Azure Network Watcher vs IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) comparison

Microsoft and IBM are both solutions in the Network Monitoring Software category. Microsoft is ranked #41 with an average rating of 8.7, while IBM is ranked #42 with an average rating of 7.5. Microsoft holds a 0.5% mindshare in NMS, compared to IBM’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Azure Network Watcher

Read 13 Azure Network Watcher reviews

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804 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

IBM SevOne Network Performa...

Read 54 IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) reviews

3,796 Views
1,974 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Azure Network Watcher

IBM SevOne Network Performa...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 2024

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management and Azure Network Watcher compete in network monitoring and management. Based on data comparisons, IBM SevOne NPM has the upper hand due to its superior visualization and reporting speed, while Azure Network Watcher benefits from its deep cloud integration.

Features: IBM SevOne Network Performance Management offers comprehensive infrastructure visibility, agentless monitoring, and robust alert settings. It excels in scalability, allowing for the monitoring of multiple network devices. Its one-minute polling facilitates real-time insights with quick reporting. Azure Network Watcher provides cloud-native features such as packet capture and firewall capabilities. It offers a holistic view of network architecture and cloud security integration, enhancing its cloud-native appeal. Its tools are well-suited for analyzing and capturing network packets.

Room for Improvement: IBM SevOne NPM should enhance reporting and data migration processes, as well as support for non-disruptive system upgrades. Improving baseline analysis and user-friendly administrative features could also be beneficial. Azure Network Watcher needs additional troubleshooting tools and better integration of traffic logging applications. Enhancing feature documentation could assist users in better utilizing its capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM SevOne NPM provides on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud deployment options, offering flexibility. Its customer service is highly regarded, with frequent collaboration and quick response times. Azure Network Watcher, limited to public cloud deployment, benefits from robust support systems though sometimes faces user experience challenges. Both products are dedicated to improving customer interaction and support efficiency.

Pricing and ROI: IBM SevOne NPM uses a flexible licensing model with pay-as-you-grow options but may incur high costs for extensive network implementations. Users find the price-to-value ratio favorable, achieving operational efficiencies and cost savings. Azure Network Watcher offers reasonable pricing but can be expensive for smaller enterprises. Its cost-effectiveness becomes significant in larger cloud environments, with a pronounced ROI for cloud monitoring capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Network Watcher vs. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Network Watcher vs. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

December 2025

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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

Azure Network Watcher

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

41st

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

IBM SevOne Network Performa...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

42nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (19th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (40th), Log Management (44th), Cloud Monitoring Software (30th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Azure Network Watcher is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is 1.0%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Azure Network Watcher	0.5%
IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)	1.0%
Other	98.5%

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Bijoyendra Roychowdhury

Program Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Network monitoring provides comprehensive analytics while the interface requires further development

The quality of Azure Network Watcher is quite good in terms of the in-depth analysis you can create from these matrices. There are other monitoring tools such as New Relic, AppDynamics, and Dynatrace which provide very detailed network tracing. Cloud providers such as Azure or AWS do not have that kind of GUI-based capability at this point, but using PowerShell or Python, you can develop it yourself. From the GUI perspective, it still needs to evolve in terms of quality and standard, though overall, it is quite good for troubleshooting. Regarding areas for improvement, when comparing to other network tools beyond Azure Monitor or Azure Network Watcher, those tools can identify single failed packets. This level of granularity is not currently possible with cloud providers as they only go to a certain level rather than the granular level needed for deep troubleshooting, though they do provide hints with available matrices.

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reviewer1543041

Network monitoring engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Provides consistent infrastructure monitoring with excellent usability and support

The primary use case of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) is network monitoring. It helps to maintain the infrastructure's availability and ensure that alerts are generated when needed The most valuable features of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) are its stability,…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Azure Network Watcher is using the gateways with the connections. The monitoring is useful for the logs and application insights into the data. The traffic filtering issues when it comes to deploying those applications are helpful."

"The most valuable feature of Azure Network Watcher is the cloud-native application firewall. It is helpful for securing databases."

"The solution is good for monitoring device behavior."

"We use the solution to monitor network services. It helps to capture any network issues."

"The solution is stable."

"Azure Network Watcher provides valuable features based on your specific requirements and use cases, helping you monitor network bandwidth, throughput, data flow consumption, and control costs by giving insight into egress and ingress traffic, total input and output operations, bandwidth, and threats through IP identification."

"I like the visibility."

"It provides good visibility."

More Azure Network Watcher pros

"The most valuable feature is the NMS because that's the core of the system. Without the NMS, the other tools aren't that usable."

"The modules and the performance management reports that come with data insights are two of the most valuable features. I also find the reports for Wi-Fi, Netflow, LAN, and WAN for monitoring to be very good."

"One of the solution's biggest strengths is its capacity management performance, with out-of-the-box reports through NMS, as well as its ability to collect NetFlow-related data from devices. The collection of network performance and flow data is important because we have many critical business applications."

"It's a great solution for highlighting and discovering useful information regarding our network's elements."

"It also gives us the closest thing to real-time insight into network performance that we have, with just a 10-second delay. It's very important for us to know the health of the infrastructure very quickly."

"SevOne has rich API capabilities, giving us the flexibility to control what we collect and customize the collection, creation, and manipulation of now metrics as necessary."

"We've had great feedback from our customers about SevOne support. They're willing to set up a remote session upon request. You have to go through three tiers of support with most vendors, and they ask a lot of screening questions before they will do a remote session. You need to spend a lot of time before an engineer will host a remote session to look at your problematic system."

"Flexible architecture: You can extend the system and its capacity by attaching another cluster pair."

More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) pros

Cons

"Technical support from Microsoft needs significant improvement compared to other product vendors."

"The initial setup and deployment could be improved to be simplified."

"Azure Network Watcher could improve by having other built-in applications. For example, an application to log activities for in and outbound traffic."

"There are some occasional downtimes, but these were based on Azure-specific issues."

"I would like to see in the future if we can troubleshoot as a firewall because it is equipment as a network player and some diagnostics."

"Azure Network Watcher needs to have better documentation and it needs to capture information accurately."

"User experience could be improved."

"I still use Wireshark and Azure Network Watcher to get the required data. My team captures the traffic from Azure Network Watcher, downloads it, then imports that traffic into Wireshark to get more details on the number of hits and replies, for example. If you can do that on Azure Network Watcher and have Wireshark built-in, that would make Azure Network Watcher better. If Azure Network Watcher has that functionality where you won't need a third-party tool to get what you need, that would be helpful. I'm also expecting more from Azure Network Watcher. It's more complex than knowing how the IP flows from its source to the destination. The tool also needs more open-source features, such as having some built-in Wireshark that improves monitoring for customers. Sometimes, you encounter a VPN tunnel, network, or routing issue, but finding out more about the blockage is challenging. Is it one hundred percent an Azure issue? Is it a peer issue? You don't get complete information from Azure Network Watcher, so you must use other tools and depend on your strategies to resolve a specific issue. If more features could be added in the next release of Azure Network Watcher, specifically ones you can find on open-source tools, then that would be a plus point for the tool."

More Azure Network Watcher cons

"I'm not really sure if this was the software's fault or a server issue, but a couple of years back the disks were failing on our SevOne physical server every month and the server would go down. The secondary server took over from the primary until the disk issue was resolved. That was annoying."

"One area that requires a little bit of improvement is the topology of visualization and being able to map out connections, end-to-end. It's able to do that, but it's not as impressive as we would like it to be. We would like to understand the different interface types and the connection points better, through the visualization. Heatmaps also need further development."

"Some similar solutions offer end-to-end visibility."

"There is no service mode setup in this monitoring tool if you want to snooze alerts for any specific amount of time, to account for any activity change or major incident."

"SevOne should work with the graphs legend functionality."

"With the administrative management of the appliance, if some object appears from SevOne because something changed in the network or whatever, then as an administrator you will not be aware. If you are using this object in a report, this object will disappear from the report and you will not be aware of it. So, if you have 1,000 reports, you cannot always check these reports everyday to see if objects are missing or information has disappeared. We don't have any information on alerts, saying that something is happening there and maybe we need to take action. If an object was replaced by another one, or if a link was replaced by another one, then the graph needs to be changed because it doesn't exist in the graph anymore. However, we don't have this information."

"In terms of having a complete view of our network performance, I would rate it a nine out of 10. The reason for not giving it a 10 is that there is no packet capture associated with SevOne, but we do have other tools in place to do that."

"The GUI: both the dashboard/user view and the admin tool."

More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is good. It's not too expensive."

"The price of the solution is reasonable."

"Price-wise, I have no information on how much Azure Network Watcher costs."

"Azure Network Watcher is a little bit expensive."

"Many tools price things based on the number of KPIs that you're collecting around a device. In many cases, there could be hundreds of metrics that you need to collect. SevOne provides device-level pricing. That gives us the flexibility to turn on, and expand on, the metrics that we're collecting around those devices, without taking a financial hit."

"A blocking point is the high upfront cost because it is challenging to get it accepted and the purchase approved."

"The tool is not expensive. We were able to negotiate with SevOne on pricing."

"The pricing has not evolved with the market, which is one of the reasons we are moving to a new product."

"The pricing has been fair."

"Choose a SevOne partner who can provide SevOne as a service and can deliver professional services and maintenance."

"It is inexpensive compared to other monitoring tools."

"There are cheaper solutions available."

More IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Government

11%

University

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

Performing Arts

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	6
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	45

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Network Watcher?

Azure Network Watcher is affordable from the perspective of basic costing. It doesn't cost too much at this point unless you are requesting customizable detailed matrices. For the default configura...

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What needs improvement with Azure Network Watcher?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Azure Network Watcher?

The purpose of using Azure Network Watcher is to observe the network flow logs during any kind of troubleshooting. If there is any performance issue or latency issue over the network, we check the ...

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What needs improvement with SevOne Network Data Platform?

There is room for improvement in the integration with different vendors and the reporting capabilities. It would be beneficial to have out-of-the-box integration with third-party vendors and improv...

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What is your primary use case for SevOne Network Data Platform?

The primary use case of IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) ( /products/ibm-sevone-network-performance-management-npm-reviews ) is network monitoring. It helps to maintain the infrastru...

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What advice do you have for others considering SevOne Network Data Platform?

To compete with custom-built tools, IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) should accommodate the desired features and be timely in the delivery of feature updates. I would rate the overal...

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure Network Watcher

January 2026

Download Azure Network Watcher product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

January 2026

IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) report

Download IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM) product report

Also Known As

No data available

SevOne

Overview

Azure Network Watcher is a comprehensive network monitoring and diagnostic service offered by Microsoft Azure. It provides a range of tools and capabilities to help users monitor, diagnose, and gain insights into their Azure network infrastructure. With Network Watcher, users can capture and analyze network traffic, monitor network performance, troubleshoot connectivity issues, and gain visibility into network topology. It also offers features like packet capture, flow logs, connection monitoring, and VPN diagnostics to ensure the smooth operation of Azure networks. Network Watcher enables users to proactively identify and resolve network issues, optimize network performance, and enhance the overall reliability and security of their Azure network environment.

Microsoft

The IBM® SevOne Network Performance Management (IBM SevOne NPM) solution helps you spot, address, and prevent network performance issues early with machine learning-powered analytics from a single source. Boost network performance and improve your user application experience by proactively monitoring your multivendor end-to-end network across enterprise, communication, and managed service provider networks.

Transform raw network performance data into intelligent and actionable insights. The IBM SevOne NPM solution goes beyond detection, combining industry-leading expertise and advanced technology to help your IT team plan and optimize your network and act on what matters: improving network performance to provide an exceptional customer experience.

For further information, please visit www.ibm.com/cloud/sevo...

IBM

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

ATOS, Devereux, Spark New Zealand, Access4, Rogers Communication, Lumen (formerly known as CenturyLink)

Buyer's Guide

Azure Network Watcher vs. IBM SevOne Network Performance Management (NPM)

December 2025

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