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

BMC TrueSight vs CA Unified Communications Monitor 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of BMC TrueSight is 1.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of CA Unified Communications Monitor is 0.6%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.2%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.2%
BMC TrueSight1.2%
CA Unified Communications Monitor0.6%
Other95.0%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Has improved monitoring efficiency and supports fast issue resolution through responsive support and reliable automation
I work with BMC TrueSight and have been using it for eight-plus years BMC TrueSight brought a positive impact and benefits to our organization. The customization part is one of the advantages of the product, along with the monitoring capabilities. Automated root cause analysis and predictive…
itarchit489981 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Good end-to-end voice quality monitoring and offers valuable features
The solution should have automatic baseline detection. On the per hour, per base, per week. That's usually the best. And on a per individual CI level. I know that they're working on it and when that's available then we will definitely implement it because it will reduce the effort we need to maintain all the products. Right now we have to set thresholds for every location, and it needs to be actually dynamic so if we have better thresholding, we'll have faster alarms across all our locations. We won't have to expend effort on it by resetting or checking them on a regular basis.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most beneficial part of the product in terms of IT monitoring revolves around the areas involving automation, and it also serves as an end-to-end event management and incident management tool."
"It has provided us with a single location to host all events to be viewed/monitored by our NOC. This has greatly helped them to streamline their processes."
"It is a stable solution."
"The solution has a very good business event manager tool."
"The ability to pull hosts together to show what processes are running, so it can be used for change management."
"Intelligent solution with a proactive monitoring feature and consolidated dashboard that's stable and easy to scale."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution's event management capabilities are fantastic. We do a best of breed. If, on the network side, they use a different tool, we pull all that data in so that we have a single console. It's kind of like the monitor of monitors. We're able to aggregate all the different types of data sets, whether it's log data, app data, OS data, infrastructure data, or network data. We're able to aggregate all those events and then correlate and be able to say we're having an event."
"We use the solution to meet the needs of the customer."
"Good end-to-end monitoring"
"The connectivity of the solution is very good."
"Technical support has always been great. They are very responsive. We've been satisfied with their level of support."
"One of the best features is the reports feature."
"There are a lot of options for customization of the dashboard, alerts, and reports."
"I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates."
"This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds NPM are network performance monitoring and the overall benefit for servers."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
 

Cons

"We were somewhat limited in TrueSight due to some of the RBAC controls not quite being what we wanted as far as delegating out administrative privileges for implementation. But because we were able to turn requests around pretty well, that burden wasn't too heavy."
"The dashboard and performance graphs should include a way to automatically schedule and export reports."
"In a large company of our size, we need multiple people in our company trained. So, I have to take the training classes. Then, I have to go and train the rest of my organization. I would prefer to say to the other people on my team, "Go to this link and..." Or, "Here's a list of training sessions that you can go to which are online and that are free." I think it would help the adoption of their product in the marketplace, personally."
"The UI for the end users could be improved and more flexible than it is now."
"I definitely would like to see more improvement in the self-diagnostics. I need to know when anything is not working or collecting, long before our customer finds it."
"The sizing (which is difficult), the maintenance of it and the upgrade paths. This is a difficult area which is not easy to cover, as every client has a different approach of implementing the product."
"I think the ease of deployment needs to be looked at. It would be great if the deployment was faster and easier."
"One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy."
"All the features and functions of the solution can be improved."
"The solution should have automatic baseline detection."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
"We are looking to change away from this solution because of the documentation and the solution doesn't have enough integration in our country. The documentation is too weak."
"SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license."
"The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support."
"It is difficult for stakeholders to translate technical requirements, which results in difficulties selecting a platform or implementing a solution."
"The interface could be made more user-friendly."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Consider scalability very carefully: how much you want to monitor and what components are very important. Then, depending on these two things, filter out unwanted metrics or attributes. If you do a good job at filtering the data, then your licensing costs will be manageable."
"The only possible additional cost that I can mention, that you might not be aware of, is that it uses Oracle partitioning, if you use Oracle. There are Oracle partitioning fees that go with that."
"The price of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is very high. If there was more flexibility with the sizing of the licensing it would be helpful, especially during the pandemic. We have wanted to expend but the licensing cost is too high."
"Pricing is very high."
"Though I have no clue about the tool's actual price, I know that it is astronomical."
"We pay license fees of between $150 and $200 per asset. There is an enterprise software license fee, and then you pay a percentage for your maintenance, and then Premier Support. For example, if you buy a two-year license for the product, then the maintenance fee is added to that for two years at X percent a year. Then there's a small fee on top of that for Premier Support..."
"The solutions are not the cheapest but are robust and stable. License model is rather complex and BMC do often change the model."
"BMC TrueSight Operations Management is not on the cheaper side, but its pricing is on a case by case basis. Its licensing model is simple and based on the number of devices."
Information not available
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
"I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
"It's expensive and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing."
"When I compare the cost of CA Spectrum to that of SolarWinds NPM, the cost of CA Spectrum is way too high, and the cost of SolarWinds NPM is pretty low."
"It is relatively inexpensive compared to other products in the same category."
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
"The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
881,928 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Government
6%
No data available
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business24
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise24
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
The solution provides visibility to our infrastructure, how it is, the resources we are monitoring, and quick updates...
What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
There are some complexities with deployment that could be improved in BMC TrueSight.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 ar...
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 scalabil...
 

Also Known As

ProactiveNet, TrueSight Operations Management
CA UC Monitor
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ensono, Transamerica, Boston Scientific, Park Place Technologies, inContact, TD Ameritrade, PNC Bank
BBVA Compass
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: January 2026.
881,928 professionals have used our research since 2012.