SolarWinds NPM and Elastic Observability are competitors in the network performance and monitoring category. SolarWinds NPM appears to have the upper hand with its proactive approach to network management and a more robust support system, despite some challenges with cost and resource usage.
Features: SolarWinds NPM offers robust fault and availability management, mature SNMP-based monitoring with modular pricing, and extensive customization options. Its alerting system provides real-time network performance visibility and scalability across devices. Elastic Observability stands out for its open-source foundation, seamless integration, machine learning features, and comprehensive log and data analysis across environments.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM faces issues with resource-heavy utilization, limited network mapping, and complex licensing. Users report frequent updates causing bugs and limited browser support. Elastic Observability could improve in visualization, application performance management capabilities, and expanding machine learning integrations. Users suggest easier deployment and broader customization options.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM is mainly deployed on-premises but also supports hybrid environments. It is recognized for its 24/7 customer service, comprehensive online support resources, and a strong user community, although its support responsiveness can vary. Elastic Observability offers flexibility across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments, although its user community and support presence may be limited compared to SolarWinds NPM, which benefits from a more engaging customer support model with an active community platform.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM's pricing can be high, with costs tied to licensing tiers and additional modules, but users report a good return on investment due to its proactive network management capabilities. Elastic Observability, leveraging an open-source model, is economical for larger users, with premium features adding to costs. It generally provides competitive pricing, particularly favorable against higher-end alternatives like Dynatrace or New Relic.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
If there is no timely response, getting a resolution is more difficult.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
Elastic Observability seems to have a good scale-out capability.
What is not scalable for us is not on Elastic's side.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it.
Elastic Observability is really stable.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
For instance, if you have many error logs and want to create a rule with a custom query, such as triggering an alert for five errors in the last hour, all you need to do is open the AI bot, type this question, and it generates an Elastic query for you to use in your alert rules.
It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side.
One example is the inability to monitor very old databases with the newest version.
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
The license is reasonably priced, however, the VMs where we host the solution are extremely expensive, making the overall cost in the public cloud high.
Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not indexing huge blobs of text and trying to parse those.
Elastic Observability is cost-efficient and provides all features in the enterprise license without asset-based licensing.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
The most valuable feature is the integrated platform that allows customers to start from observability and expand into other areas like security, EDR solutions, etc.
the most valued feature of Elastic is its log analytics capabilities.
All the features that we use, such as monitoring, dashboarding, reporting, the possibility of alerting, and the way we index the data, are important.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
Elastic Observability is primarily used for monitoring login events, application performance, and infrastructure, supporting significant data volumes through features like log aggregation, centralized logging, and system metric analysis.
Elastic Observability employs Elastic APM for performance and latency analysis, significantly aiding business KPIs and technical stability. It is popular among users for system and server monitoring, capacity planning, cyber security, and managing data pipelines. With the integration of Kibana, it offers robust visualization, reporting, and incident response capabilities through rapid log searches while supporting machine learning and hybrid cloud environments.
What are Elastic Observability's key features?Companies in technology, finance, healthcare, and other industries implement Elastic Observability for tailored monitoring solutions. They find its integration with existing systems useful for maintaining operation efficiency and security, particularly valuing the visualization capabilities through Kibana to monitor KPIs and improve incident response times.
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:
SolarWinds NPM Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
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.”
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