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BMC TrueSight Operations Management vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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

BMC TrueSight Operations Ma...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
28th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
19th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (23rd), Event Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (13th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is 0.8%, down from 1.3% 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

Ayobanji Iluyomade - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution is stable and can be used for monitoring and managing events, but it does not provide application or service monitoring features
We are moving from basic monitoring to AIOps, where we can do things like self-healing. We also want to create dashboards for IT and business users to show the status of their services. We have done a couple of demos. I recommend the solution to others. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.
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

"The fact that they have a very integrated relationship with Sentry Software, the Knowledge Module, is valuable... The richest feature for us is the number of Knowledge Modules that we can load into the product to add breadth of service to the customer. It enables us to move up the operational stack from hardware, to operating system, to application, and to cloud... That enables us to provide one pane of glass over all those layers - hardware, OS, app, and cloud."
"We can verify uptimes as another source of keeping devices in compliance."
"I like the deep-dive detail and end-user metrics data. The synthetic monitor is the best one. The best point of the new one is that there's no need for configuration. You can inject the Java script and start to change major developments in the application. This is a good approach, and we received all the data using this."
"The noise reduction for ticketing works much better than we have seen in a lot of other companies."
"I like the event management part."
"It allows our operations team to have one single application to reference when investigating issues in our environment."
"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 works irrespective of the operating system we’re running."
"I would rate the overall solution nine out of ten due to its capabilities, however, its complexity is a major drawback."
"The most valuable feature is the graphical user interface."
"With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server."
"SolarWinds is reasonably priced."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its graphical interface and reports."
"I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable."
"The most valuable features are language support and technical support."
"It is scalable."
 

Cons

"The stability of BMC TrueSight Operations Management needs improvement. My organization's infrastructure is vast and implemented based on BMC recommendations, but the solution needs to be optimized for large-capacity infrastructure."
"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."
"I think the ease of deployment needs to be looked at. It would be great if the deployment was faster and easier."
"Specifically around application performance monitoring, BMC is definitely not the market leader. The Dynatraces, the New Relics and the like are more of the market leaders in that space. I would like to see them grow that space a little bit more aggressively. It has not really been their bread and butter."
"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."
"Reporting would be an area for improvement in TrueSight... We have almost 800 customers today on TrueSight and just under 10,000 assets. We need to be able to give a customer some information. If the customer's product fails, they'll ask us, "Did it have a problem beforehand?" We have all those events and we know all the problems it had beforehand. We have to be able to give them access to that kind of reporting. That's an enhancement that we need."
"The pricing could be better."
"The dashboard and performance graphs should include a way to automatically schedule and export reports."
"There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country."
"Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier."
"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."
"The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear."
"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."
"A need for improvement is in the technical support provided by SolarWinds."
"They don't have a local support team."
"Consolidation of platforms would provide a smoother experience."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"The solution is based on endpoints and knowledge models which can be costly."
"We're end-of-lifeing it now. Overall, the licensing costs of BMC are a challenge for us in that they're hard costs, whereas open-source monitoring has soft costs, where it's harder to line-item."
"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..."
"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."
"Pricing is all volume-driven. I think we were paying between $80 and $85 per license. That's per unit, for a perpetual license. You pay it one time and then, every year, you pay 20 percent of that for annual maintenance and support. But now that we've grown, we've purchased tens of thousands of licenses and the cost per license has gone down to something like less than $30..."
"It is a large, complex product. So, there is a commitment of manpower to deploy it, as it is not a cheap product."
"We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"It was inexpensive when we installed it and gradually became more expensive, but it was a very inexpensive product at first."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees."
"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."
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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
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
5%
Educational Organization
21%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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 when it has any problems. We have integrated it with ServiceNow to open instances.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
Though I have no clue about the tool's actual price, I know that it is astronomical.
What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Operations Management?
Cost is an issue with BMC TrueSight Operations Management. Though I am not responsible for the budget, I know that it is an expensive tool set when used only for event management. The tool's issue ...
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...
 

Also Known As

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ensono, Transamerica, Boston Scientific, Park Place Technologies, inContact, TD Ameritrade, PNC Bank
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about BMC TrueSight Operations Management vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,481 professionals have used our research since 2012.