SolarWinds NPM and Amazon CloudWatch compete in the network and infrastructure monitoring category. SolarWinds NPM holds the upper hand in network monitoring with its customization and multiple vendor support, while Amazon CloudWatch excels in cloud environments with its deep integration with AWS services.
Features: SolarWinds NPM offers granular insights into device performance, detailed customization, and support for multiple vendor devices, coupled with a robust alerting system. Amazon CloudWatch provides excellent integration with AWS services, focusing on infrastructure and workload monitoring, and offers robust metrics and alarms suitable for cloud environments.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM needs enhancement in resource utilization, interface design, and support for non-Cisco vendors. The web-based interface sometimes introduces bugs with new features. Amazon CloudWatch should improve third-party integration, advanced application monitoring, and streamline its interface to better accommodate hybrid or on-premises scenarios.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM is praised for its on-premises deployment capabilities, allowing for significant customization and scaling, although its customer service has mixed reviews due to slow responses. Amazon CloudWatch simplifies deployment in AWS environments but has limited on-premises capabilities, with customer service noted for technical knowledge but criticized for high premium support costs.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM prices vary based on device count and modules, which can be high for smaller organizations but offer substantial ROI through performance uptime. Amazon CloudWatch employs a pay-as-you-go model, which is cost-effective initially but can increase with usage, making it more affordable for AWS-focused operations.
Amazon CloudWatch offers cost-saving advantages by being an inbuilt solution that requires no separate setup or maintenance for monitoring tasks.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
While using their cloud and cloud resources, if you have an issue with CloudWatch, you must pay additional monthly fees to get time from dedicated tech support.
In recent years, due to business expansion, knowledge levels among support engineers seem to vary.
If there is no timely response, getting a resolution is more difficult.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
Amazon CloudWatch's scalability is managed by AWS.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
I sometimes notice slowness when Amazon CloudWatch agents are installed on machines with less capacity, causing me to use other monitoring tools.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
When using third-party dashboards such as Kibana or Grafana and other visualization tools, there should be a way to feed CloudWatch's data and logging capabilities into these visualization tools.
Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage.
Maybe Amazon Web Services can improve by providing a library for CloudWatch with some useful features.
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
Features such as taking backup of the devices or configurations of the devices can be included in further versions of SolarWinds NPM.
Overall, the pricing of Amazon CloudWatch is very expensive.
Amazon CloudWatch charges more for custom metrics as well as for changes in the timeline.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
Being an inbuilt solution from AWS, it saves time on installation, setup, and maintenance.
The best features of Amazon CloudWatch need to improve visibility into the network because when using hundreds of network resources such as transit gateway, VPNs, routers, route tables, and firewalls, it does not give many details in a structured manner.
I like its filtering capability and its ability to give the cyber engine insights.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| SolarWinds NPM | 4.3% |
| Amazon CloudWatch | 2.3% |
| Other | 93.4% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 17 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 8 |
| Large Enterprise | 24 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 59 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 33 |
| Large Enterprise | 84 |
Amazon CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with AWS, providing real-time monitoring and alerting features. Its interface supports task automation, enhancing troubleshooting and analytics capabilities, while offering strong security and scalability at a cost-effective rate.
Amazon CloudWatch is an impactful platform for monitoring AWS resources and managing application performance. It simplifies infrastructure performance monitoring by providing comprehensive analytics capabilities, including application insights and event scheduling. Users appreciate CloudWatch for its detailed metrics, dashboards, and support in issuing alerts to detect anomalies. It efficiently tracks performance, optimizes resource utilization, and ensures service availability. CloudWatch is recognized for its robust alerting features and integration with other AWS services, further supporting its resource monitoring capabilities. However, there is room for improvement in dashboard customization, log streaming speed, and integration with non-AWS services. Enhancements in API integration, machine learning features, and support for third-party tools are also desired.
What features does Amazon CloudWatch offer?Industries implementing Amazon CloudWatch often focus on optimizing IT infrastructure. Companies in sectors like finance and e-commerce rely on its monitoring and alerting capabilities to ensure service uptime and performance. The platform's automation and analytics features empower teams to proactively manage performance and detect potential issues promptly.
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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