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Grafana Enterprise Stack vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 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

Grafana Enterprise Stack
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
14th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.8%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Muralitharan KS - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective data visualization and effortless integration with Kubernetes
Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources. It categorizes signals accurately and is easy to integrate with Kubernetes or OpenShift clusters using Helm charts. It helps administrators put in minimal effort due to its automatic data source collection capabilities.
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

"The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance, from 10 AM to 2 PM, we may experience high memory utilization. It helps us to solve these issues."
"It is truly reliable."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."
"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
"The most valuable features of Grafana for data visualization are its ability to create intuitive dashboards and its wide range of visualization options like graphs, charts, and tables."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"The dashboards are pretty good."
"A product that is well-tested and trusted in demanding situations."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization."
"I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates."
"It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network."
"It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation."
 

Cons

"The solution should include integration with Power BI."
"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved. Currently, one needs to ingest labels and timestamps for them to be connected, however, drilling down sometimes takes time."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features."
"The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market."
"Complex and overly detailed setup."
"We are looking to change away from this solution because of the documentation and the solution doesn't have enough integration in our country. The documentation is too weak."
"I would like to see integration with antivirus or other security endpoint solutions."
"Each model has different features, so clients need to purchase a separate model for SQL monitoring, database monitoring, network traffic analyzer, HTTP traffic, etc. So each feature they need is in a different model, but customers would prefer an all-in-one solution."
"SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."
"The initial setup of SolarWinds NPM is complex, and I find it challenging."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's free license."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"USD $15,000 annually for maintenance."
"It is expensive."
"The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"It is not an expensive product."
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten"
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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
Energy/Utilities Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Grafana Enterprise Stack?
The tool's most valuable feature is real-time monitoring. It helps in securing the application or the node by allowing us to monitor and manage resource consumption during peak times. For instance,...
What needs improvement with Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I believe there are some areas for improvement in the product. Something that could be better is the time series functionality. If we choose a longer time range, it averages out some of the visibil...
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I am using Grafana Enterprise Stack just for monitoring purposes. The main use case is monitoring, and Grafana Enterprise Stack gives all the historical trends, which makes it easy to understand ho...
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

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

Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Uber 2. PayPal 3. eBay 4. Sony 5. Red Hat 6. IBM 7. Cisco 8. Adobe 9. Expedia 10. Booking.com 11. Airbnb 12. LinkedIn 13. Twitter 14. Netflix 15. Spotify 16. Pinterest 17. Slack 18. GitLab 19. Docker 20. Atlassian 21. Salesforce 22. Microsoft 23. Google 24. Amazon 25. Facebook 26. Apple 27. Intel 28. Oracle 29. SAP 30. VMware 31. HP 32. Dell
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Grafana Enterprise Stack vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,164 professionals have used our research since 2012.