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Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 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

Google Cloud's operations s...
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
21st
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (26th), Log Management (31st)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 1.1%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.2%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Patel - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations
As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.
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

"Offers a valuable logging transport feature"
"Google's technical support is very good."
"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."
"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."
"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."
"We find the solution to be stable."
"I like the monitoring feature."
"This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments."
"The solution is user-friendly and has many options for customized monitoring that other tools don't have."
"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."
"The interface is user-friendly, making it easy to use."
"The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
"The SolarWinds NPM framework, upon which most of their flagship products are built, empowers a wide variety of admins and users to quickly find value in their installed products."
"It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass."
 

Cons

"The logging functionality could be better."
"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."
"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."
"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."
"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."
"The process of logging analytics can be improved"
"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."
"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."
"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."
"Time: A worldwide deployment can be confusing for dispersed users with non-local times. Each node should have a local time (with summer offset if appropriate) & each user should view & report in their local time."
"The evaluation time for the product is too short especially for large corporations."
"We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure."
"Complex and overly detailed setup."
"It would be nice if SolarWinds could have a polling engine on the site that would collect the reporting and then manage everything itself."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."
"The cost could be lower."
"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."
"We pay for SolarWinds NPM yearly. We buy it and then we renew it, but it's not subscription-based. I don't remember the value exactly, because it's my manager who manages pricing, but we pay $60,000 per year for all the solutions. Pricing will also depend on the number of devices. We have a lot of devices."
"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"Some solutions are open source and free."
"USD $15,000 annually for maintenance."
"Licenses depend on the number of devices, but all license levels come with technical support."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
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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
20%
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
6%
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?
If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analytics can be improved.
What is your primary use case for Google Stackdriver?
I use the solution for logging, defining alerts, and monitoring. Our company's Java and Python logging teams mainly use it.
What advice do you have for others considering Google Stackdriver?
The Ops Agent and logging transport feature of the solution have had a major impact on improving application performance. The solution also allows the transport of logs into log buckets, which is h...
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

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
857,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.