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Instana Infrastructure Monitoring 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

Instana Infrastructure Moni...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
37th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
24th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.9%, up 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 NPM3.9%
Instana Infrastructure Monitoring0.5%
Other95.6%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Hakimuddin Ronaque - PeerSpot reviewer
Has the capability to automatically integrate with a large number of products
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten. I have not worked much on other technologies, like SAP or VMware's virtualization part, on-prem infrastructure, or cloud infrastructure. Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is so fast and easy to adapt that it works fine. I have not explored other operating systems or infrastructure solutions because my company doesn't have that customer scale. Most of our customers are on-prem or on AWS or Azure, but Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to their infrastructure very well. My company came to know how well Instana Infrastructure Monitoring adapts to our customers' infrastructures when we take care of the PoC phase. Around 12 to 15 people in my company use the product.
Tochukwu Uzomba - PeerSpot reviewer
Rich modular monitoring capabilities offer tailored monitoring needs with good support
SolarWinds NPM is used for monitoring different solutions like database, infrastructure, and network performance. Each of these requires separate solutions, and SolarWinds provides modular options for monitoring Based on my experiences, SolarWinds NPM can handle large network infrastructures…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product's initial setup is easy."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"Everything has been complete and stable for our needs over the past four years."
"Provides a good level of tools and covers essential components."
"The people in technical support are very good."
"You can monitor performance counters effortlessly."
"The set up was very easy. We didn't have any problems with the setup. The deployment took less than an hour."
"SolarWinds is user-friendly with a manageable console."
"SolarWinds is reasonably priced."
"The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable."
 

Cons

"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."
"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"The price could be better."
"Technical support and releases are not particularly reliable."
"The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like."
"SolarWinds NPM offers limited customization options. Users and developers may find restrictions in modifying or customizing the dashboard and adjusting monitoring features such as polling intervals or SLAs for different nodes."
"The reporting module that got integrated into the system itself, used to be a standalone solution and I preferred that."
"The aesthetic widgets should be dynamic widgets, so the customization can be even more customizable."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten"
"It is not an expensive product."
"The licensing is based on the number of nodes, interfaces, and volumes."
"I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
"The cost is based on the number of nodes, so it is expensive when you have a lot of them."
"The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
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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
14%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise84
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required.
What is your primary use case for Instana Infrastructure Monitoring?
I use the solution in my company, especially if an application is down and it is considered to be a P1 issue or a critical issue. The network team will blame the application team, while the applica...
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

booxware, drivenow, scopevisio, enevo, TimoCom, mobitech
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Instana Infrastructure Monitoring vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.