ControlUp vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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ControlUp Logo
1,951 views|1,262 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
SolarWinds Logo
11,608 views|6,330 comparisons
92% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ControlUp and SolarWinds NPM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed ControlUp vs. SolarWinds NPM Report (Updated: March 2024).
767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable feature is the granularity of visibility into the resources that are in use by our applications.""ControlUp has an easy installation process.""The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities.""Integration with Netscaler and Scoutbees can provide a proper end-to-end analysis of the user's experience and give us a real ROI.""It has a great career time monitoring tool.""The most valuable features in ControlUp are endpoint monitoring and the many features that are available.""It shows you so many details of what's going on in that log-on that, if there's a problem, you can identify it in five minutes.""Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service."

More ControlUp Pros →

"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there.""The most valuable feature of SolarWinds NPM is the performance monitoring to see the memory, and CPU utilization.""The initial setup is easy.""The most valuable features in SolarWinds NPM are the network search and diagnostic tools.""Their support team is efficient, and it is easy to set up.""We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM.""The interface is user-friendly, making it easy to use.""We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down."

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Cons
"It can be improved by including script-based scheduling.""We'd like to see the mobile app working again so that we can get alerts 24/7. This is especially useful for the person on call.""This solution be improved by including load throttling tools. For example, I can identify a service where we spend a lot of CPU but I cannot restrict the service from ControlUp. I have to use another tool like AppSense.""ControlUp could improve the integration. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring has better integration.""Solve is a quick and intuitive tool for quickly mapping data together, however, once you have the view of the data that you like, it is difficult to share this with colleagues.""The graphical user interface needs to be improved from version to version.""Integration is always a problem, and we feel that we are doing our best and the service provider thinks they are doing their best. I guess if ControlUp's system could be more capable or if people could understand the integration part, that would be better.""Something I would love to see from a partner perspective would be maybe a way to do this in a surface hosting provider."

More ControlUp Cons →

"SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot.""If they did some type of synthetic monitoring, it would have been better.""The only thing that can be improved is to continually add to the existing capabilities of the product.""Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing.""The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market.""The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible.""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.""Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We are satisfied with the price compared to other solutions."
  • "Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios."
  • More ControlUp Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
  • "Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
  • "I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
  • "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."
  • "The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
  • More SolarWinds NPM Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    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 using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:When using ControlUp, the core feature that we have found valuable is its UI It is a valuable tool to view the analysis reactions of a base core Level 2 or Level 1 team so that they can complete the… more »
    Top Answer:They have standard and platinum licensing. We have a platinum license.
    Top Answer:This solution be improved by including load throttling tools. For example, I can identify a service where we spend a lot of CPU but I cannot restrict the service from ControlUp. I have to use another… more »
    Top Answer: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 or… more »
    Top Answer:From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.
    Top Answer: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 are… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    1,951
    Comparisons
    1,262
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    864
    Rating
    8.7
    Views
    11,608
    Comparisons
    6,330
    Reviews
    28
    Average Words per Review
    492
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
    Learn More
    Overview

    ControlUp is a digital experience monitoring management platform that makes it possible for IT teams to deliver a work-from-anywhere experience for employees. The solution makes fixing and preventing issues easy, enabling IT teams to make smarter decisions. It also provides monitoring performance, availability, and useful productivity metrics.

    The ControlUp platform supports:

    • Any digital workstyle
    • Physical endpoints
    • Virtual desktops
    • Apps
    • SaaS
    • Web apps
    • Unified communications tools

    ControlUp Features

    ControlUp has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Out-of-the-box device and performance metrics
    • Custom metric and device data collection
    • Non-intrusive, secure agents with offline mode
    • Custom reporting
    • Easy-to-use dashboards
    • Scalable SaaS infrastructure
    • Built-in troubleshooting & remediation actions
    • Remote assist
    • Custom script actions
    • Multiple scripting languages
    • Automation and alerting

    ControlUp Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing ControlUp. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Wide range of platform options: ControlUp offers multiple platform options including Windows, macOS, Linux, and IGE, independent of device location.
    • Powerful analytics: With ControlUp, you can analyze across your entire infrastructure or you can collect detailed individual device performance.
    • Optimizes performance: The solution enables you to remediate issues and optimize performance with its support of both manual and automated actions.
    • Minimize user downtime: ControlUp helps you catch common issues that lead to workflow interruptions. Self-correcting capabilities and comprehensive early-warning systems address issues before they impact employee productivity.
    • Resolve issues faster: The solution enables you to spend less time on support calls and more time driving value via its real-time troubleshooting and remediation solutions.
    • Increased visibility of remote environments: Gain real-time visibility across your entire network and find new ways to deliver the best end-user experience possible.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the ControlUp solution.

    A Chair, IEEE Consumer Technology Society - Dallas,Texas, USA at a non-profit says, “In terms of the public cloud, ControlUp's features make us feel very secure. Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service. ControlUp offers a return-on-investment type of approach that helps us.”

    A VP Virtualisation and Citrix Engineer at BlackRock mentions, “Solve is quickly becoming one of the most-used features. Its interface allows us to connect to all 54,000 monitored endpoints in real-time. The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities. Combined with the triggers, we have been growing their usage to fix things before they become an issue. Lastly, the controller view allows us to compare the configurations of settings side-by-side which is extremely helpful when tracking down the RCA of an issue.”

    A Senior Citrix Remote Access Engineer at Rabobank comments, “The high-level view of the estate coupled with powerful administration tools has been great. We can see real-time performance and trends and can create triggers for common issues with associated scripts that can automate a lot of the previous manual remediation steps.”

    SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.

    SolarWinds NPM Features

    SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Increased scalability
    • Fault, performance, and availability monitoring
    • Dynamic network discovery and mapping
    • Cross-stack network data correlation
    • Customizable topology
    • Dependency-aware intelligent alerts
    • Intelligent maps
    • Automated capacity forecasting, alerting, and reporting
    • Logical and physical network monitoring
    • Monitor Azure vNet gateway visibility

    SolarWinds NPM Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Comprehensive monitoring for advanced network devices: With SolarWinds NPM, you can gain insight into the health and performance of your load balancers, Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks, firewalls, and Cisco Nexus switches.
    • Hardware health monitoring: SolarWinds NPM makes it easy for you to monitor, alert, and report on key device metrics, including power supply, fan speed, and temperature.
    • Customizable performance and availability reports: With this feature, you can choose from more than 100 templates to schedule and also generate custom network performance reports.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.

    PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “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. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."

    Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”

    A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”

    Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”


    Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”

    Sample Customers
    B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm57%
    Non Profit14%
    Energy/Utilities Company14%
    Computer Software Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Insurance Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise33%
    Buyer's Guide
    ControlUp vs. SolarWinds NPM
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about ControlUp vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    767,847 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    ControlUp is ranked 22nd in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 9 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 146 reviews. ControlUp is rated 8.8, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of ControlUp writes "Great for troubleshooting and reporting with a controller that allows for configuration comparisons". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". ControlUp is most compared with Nexthink, Goliath Performance Monitor, Liquidware Stratusphere UX, eG Enterprise and ServiceNow IT Operations Management, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and LogicMonitor. See our ControlUp vs. SolarWinds NPM report.

    See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.

    We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.