Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
40th
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
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 4.2% 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 Infrastructure Assurance provides excellent analytic capabilities for early problem detection, offering beneficial diagnostic information and actionable remediation steps."
"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance's most valuable feature is its ability to analyze integrity and perform interrogations, providing alerts based on configurable thresholds."
"Thanks to BlueCat, we have not experienced any downtime in the past two years."
"BlueCat's solution has been instrumental in maintaining a highly reliable network environment, and its value in preventing disruptions is immeasurable."
"The most valuable aspects of BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance are remote commands, a core functionality for us, and automated remediation options."
"With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server."
"The most valuable feature is the graphical user interface."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"The stability is fantastic."
"The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well."
"The most valuable feature is the user-friendly interface and the ease of deployment."
"Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disc space statistics from servers and determine how much was free or used on various volumes."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"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."
"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance does not support all network security devices."
"Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product."
"The initial setup of SolarWinds NPM is complex, and I find it challenging."
"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 could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications."
"There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"The reporting module that got integrated into the system itself, used to be a standalone solution and I preferred that."
"The price of the solution can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance is reasonably priced."
"BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance meets our budget requirements."
"The pricing for BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance is fairly comparable."
"Price could be improved on"
"USD $15,000 annually for maintenance."
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"It is too expensive."
"The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"It is relatively inexpensive compared to other products in the same category."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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: June 2025.
860,168 professionals have used our research since 2012.