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CA Unified Communications Monitor vs SolarWinds NPM 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

CA Unified Communications M...
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
103rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
68th
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Unified Communications Monitoring (6th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of CA Unified Communications Monitor is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

itarchit489981 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
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

"We use the solution to meet the needs of the customer."
"Good end-to-end monitoring"
"The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products."
"I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates."
"I like the tracking feature to track devices and see where they are connected. This is very practical."
"SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly. The product allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance."
"The abnormal traffic notifications are good. Most of them are remote, and it is very good for notifications and monitoring for the traffic."
"There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM. We can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can use useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting. It is very helpful. Overall it was a very good experience."
"The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring."
"SolarWinds NPM provides an overview of network monitoring, extending its capabilities to cover other aspects, such as virtual machines and servers. The platform has features like NetPath, which is particularly beneficial for end-users, offering insights into issues like latency, packet loss, and connectivity problems with routers, switches, or servers."
 

Cons

"The solution should have automatic baseline detection."
"All the features and functions of the solution can be improved."
"The solution is not always good with new features, so it's take a long time."
"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."
"The interface could be made more user-friendly."
"Technical support can be slow to respond."
"There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country."
"Complex and overly detailed setup."
"If they did some type of synthetic monitoring, it would have been better."
"The price could be better."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"It is too expensive."
"We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."
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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
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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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

CA UC Monitor
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BBVA Compass
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about CA Unified Communications Monitor vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
864,155 professionals have used our research since 2012.