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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
13th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
160
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Grafana Enterprise Stack is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.2%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.2%
Grafana Enterprise Stack1.1%
Other95.7%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

RM
Test Lead at Calpine Group
Efficient monitoring and alerting enhance operational insights
With Grafana Enterprise Stack, we can identify issues that New Relic cannot help with. While New Relic requires purchase and supports frontend and backend components, Grafana Enterprise Stack helps identify where issues are occurring. When we need to deep dive into issues, we use New Relic to trace transactions and determine where maximum impact occurs, whether in core size, DB side, or frontend components that slow performance. We first evaluate with Grafana Enterprise Stack, then move to New Relic if we identify performance degradation, such as DB queries taking too much time. Grafana Enterprise Stack responds to queries within 6 to 12 hours. They contact users through email immediately when available. Similarly, New Relic follows the same pattern, responding immediately when requests are raised and resolving issues promptly.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The most valuable features for us are dashboards; we can dashboard anything that we can think of, we can dashboard and measure."
"The ability to graph actual, live, or on-the-fly activity is valuable; it is an added value to work with Grafana Enterprise Stack and to display results or logs, which are huge in nature, in graphical characters."
"It is very easy to deploy and integrate with any application or infrastructure layer."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of Grafana Enterprise Stack is the dashboards."
"SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason."
"We found that it was easy to operate, and it was simple if anyone has entry-level working experience or even if someone is not experienced."
"It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation."
"The interface is user-friendly, making it easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is the vital states of the devices as it provides overall CPU and device health information."
"SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy-to-use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install."
"SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly. The product allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance."
"The connectivity of the solution is very good."
 

Cons

"The solution should include integration with Power BI."
"Grafana Enterprise Stack is complex and not easy or simple."
"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."
"Integrating AI capabilities for automated self-healing and reduced manual interventions would be valuable."
"If Grafana Enterprise Stack could display transaction queries in dashboard format similar to New Relic, it would provide more options and capabilities for users."
"In terms of what Grafana provides, it just provides the charting tools. Everything else is third-party."
"They could use more small tutorials to explain a bit about how Grafana works."
"The tool needs to show only fewer updates."
"The solution could be more secure."
"The solution's database performance could be improved."
"SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."
"The integration with video apps could be better."
"If they’re going for a “cover everything” approach, then they need to do so and enable a bit more of the "cover everything approach" within every one of the tools."
"SolarWinds NPM should be more flexible to accommodate specific customer requirements quickly."
"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."
"The price of the solution can be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I use the tool's free license."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000."
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
"We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
18%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
 

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 am trying to think about its advanced alerting features; we do not use it too much for that. We do get it to report through to our help desk system and if a threshold gets broken, then a ticket i...
What is your primary use case for Grafana Enterprise Stack?
I have switched to a different suite, focusing on customer edge solutions that are mostly Fortinet. To manage it, I use Grafana Enterprise Stack and a whole bunch of tools that we wrote ourselves. ...
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: January 2026.
880,685 professionals have used our research since 2012.