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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
25th
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 July 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Instana Infrastructure Monitoring is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.8%, down from 4.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
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 product's initial setup is easy."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"This solution offers a very good view of our network and allows us to effectively monitor performance."
"We don't have any issues with the stability of SolarWinds NPM."
"I like SolarWinds support because it's 24/7. You describe your issues, your situation and maybe two or three hours later you can discuss a solution with a technical engineer."
"The alerting and reporting capabilities of the tool are impressive"
"It's a very good tool and a very stable tool."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"The other valuable system is the DSS (decision support system). If there's a fault in the network, SolarWinds is basically capable of rectifying and resolving that problem on its own without any intervention from an IP assistant or administrator."
"A product that is well-tested and trusted in demanding situations."
 

Cons

"The product’s scalability is an area with certain limitations, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Instana Infrastructure Monitoring needs to support monitoring of the .NET framework since it is one of the areas where the solution currently has shortcomings."
"It would be nice to have a test to check if you can access a particular device via API without installing it and waiting for a poll cycle. You should have the capacity to initiate a test to see if it was reachable and get the results almost immediately."
"If they could combine everything into one product, that would be very helpful."
"The solution is not always good with new features, so it's take a long time."
"The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved."
"I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it a little bit easier to create reports or having a larger assortment of canned reports."
"SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license."
"Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product."
"Time: A worldwide deployment can be confusing for dispersed users with non-local times. Each node should have a local time (with summer offset if appropriate) & each user should view & report in their local time."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of the tool is around 130 USD per month."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"It is not an expensive product."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"USD $15,000 annually for maintenance."
"It is too expensive."
"Some solutions are open source and free."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"Licenses depend on the number of devices, but all license levels come with technical support."
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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
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

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: July 2025.
862,624 professionals have used our research since 2012.