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DX Spectrum vs Scout APM vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

DX NetOps Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
DX Spectrum26.7%
DX Performance Management32.8%
AppNeta by Broadcom31.9%
Other8.599999999999994%
DX NetOps
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Scout APM0.5%
Dynatrace6.3%
Datadog5.3%
Other87.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.4%
Zabbix5.7%
PRTG Network Monitor3.3%
Other87.6%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

ON
Solution Architect at SA Consulting
Provides proactive network monitoring and effective fault detection for large-scale environments
I would like to see improvements in making the interface more user-friendly. Many people find it not simple to use. One of the common customer complaints is about the alarm notifications. Currently, they appear as pop-up messages, but I would prefer having alarm messages shown as a scrolling bar at the taskbar for easier visibility.
Antonio_Barros - PeerSpot reviewer
Regional Manager LatAm at Splunk
Great visibility and reliability with fair pricing
The solution is stable. It's pretty easy to set up, especially if you have the knowledge base and/or you have a partner assist you. The product can scale. The processes are great. It helps with services and microservices. The product is great for man different industries, including energy, government, finance, and more.
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

"It helps our NetOps group actually handle alarms in a way that lets them see the bigger picture of those alarms, and how they might affect our services. It helps us communicate information about the network state better to services that might be impacted by a specific network condition."
"The most valuable features of DX Spectrum are the comprehensive alerts."
"It is easy to navigate."
"I have found the cross analysis feature to be the most valuable."
"The containerization of different objects was very helpful in building an org structure. Being able to separately manage your MSP clients with separate visibility was also helpful."
"Offers a lot of functionality."
"It does correlation so instead of producing 20 alarms if a site goes down, it only creates one."
"We were able to standardize the internal processes across all internal departments, resulting in almost an elimination of non-standard process flows through our organization."
"The product can scale."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices."
"I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable."
"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"Reporting tools are a great feature along with the ability to create customized reports for you"
"SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy-to-use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install."
"It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass."
 

Cons

"It doesn't really allow for multi-tenancy. If you're an ISP or an MSP and you want to use this tool to provide these types of fault management services to your customers, you would need a separate SpectroSERVER for each customer..."
"If they could interact with the MIBs of vendors better, and have a lot more pre-loaded ones, that would be amazing for us right now."
"We have a lot of different monitoring tools in the background, so orchestration has been a little bit of a challenge."
"The solution could improve by allowing the ability to monitor the network shortly after installing the software and adding an auto-discovery function."
"Integration with some other tools, and integration with some Network Packet Broker, need some improvement."
"If the integration is simplified or improved, it will be a unique selling point in comparison to the competition on the market."
"I would like to see better scalability, and maybe, a more intuitive user interface. ​"
"The platform is complicated to use."
"I can't recall coming across any missing features."
"It would be beneficial if NPM offered support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as currently, it does not support this and we are migrating our services there."
"This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"We'd like to see a bit more automation in the future."
"Technical support can be slow to respond."
"They don't have a local support team."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It’s a great tool, but an expensive one. Learn how to use it properly."
"DX Spectrum's pricing is neither expensive nor cheap."
"The price is good enough to expect an ideal solution. It's expensive."
"The solution's pricing could be better."
"It is very pricey. With the current trend of enterprises moving towards cheaper and more modern looking solutions like ManageEngine, SevOne, ServicePilot, and Paesller."
"The product, support, and maintenance are all expensive, which is another reason that we are switching to another solution."
"It is expensive compared to other tools in the market."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
Information not available
"I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
"Licenses depend on the number of devices, but all license levels come with technical support."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"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."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
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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
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Marketing Services Firm
6%
No data available
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise19
Large Enterprise89
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about DX Spectrum?
The solution's most valuable features are its integration with Broadcom tools and scalability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Spectrum?
The price of DX Spectrum is not competitive when compared to other solutions, such as SolarWinds. The high price has ...
What needs improvement with DX Spectrum?
I would like to see improvements in making the interface more user-friendly. Many people find it not simple to use. O...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
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 ar...
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 scalabil...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

CA Spectrum
No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

National Informatics Centre India, Banese, Olympus, AlphaServe Technologies, Sicredi
Chargify, Synctree, Aptuitiv, Barnes and Noble, Journey, Geosnapshot, Kongregate, PaperTrail, Adobe, SendGrid, Sentry
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about DX Performance Management vs. DX Spectrum and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,757 professionals have used our research since 2012.