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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
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
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.9%, down from 4.3% 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.
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 dashboards are pretty good."
"Grafana's full observability stack, known as LGTM, is highly valuable."
"Our productivity has improved with its use."
"Grafana's most valuable feature is its ability to provide a graphical representation of data collected from various sources."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the 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 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 has enough features around dashboard management. It's got enough plugins to create your dashboards."
"The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."
"The most valuable feature is the graphical user interface."
"For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the alerts."
"We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM."
"I like that SolarWinds NPM is a strong tool for monitoring network devices, switches, and routers. It's also a user-friendly tool. My team also likes how scalable it is."
"Technical support is very helpful with our upgrades."
"The ability to customize the views and dashboards is nice. SolarWinds also allows us to access the data via the API. That's probably the feature I liked the most."
 

Cons

"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."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"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."
"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."
"I have encountered occasional issues with false inputs or incorrect data in Grafana."
"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."
"I would like to see integration with antivirus or other security endpoint solutions."
"The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved."
"The only real caveat that we have or that I have an issue with is when I go on vacation, it's a little hard for me to go and modify alerts so that I don't get alerted about things when I'm on vacation."
"There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country."
"The scalability can be better."
"The tool can only monitor up to 1000 instances in a single SolarWinds console. Customers may have over 1000 instances. Hence, it needs to support a minimum of 1500 instances. It should also improve support."
"My team has had a lot of issues with support."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's free license."
"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."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"I find that the pricing is acceptable."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"Price could be improved on"
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"Most of the licenses are perpetual, and the annual maintenance charges are not high."
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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
15%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

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: June 2025.
857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.