Hugo Boss, JC Decaux, French Government (Defense, Justice, Environment, Agriculture), OptiComm, Thales, Zeiss.
Oceaneering International, Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, 335th Signal Command, Immofori
Find out what your peers are saying about Centreon vs. SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer and other solutions. Updated: September 2020.
787,779 professionals have used our research since 2012.