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Icinga vs SCOM vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Icinga is 3.3%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SCOM is 1.8%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, down from 5.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification
I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.
MarcMermuys - PeerSpot reviewer
Has efficient monitoring with robust integration capabilities
We use SCOM to configure different monitors using several management packs. It integrates systems like Active Directory and correlates them, and it is used for monitoring and managing systems SCOM allows integration of several systems, providing correlation between different systems such as…
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

"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"This solution has a self-healing handler where if the service is down, it is automatically restarted."
"Icinga has multiple automation and integration features. There is an API for everything and a web UI for configurations. The APIs enable you to automate tasks in Icinga. We can also use plugins to talk to the API. The Icinga Director talks to a database in the background, and you can import settings from the CMDB to all systems in Icinga."
"Icinga does the job and is fairly stable."
"The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution directs me to areas that I should look for first."
"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."
"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."
"The value of Icinga is that it has hundreds of plugins, so it's really easy to monitor pretty much anything."
"This solution allows us to standardize all of the reports for monitoring the network, so it helps a lot for auditing purposes."
"The inbuilt management pack that Microsoft provides is really helpful. I know it's a mature product, and they keep upgrading the management pack."
"The most valuable features for us are the monitoring, the health explorer, and the console."
"The most valuable feature of SCOM is the capability of using classes within your management pack development."
"It can send messages to our ticketing system."
"It is a user-friendly product that requires almost no maintenance."
"Being able to make and customize management packs and send out notifications is very valuable."
"The product’s auto-remediation feature helps with automation."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the monitoring capabilities."
"Technical support is very helpful with our upgrades."
"One of the best features is the reports feature."
"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM. We can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can use useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting. It is very helpful. Overall it was a very good experience."
"With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
 

Cons

"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."
"I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built."
"One thing that Icinga lacks is the capability to create advanced and customized dashboards within the tool itself."
"The user interface should be improved."
"It needs Trap SNMP. I saw the documentation for Zabbix, that it has its own built-in product which handles SNMP traps, and there's nothing similar in Icinga or Nagios. I think this feature is most important for me."
"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."
"The interface is a little bit cumbersome and certain actions could be simplified."
"The price could be improved."
"The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved."
"The solution should have more tools for monitoring the cloud engine versus on-premise."
"Stability and some performance issues exist and they need improvement."
"The solution can be improved by expanding to cloud usage."
"It'll help if they can provide real-time or closer to real-time monitoring."
"System Center just provided upgrade and update features for Windows clients, and Windows systems, and did not support Linux, Android, or iOS, and other operating systems. They need to provide better integration with other operating systems if they don't already."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"The console could be more user-friendly. It would be better if SolarWinds updated the user interface."
"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."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."
"The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved."
"Robustness of network element mapping tool could be better"
"The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network."
"Complex and overly detailed setup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"The solution is cheap."
"The solution is free to use."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"It's an open-source solution."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"If you have a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, then this is part of the agreement."
"The pricing is good, and it's part of their system center suite."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"We have to pay for a license and the price is fine for us."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
"SCOM is very cheap because it's included in the license for the System Center suite, which is around $8,400 per CAL."
"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"Quite highly priced"
"It's expensive and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"It is expensive."
"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."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"SolarWinds NPM is very expensive, and we pay ten thousand yearly."
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
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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
Computer Software Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Icinga?
The best thing about the solution is how it highlights errors, the issues, and what needs my attention. The solution ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?
It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to i...
What needs improvement with Icinga?
There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should b...
What do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substan...
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporti...
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 ar...
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 scalabil...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Icinga Cloud Monitoring
System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Dialog Telekom
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Auvik, SolarWinds and others in Network Monitoring Software. Updated: July 2025.
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