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BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance (BCIA) vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

BlueCat Infrastructure Assu...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
41st
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance (BCIA) is 0.1%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.8%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Bob Stiles - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers proactive issue detection through customized alerts enhances troubleshooting
We saw the benefits of BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance immediately after we deployed it. The enhanced analytics dashboard helps us prioritize troubleshooting. BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance detects potential issues and anomalies before they occur, provided we have set our thresholds. Without defined thresholds, the system may still identify problems, but we will only be alerted after the event. This proactive approach helps prevent issues rather than simply reacting to them. It provides diagnostic information to help with remediation. BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance significantly enhances our company's network stability by preventing outages. With over a hundred firewalls integrated into the system, it provides comprehensive monitoring and control, effectively minimizing potential downtime. BlueCat's solution has been instrumental in maintaining a highly reliable network environment, and its value in preventing disruptions is immeasurable.
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"BlueCat's solution has been instrumental in maintaining a highly reliable network environment, and its value in preventing disruptions is immeasurable."
"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance provides excellent analytic capabilities for early problem detection, offering beneficial diagnostic information and actionable remediation steps."
"The most valuable aspects of BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance are remote commands, a core functionality for us, and automated remediation options."
"Thanks to BlueCat, we have not experienced any downtime in the past two years."
"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance's most valuable feature is its ability to analyze integrity and perform interrogations, providing alerts based on configurable thresholds."
"SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason."
"From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization."
"The ability to customize the views and dashboards is nice. SolarWinds also allows us to access the data via the API. That's probably the feature I liked the most."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the alerts."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
"We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."
"The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour."
"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."
 

Cons

"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance does not support all network security devices."
"Considering that some of our junior engineers have limited coding expertise, incorporating features that assist in query construction or provide clear textual translations of code would be valuable."
"Considering that some of our junior engineers have limited coding expertise, incorporating features that assist in query construction or provide clear textual translations of code would be valuable."
"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance does not support all network security devices."
"We would greatly benefit from expanded BlueCat integrations, particularly through a robust API ingestion system that allows for custom integrations with other systems. Ideally, this would include a user-friendly message queue system that facilitates communication between BlueCat and any external system via APIs."
"Consolidation of platforms would provide a smoother experience."
"GUI needs improvement with a more graphical dashboard."
"The solution's customer service is not very good because the support takes too long."
"Technical support and releases are not particularly reliable."
"In terms of scalability, there is room for improvement. When you start monitoring, if you have so many interfaces and you're trying to monitor them at a faster interval, or a shorter interval, you get to a point where you need to request another node."
"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."
"The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market."
"SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance meets our budget requirements."
"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance is reasonably priced."
"The pricing for BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance is fairly comparable."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"It is not an expensive product."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
"The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
"It is expensive."
"Price could be improved on"
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
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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
No data available
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance (BCIA)?
BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance does not support all network security devices. We currently use BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance on-premises, but it lacks the AI capabilities that are becoming inc...
What is your primary use case for BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance (BCIA)?
My organization comprises a financial institution and a technology company. BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance, an internal service, helps accurately pinpoint issues within our systems.
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...
 

Comparisons

No data available
 

Also Known As

Indeni
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

MasterCard, Bloomberg, Comcast, Office Depot, O'Reilly Auto Parts, Prudential, Wyndham Worldwide, iRobot, Leumi, Pelephone, Sheetz, Travelex
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance (BCIA) vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.