Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
25th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.8%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.9%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Gregory Diana - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers very good charting capabilities and capable of automatically generating dashboards, even for a large number of data points
In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party. It's like Node-RED. Node-RED is free, and you can choose an application, but that application depends on the person who's supporting it. If they decide not to support it, then you're stuck. However, I believe that it can't be improved or changed because people have to make money and make a living from it. Nothing will ever be changed. It depends on the software. Same as Windward. Windward just decided it could not support a large number of customers, so it focused on high-income, low-volume clients. Whereas Node-RED has millions of followers and fantastic support, the same as Grafana. Grafana is partly free, but it's your problem. That's how all these companies work. If you're big and you pay a lot of money, they'll pay attention to you.
MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The dashboards are pretty good."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"Grafana has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
"It is truly reliable."
"Our productivity has improved with its use."
"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."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"The people in technical support are very good."
"I found a lot of valuable features in SolarWinds NPM, such as the customized application monitoring that allows you to customize any monitoring and script customization, and you also have the option to deploy and upgrade SolarWinds NPM online, which is very useful for my organization."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We deployed the solution from new and completed the upgrades."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the alerts."
"It covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
"This has helped us to monitor the availability of our routers, switches, servers, and virtual environments."
"The most valuable features of SolarWinds NPM are network performance monitoring and the overall benefit for servers."
 

Cons

"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"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."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"The connection between metrics, logs, and traces could be improved."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"The solution should include integration with Power BI."
"I find Grafana really hard to configure. It's difficult to build the dashboard, and it's non-intuitive. In my opinion, it's very difficult to work with Grafana."
"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."
"The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved."
"SolarWinds needs to be improved such that it is on par with the leading products in the market."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility."
"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."
"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."
"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 product could improve by adding cloud monitoring. I want SolarWinds NPM to do much more integration, and have more involvement in cloud monitoring, like AWS or Google, or Azure. I feel like it requires lots of improvement for cloud monitoring in NPM."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's free license."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
"Price could be improved on"
"It is not an expensive product."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market."
"I find that the pricing is acceptable."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

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
16%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Educational Organization
54%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

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?
From an analytics perspective, the integration of AI would be a beneficial improvement for Grafana Enterprise Stack.
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
Our primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack includes monitoring cluster utilization, taking care of impact avoidance, conducting upgrades, ensuring storage memory does not become full, and id...
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: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.