We performed a comparison between Kentik and SolarWinds NPM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in Network Monitoring Software."We can manage the entire system across the network and troubleshoot the pain points."
"We're pretty happy with the API functionality. It's web, and it's very simple to set up queries. It has served us well and you don't need to be an expert on the API or the product to set these things up."
"I am able to do a lot of work on the visualization end to create different visualizations and different ways to get information out of it."
"We're also using Kentik to ingest metrics. It's a useful feature, and its response time, whenever we're pulling back the data, is higher than our on-prem solution."
"I really love the Data Explorer. I use it all the time to go in and craft exactly what I need to see. I'm able to then take that story and explain it to the executives. I've done that a couple of times and it is helpful."
"The drill-down into detailed views of network activity helps to quickly pinpoint locations and causes. All the information is there."
"In terms of the solution’s real-time visibility across our network infrastructure, I have not been able to find any other monitoring or netflow visualization tool that gives me the kind of information I get from Kentik. If I need to take a deep-dive into something that I see, it's really easy for me to do that. Whereas with most other things, I have to use five or six other tools to get that kind of data, with Kentik, I have it all in one place."
"Having the API access allows us to do a great deal of automation around a lot of our reporting and management tools."
"The most valuable feature is being able to pull traffic patterns; to and from destinations. We're able to understand where our traffic is going, our top talkers from an AS set, as well as where our traffic's coming from."
"We had some interfaces where the SFP Ports were having some problems after a while. We found which of the SFP Ports was having the error and changed it, so the bandwidth become okay."
"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."
"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 covers everything from end to end, from the standpoint of endpoint machines and the routers and switches. The switch port also comes there."
"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."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"This solution offers a very good view of our network and allows us to effectively monitor performance."
"It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation."
"The Wi-Fi side needs improvement."
"I would like to see them explore the area of cost analysis."
"There is room for improvement around the usability of the API. It's a hugely complex task to call it and you need a lot of backing to be able to do it. I should say, as someone who's not in networking, maybe it's easier for people who are in networking, but for me that one part is not very user-friendly."
"We asked for a way, regarding the potential networks that exist, to hook Kentik up with external tools like peering DBs to correlate things together and see what we can do... This is all in the [next] beta now."
"The only downside to Kentik, something that I don't like, is that it's great that it shows you where these anomalies lie, but it's not actionable. Kentik is valuable, don't get me wrong, but if it had an actionable piece to it..."
"I believe they're already working on this, but I would love for them to create better integrations from network flow data to application performance — tracing — so that we could overlay that data more readily. With more companies going hybrid, flow logs and flow data, whether it be VPC or on-prem, matched with application performance and trace data, is pretty important."
"I consider the pricing model as an area for improvement."
"They're moving more in a direction where they are saying, "Hey, here's information that you may be interested in or may a need," before the question has to explicitly be asked. Continuing to move in that direction would be a good thing."
"I've checked out the V4 version of the interface and it's still a little bit clunky for me to use. I still go back to the old interface. That's definitely one that they still need to work on. It doesn't seem like everything that you get in the V3, the older interface, is there. For instance, I was trying to add a user or do the administrative tasks in V4, and I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to do that."
"The solution could be more secure."
"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."
"It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. The performance is slow."
"The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work."
"There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country."
"SolarWinds could offer more support and insights for a broader range of devices. Currently, it focuses on routers, switches, and some load balancers. However, it lacks an out-of-the-box dashboard for monitoring firewalls and some other modern network security devices. We have to customize it a lot."
"It would be good to have high security."
"A feature I would ask for is for them to have this solution available for Linux systems instead of Windows."
Kentik is ranked 46th in Network Monitoring Software with 12 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 146 reviews. Kentik is rated 9.2, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Kentik writes " Flexibility for creating reports and gaining more visibility is a definite strength". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". Kentik is most compared with ThousandEyes, Arbor DDoS, NETSCOUT nGeniusONE, Datadog and Cloudflare, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and LogicMonitor.
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