SolarWinds NPM and Google Cloud's operations suite are two competitive solutions in the network performance monitoring and cloud operations domains. Considering the features, SolarWinds might have the upper hand in on-premises network management with its extensive features, while Google Cloud tends to excel in cloud-native environments due to its scalable infrastructure monitoring.
Features: SolarWinds NPM stands out with customizable alerts, vendor integration, and modular pricing allowing users to purchase only necessary features. Its extensive on-premises solutions are favored for managing in-house infrastructure. Meanwhile, Google Cloud's operations suite provides seamless integration with Google services, effective cloud monitoring capabilities, and scalability that benefit cloud-native operations without hindrance.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM struggles with network discovery, topology mapping, and managing alerts across diverse devices, highlighting the need for better automation and integration capabilities. Google Cloud's suite faces challenges with detailed request-level analytics, complex cost tracking, and a need for improved profiling capabilities.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM is strong in hybrid environments and is appreciated for its on-premises management capabilities. It receives generally favorable customer service feedback, though with suggestions for better response times. Alternatively, Google Cloud's operations suite offers smooth deployment in public cloud landscapes and good integration with cloud services. Its technical support is praised, yet sometimes noted for slow responsiveness in non-critical situations.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM's pricing can be high, especially for additional modules, but its ROI is seen positively due to its comprehensive features and effective infrastructure insights. Google Cloud's operations suite offers a flexible, usage-based pricing model that is cost-effective for cloud operations, though it has faced issues with unexpected billing. SolarWinds remains strong in providing immediate infrastructure insights, while Google Cloud offers managed services at lower costs.
Real-time log management and analysis
Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud. Get advanced performance, troubleshooting, security, and business insights with Log Analytics, integrating the power of BigQuery into Cloud Logging.
Built-in metrics observability at scale
Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. Visualize this data on charts and dashboards and create alerts so you are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.
Stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus
Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. Keep your existing visualization, analysis, and alerting services, as this data can be queried with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring.
Monitor and improve your application's performance
Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler to help you reduce latency and cost so you can run more efficient applications.
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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