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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
88th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
61st
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Unified Communications Monitoring (3rd)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
2nd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of CA Unified Communications Monitor is 0.5%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.7%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.7%
CA Unified Communications Monitor0.5%
Other95.8%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1605927 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr.Solutions Engineer | Project Manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Meets the needs of the customer but all of the features need improvement
I do not choose the solution. The client does. I am an implementer. We are systems integrators. It is worth mentioning that the solution should be easy to install and offer the user exhibition capabilities. Also, a data sheet should be used to gather information about the product, to facilitate easy and simple implementation. I rate CA Unified Communications Monitor as a five out of ten.
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

"We use the solution to meet the needs of the customer."
"For us, it's very key to know the voice quality of the total solution, which is based on many components across many domains."
"Good end-to-end monitoring"
"It's very easy to scale; the scalability is brilliant, and if you need additional monitoring resources or need to plug in your secondary data center, it takes thirty minutes and is easy to use."
"SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason."
"The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect; it's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic, and with a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items."
"A product that is well-tested and trusted in demanding situations."
"It paid for itself within six months, when compared to our previous solution."
"The initial setup is easy."
"SolarWinds NPM is used to monitor network components and solutions, and we used it to monitor downtime and latency between applications as well as the latency between services."
"SolarWinds NPM is a scalable solution since it can handle a huge number of users."
 

Cons

"The solution should have automatic baseline detection."
"All the features and functions of the solution can be improved, specifically the user experience."
"The module UIs can have different features based on what module you're in. I'd love to see feature parity between them."
"It needs group views with performance metrics."
"It is too expensive."
"SolarWinds should have integrations back into products like ExtraHop, VIAVI, Riverbed, and NETSCOUT."
"The root cause analysis and installation faults are not clear."
"This is a complex product to set up and I think it's really too detailed and could be simplified."
"Real-time analytics is the major weakness of the SolarWinds NPM platform today. They've done a fantastic job enabling the collection of data. Users are now demanding the ability to generate their own graphs, views, and so on; all of this must be done by an admin today."
"You could question the scalability. It could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"Some solutions are open source and free."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
"SolarWinds NPM has different pricing models available. The cost of the solution is less than some competitors."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine."
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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
Construction Company
25%
Comms Service Provider
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise87
 

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: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.