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DX Performance Management vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 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

DX Performance Management
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
57th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
32
Ranking in other categories
Infrastructure Capacity Planning (2nd), DX NetOps (2nd)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of DX Performance Management is 0.2%, down from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.5%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Sandip Kheni - PeerSpot reviewer
The vertical database loads faster than any other product available
We experience disconnections between the solutions own components. In the last five years, there have been many intermittent connection issues with the four components and we still don't know the reasons. The solution has issues when loading groups that have been created in the application interfaces. It would be nice to have a mobile application. In the current industry and technical word, the mobile phone is the only thing that is always in your hands. Other Broadcom products have mobile applications but the solution doesn't offer one. It would be great to view device parameters and view or download graphs from a mobile device.
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

"One feature I like about CA Performance Management is the certification of the devices."
"Scalability is the reason we bought the product to begin with. It was designed from the ground up for carrier-grade services, and we are in effect a MSP ourselves. So we were really interested in looking at something to be able to handle the multi-tenancy and scale as large as possible. This was the only solution that we really considered at that level."
"It is very easy to add devices; just be aware that it requires SNMP to be enabled."
"When we deployed it, right out of the box we were able to stand up Performance Management within two weeks, in our production environment, with full discovery and relevant information, actual information, that we could use in our command center, our 24/7 operations center."
"You can have thousands of devices inside and hundreds of thousands of interphases without a problem."
"I can get it to run a report showing, for instance, what root drives are in the critical range in terms of being full, like 90 percent full, and disseminate that information to the other areas of the organization."
"It gave us one location, one place to do all of group administration, and to build dashboards, and device administration, inventory counts... it really reduced our overall administrative overhead."
"​When devices are having performance issues, it proactively build dashboards which allow us to go and do health checks, and resolve problems before they become an issue.​"
"Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disc space statistics from servers and determine how much was free or used on various volumes."
"SolarWinds is user-friendly with a manageable console."
"The alerting system in SolarWinds NPM aids in proactive network management."
"Network performance is the main issue clients are facing. SolarWinds checks if a node is down, and we can set thresholds for performance metrics. For example, we set it up to get an alert automatically if a value is over 80 percent. It has a full dashboard that covers CP, hard disk, and node monitoring."
"SolarWinds is user-friendly with a manageable console."
"From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization."
"The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well."
"I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful if CA provided online training for its customers."
"Even though we can see when something is not available, it would also be it would be nice if some sort of alerting took place to that you could know immediately if something went down."
"Spectrum's topology view sometimes does not rebuild automatically when a device is shut down and reconnected."
"There are some areas in the technology right now, like with VMs, where we are lacking with our abilities to get inside the VM to monitor traffic within the machine."
"It seems like we escalate more than I would like to. If anything, they should look at how the tier support goes in place."
"The quantity of views which are tied to specific metric families is too high. Also, the problem is the view doesn't tell you which metric family it uses, so you don't know why you don't see data."
"We would like to be capable of reporting network performance with a report strictly focused on the times outside business hours, which CA PM does not currently support. We have discontinued the use of the Business Hours Filtering until CA engineers are able to resolve or offer guidance."
"For CA PM, there should be a way of easily migrating the reports coming from eHealth going to CA Performance Center, since CA PC is replacing eHealth."
"SolarWinds NPM can be very slow at times. The database optimization can be done to improve the product performance."
"My team has had a lot of issues with support."
"GUI needs improvement with a more graphical dashboard."
"I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility."
"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."
"Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product."
"If they did some type of synthetic monitoring, it would have been better."
"Technical support can be slow to respond."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We purchase a license to use the solution every three years and we have multiple contracts. They have been increasing the price annually. We have a baseline for three years and then we need to pay the difference from the baseline, and we are in the process of negotiating a new price for all the licenses we need. The price overall is affordable."
"They should provide more scalable licensing for the product."
"I like the licensing model because it's device-based."
"We were looking at other vendors in the marketplace for NetFlow, and CA just beat everybody else in price, cost, and the size to implement. ​"
"The tool's pricing is based on the number of network devices."
"Do your homework and know how many devices you will be managing out of the gate. Be sure to project what your growth will be each year."
"It is too expensive."
"The licensing is based on the number of nodes, interfaces, and volumes."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
"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 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."
"Quite highly priced"
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"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."
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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
19%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Computer Software Company
12%
Educational Organization
7%
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
9%
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 DX Performance Management?
The tool helps us understand network performance.
What needs improvement with DX Performance Management?
Spectrum's topology view sometimes does not rebuild automatically when a device is shut down and reconnected. It requires manual discovery and rebuilding of the topology, which I hope can be improved.
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 Performance Management
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Jack Henry & Assoc, Target, CenturyLink, Bell Canada, BrightHouse Networks, Telus, Unisys, Verizon, Southern California Edison, GEICO, Fidelity Investments, Wells Fargo, American Family Insurance Group, Deutsche Telekom AG 
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Performance Management vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
859,579 professionals have used our research since 2012.