SolarWinds NPM and Kentik compete in the network monitoring and management category. Kentik appears to have the upper hand due to its advanced traffic analysis capabilities and responsive customer service.
Features: SolarWinds NPM provides robust network fault management, SNMP-based monitoring, and customizable alerts. It supports a wide range of network devices and effectively integrates with other SolarWinds tools. Kentik offers traffic analysis, network flow insights, and effective DDoS detection. It provides deep traffic visibility, essential for optimizing performance and data exploration.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM needs to address heavy resource usage, scalability in large environments, and challenges in custom metric creation. Kentik lacks actionable DDoS mitigation features and has an API complexity issue that could be simplified for ease of use.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM, mostly on-premises, allows for hybrid cloud deployment but has a learning curve for large-scale setups. Its customer service receives mixed feedback, with some users relying on community help. Kentik, being SaaS-based, is easier to deploy but less varied compared to SolarWinds. Its technical support is highly rated for responsiveness and proficiency.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM uses an element-based pricing model that can be costly but offers good ROI through improved visibility. Kentik's device-based pricing accounts for flow volume, potentially expensive but provides substantial value with its comprehensive data analysis capabilities, especially in large network environments.
In production environments, especially for service providers on IP networks and data centers, Kentik helps in reducing the time to identify and resolve issues.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
I have mostly used forums for any support needed because the setup is straightforward and the documentation is quite good.
They have monthly calls and discuss the product roadmap with us to determine what is needed.
If there is no timely response, getting a resolution is more difficult.
We had contact with SolarWinds regarding the implementation, and they were helpful.
They have good technical support.
Kentik's integration with Kubernetes makes scaling easier.
You can scale as many devices and tests as you want, but you should have a good number of credits in your accounts.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
Based on stability, I would give Kentik a nine.
In production, however, dimensioning of the underlying platforms is something to be mindful of.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
More work is required to integrate AI for troubleshooting, simplifying root cause analysis, and providing suggested solutions for network issues.
Customers have given feedback about the delayed response times from the technical team.
SolarWinds needs to upscale on observability and add full-fledged observability features, including security features.
Kentik’s pricing is competitive in the marketplace.
The pricing is good and aligns with the market target.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
The most important feature is cybersecurity.
One of the most valuable features of Kentik, especially for service providers, is its ability to visualize all the BGP peering and the status of the BGP peering platform.
Kentik is easy to use and set up.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
Kentik's AIOps Network Traffic Intelligence platform unifies network operations, performance, security, and business intelligence.
With a purpose-built big data engine delivered as public or private SaaS, Kentik captures a high-resolution view of actual network traffic data and enriches it with critical application and business data, so every network event or analysis can be tied to revenue & costs, customer & user experience, performance & risk.
SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.
SolarWinds NPM Features
SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:
SolarWinds NPM Benefits
There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
Reviews from Real Users
Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.
PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."
Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”
A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”
Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”
Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”
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