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NetBrain vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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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:
 

Categories and Ranking

NetBrain
Average Rating
7.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
Network Troubleshooting (18th), Network Automation (6th)
SolarWinds NPM
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (7th), Cloud Monitoring Software (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Network Management solutions, they serve different purposes. NetBrain is designed for Network Troubleshooting and holds a mindshare of 3.3%, up 2.8% compared to last year.
SolarWinds NPM, on the other hand, focuses on Network Monitoring Software, holds 3.7% mindshare, down 4.4% since last year.
Network Troubleshooting Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
NetBrain3.3%
Wireshark18.8%
AirMagnet Survey PRO8.5%
Other69.4%
Network Troubleshooting
Network Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.7%
Zabbix3.7%
NETSCOUT nGeniusONE2.9%
Other89.7%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Deborah Gamelin - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President at Asset Track for Cloud, LLC
Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility
In my organization, we had 130,000 network devices that needed to be brought into the solution and mapped. NetBrain can handle the scale but the engineers that manage those devices have to go in and update all of them to allow NetBrain permission to poll them. It can get a little stressful for everybody when you're trying to roll out new stuff when you've got other issues that have to be addressed with other devices. In some cases, our devices had no automation at all. One example is the Cisco 3650. Right now, if you went through the inventory list, you see that we have different versions running. Some are on one version, whereas others are on another version. The problem with upgrading them is that they need to be done overnight because we don't want to disrupt any network traffic during business hours. Consequently, it could take us years to upgrade the versions before we can even get them onto these new tools. This may be an internal issue but it's a big one when you have a lot of devices. Even if you had 10,000 devices, it's still an issue. You have to consider the compatibility of the device against the tool, and being able to use certain commands to upgrade it.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions."
"NetBrain is a very simple tool."
"NetBrain is very good when it comes to network mapping, as it looks for different assets within the network available, so router, firewall, applications, et cetera, and it gives you the full mapping, asset mapping along with the full range including the firmware software update and all those things."
"NetBrain is faster, better and level sets the engineering technical sets."
"Once it's up and running and you don't have the strange requirements I had, and you just want some basic maps, it'll work."
"This tool is exactly what we wanted and needed."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that you can click once and have a link test, see your network, and get an overall view of your network and its state."
"The ability to customize the views and dashboards is nice, and SolarWinds also allows us to access the data via the API, which is probably the feature I liked the most."
"Performance history is the most valuable feature, especially when tracking down a problem."
"Everything has been complete and stable for our needs over the past four years."
"The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well."
"So far, there hasn't been anything that it hasn't been able to do for us."
"SolarWinds NPM has helped our organization by providing a proactive approach to understanding the current trends in the environment, utilization of the resources, and providing inventory reports of the environment."
"We switched back to SolarWinds because of ease of use."
"Whether you want basic enterprise network monitoring or a full suite of network diagnostic tools and monitors, I recommend Orion 9 for its full feature set and ease of use."
 

Cons

"Netbrain must get AWS functionality done."
"Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network."
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging."
"The pricing needs to be improved."
"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"If you're comparing NetBrain as an NDR, I would rate it as a four or five, however, NetBrain has a different aspect of looking at things within the network."
"It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities."
"The IP interface brief isn't consistent."
"SolarWinds NPM should be more flexible to accommodate specific customer requirements quickly."
"There isn't a great deal of flexibility to create custom metrics that can be discovered easily or custom aggregation schemes."
"Technical support and releases are not particularly reliable."
"The SolarWinds notification and alerting configuration could be simplified as it would be easier to find if it was within the NPM web application instead of in a separate client application."
"Going through the wizard to create these new pollers is quite cumbersome if you don't understand what you're doing."
"Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it."
"NPM comes with a tool called Network Atlas. Currently, it can only link switches to switches and only if all the corresponding ports are monitored."
"Back in the early days and new major releases, of course, there were some hiccups and gotchas."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
"The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"We pay approximately $700 per year for renewal of the license."
"I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
"Price could be improved on"
"It is not an expensive product."
"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten"
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
6%
Outsourcing Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Construction Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business60
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise87
 

Questions from the Community

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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

CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
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