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BigPanda vs FortiMonitor 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

BigPanda
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
51st
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
12th
Average Rating
7.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
AIOps (18th)
FortiMonitor
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
14th
Ranking in IT Alerting and Incident Management
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (14th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of BigPanda is 0.9%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FortiMonitor is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Ankit-Mathur - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers comprehensive alert monitoring and a user-friendly interface but requires manual validation to provide accurate alerts
For new users, I would advise using BigPanda for its comprehensive alert monitoring and integration with ServiceNow. Its mapping capabilities and user-friendly interface make it valuable for incident analysis and prioritization. As users become more familiar with the tool, its full potential will become apparent, enhancing efficiency and effectiveness over time. It is easy for someone to learn to use BigPanda for the first time. We start with basic examples that everyone can understand, then provide verbal introductions followed by hands-on training over two weeks. We encourage making mistakes and asking questions to ensure understanding. It depends on the trainer's approach, but with proper guidance, anyone can learn effectively. Overall, I would rate BigPanda as a five out of ten. For it to be a perfect ten, it would need to consistently provide accurate alerts without requiring manual validation. This means it should effectively suppress similar incidents, eliminating the need for constant monitoring. Once it reaches this level of reliability, BigPanda would be exceptional.
JaimeVasquez - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring capabilities keep operations running smoothly and alerts enhance proactive system management
We use FortiMonitor to monitor the infrastructure of our customers. We check on what is happening with their operations, monitor bandwidth, ensure configurations are appropriate for the customer, and identify if anything is going wrong The most valuable features of FortiMonitor are its redundancy…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Easy integration - We've had challenges in the past integrating all of our various monitoring sources and tools into one central system. BigPanda, with the integrations that it already has, as well as offering webhook/REST API, has made it very easy for us to plug everything in."
"BigPanda improves service reliability with instant resolution, increased uptime, and reduced mean time to resolution, thus enhancing service quality."
"The most valuable features of BigPanda include event deduplication, correlations, and enrichment, which reduce the noise in the environment."
"BigPanda integrates well with other solutions, such as WatchGuard,"
"Alert aggregation was the primary requirement. BigPanda pulls all this together into a single UI for us, allowing us to see related alerts grouped together into an incident, and enables us to easily create a JIRA ticket and Slack channel to manage an issue."
"The most valuable features of BigPanda are the API integration was good. It enables us to do faster onboarding."
"The best of a bad lot was the error message deduping."
"One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface."
"It provides the best firewall features."
"FortiMonitor has a very intuitive dashboard, which makes it particularly helpful for analyzing traffic, alerts, and other information."
"The most valuable feature of FortiMonitor is the overall ability to monitor the health of the environment."
"Fortinet's customer support is very good."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is what the devices are used for. We have big backups for our Cradlepoint solutions, but FortiMonitor is a great routing device and we love working with them."
"The tool continuously improves, adapting to support new vendors and technologies. Importantly, it automates the process, triggering alerts when devices require attention, and eliminating the need for manual intervention."
"FortiMonitor has a very intuitive dashboard, which makes it particularly helpful for analyzing traffic, alerts, and other information."
"FortiMonitor is 100% stable."
 

Cons

"Analytics is an area for improvement, being able to break down the actions that are being taken by users of BigPanda, as well as the auto-magical work that is being done by BigPanda."
"The solution could improve by having better integration."
"Lacks sufficient dashboard features."
"The cost of this product is too high compared to New Relic."
"Our infrastructure is quite large - tens of thousands of servers, often with 30-plus checks running on each host with one minute intervals. This generates a lot of data often in bursts (when we have a large scale failure). This has caused some delay in the ingestion pipeline."
"The UI for this solution could be improved. It is very hard to find what you are looking for."
"When handling critical traffic, the BigPanda site can slow down, which we manage with a load balancer."
"BigPanda sometimes creates false incidents and workarounds, causing financial disturbances because we pay for each incident."
"Sometimes, we get corruption when upgrading from firmware to the new generation, causing a lot of issues."
"FortiMonitor's monitoring could be much better. It should be like, in Palo Alto."
"We use FortiToken, and it's a pain to use because you have to send things through your phone and then confirm by email. Only after this can you log in. It's dual-factor authentication. I wish that I could just log in or bring up a dashboard where I could log in from."
"There are no AI features in FortiMonitor, which might be an area for enhancement."
"There is room for improvement in the FortiMonitor report. It is not ideal for showcasing to tech customers or managers, especially when trying to display high CPU usage from logins within a specific range of months or the most recent month."
"The solution's initial setup process is time-consuming."
"I think the current features are really good for me, nothing else comes to mind right now. Maybe some small improvements could be made in the customization and configuration part of the UI to make it easier or more intuitive. Customizable UI options, like we saw in the demo, could be helpful for everyone. But in our operational environment, having clear health status and system details is crucial for us system engineers. One feature I'd really like to see is a credential management system. It would help us keep track of who's logged in and how many times, which is important due to user restrictions. Sometimes, we need to manage logins more efficiently, like logging off other users to free up credentials. So having a feature like that would be really helpful."
"FortiMonitor could be improved by making it more convenient for smaller workloads, such as when configuring a few branches."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of BigPanda is in the middle compared to other solutions."
"They were great to work with on pricing/licensing. Given we are a high-growth company, we needed a flexible site license."
"BigPanda is cheaper than the competitors."
"We pay $200,000 USD per year."
"There are additional costs needed for certain functionality, such as scalability."
"FortiMonitor's price is very high."
"On a scale from one to ten, I rate the pricing a nine since it is a good solution that is available at a cheap price."
"Compared to other solutions, FortiMonitor is a very expensive solution."
"We have a large customer base for Fortinet, and the additional buying power got us really great discounts."
"The tool's pricing model in Vietnam is a bit high. I rate the product price as an eight out of ten."
"In terms of licensing, while it may not be the most expensive option on the market, it's relatively cost-effective. You can obtain licenses at a lower cost, with the calculation being straightforward. For example, if you onboard around 5,000 devices, you'll need approximately 5,000 licenses, as each device typically counts as one license."
"The price of FortiMonitor is approximately $200 annually for 225 users. The price is competitive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
Computer Software Company
29%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Retailer
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What do you like most about BigPanda?
One of the most valuable features of BigPanda is its user-friendly interface.
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
I have a clear bias because I work for Panopta. We aren't a fit for everyone, but I can confirm that Panopta is a lot less work to stand up and maintain. It's also a lot easier to use and onboard n...
What do you like most about FortiMonitor?
In FortiMonitor, we're linked up with our Netgear, CactusServer, and NOC. It's really valuable because everything's migrating to one dashboard for us system engineers. We can keep an eye on traffic...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FortiMonitor?
FortiMonitor does save time but not significantly on costs, as there are still expenses related to procurement, installation, and licensing.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Panopta
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Nagios, ServiceNow, ITSM, NOC, CMDB Evolved, RemedyIncident Management Process
SONY, GoDaddy, HCL, ING, ARMOR, billboard
Find out what your peers are saying about BigPanda vs. FortiMonitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.