ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs WhatsUp Gold comparison

ServiceNow and Progress Software are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. ServiceNow is ranked #39 with an average rating of 8.0, while Progress Software is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.7. ServiceNow holds a 0.7% mindshare in APM, compared to Progress Software’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 85% of Progress Software users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Read 4 ServiceNow Cloud Observability reviews

1,253 Views
1,203 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

WhatsUp Gold

Read 25 WhatsUp Gold reviews

6,518 Views
1,760 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

WhatsUp Gold

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

WhatsUp Gold and ServiceNow Cloud Observability are leading tools in the monitoring and observability space. WhatsUp Gold seems to have the upper hand for its user-friendly implementation, whereas ServiceNow Cloud Observability is favored for its extensive feature set.

Features: WhatsUp Gold has intuitive network mapping, robust reporting capabilities, and straightforward setup. ServiceNow Cloud Observability is strong in integrating with other ServiceNow applications, offering advanced analytics, and providing comprehensive support documentation.

Room for Improvement: WhatsUp Gold needs enhanced alerting mechanisms, better integration capabilities, and a more advanced feature set. ServiceNow Cloud Observability requires an easier learning curve, optimized performance for large-scale deployments, and simplified complexity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: WhatsUp Gold is praised for its straightforward setup process and responsive customer support. ServiceNow Cloud Observability presents a steeper learning curve but benefits from comprehensive support documentation and extensive resources.

Pricing and ROI: WhatsUp Gold is cost-effective with quicker return on investment due to lower setup costs and shorter implementation times. ServiceNow Cloud Observability involves higher initial costs but offers long-term benefits and extensive capabilities, justifying the investment.

To learn more, read our detailed ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. WhatsUp Gold Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. WhatsUp Gold

March 2026

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Helped 885,376 peers since 2012

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

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

39th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

WhatsUp Gold

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

26th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (24th), Server Monitoring (15th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (19th), Configuration Management (20th), Log Management (35th), Cloud Monitoring Software (21st), Network Traffic Analysis (NTA) (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of ServiceNow Cloud Observability is 0.7%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of WhatsUp Gold is 1.2%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
WhatsUp Gold	1.2%
ServiceNow Cloud Observability	0.7%
Other	98.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

VinayKumar16

Senior DeliveryManager at ITC Infotech

Provides ease of use in areas like analytics and reporting

The feature of the tool that is more impactful for cloud performance stems from the area revolving around analytics and reporting. It is an easy-to-use tool. There is something known as performance analytics within ServiceNow that offers complete analytics, which offers end-to-end analytics along with the KPI metrics with what we have in place and so on. With the aforementioned aspects of the tool, I think we should be able to create a dashboard according to the operations view called the operation dashboard view, specifically for C-level executives.

Read full review

Erik Cheng

Technical Manager at Quan Hung Gourmet

Efficient monitoring with detailed customization, yet complexity remains

The best feature of WhatsUp Gold is the automatic generation of topology and its integration with virtualization and wireless. I have used the automated device discovery with this topology feature. The interactive map feature helps me manage the topology because sometimes we cannot draw the topology correctly, so we need to manually edit the connections. The alerting system is very tunable and customizable, but it's a little complicated to use. Many customers cannot manage it by themselves and need support from us, the provider. We always use the dashboards in the SOC, where we constantly display a dashboard or multiple dashboards. This allows us to know immediately if the connection or bandwidth is full or if the connection is broken.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"To a certain extent, it is possible to save on the costs of the product."

"The solution Lightstep/ServiceNow has a couple of pretty advanced functionalities to help us investigate a deviation and help the development teams have better observability in the environment using distributed and complex services."

"The ability to create a stream based on different parameters, operation name, service name, URL, tags, and URI part, is one valuable feature."

"The UI is very intuitive."

"The most valuable features are network bandwidth monitoring and monitoring device health."

"The new version has a lot of improved features."

"This is a good, stable network monitoring solution for devices."

"It is very good at monitoring the network and keeps us up to date on the status of internal devices."

"We primarily use the solution to check the state of the network, monitoring thousands of devices and all of the internal network, and it is the first tool we use to see the state of the network for real-time monitoring."

"Auto scanning is most valuable. It looks for rogue devices on your network."

"The visual map and email alerts are very useful to have in real time so we always know the state of our network."

"The tool's most valuable feature is the visibility it offers of everything in the network and infrastructure."

More WhatsUp Gold pros

Cons

"The support team could be better. Because of the different versions of different tactics of integrating reactive code base, the documentation is not very clear if someone has to be onboard. I would rate the documentation of Lightstep a five out of ten. It could need improvement."

"The design of this solution is not very intuitive and probably could come with more friendly tips for beginners."

"The dashboard and graphics must be improved."

"In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs."

"The new release cadence needs to be improved. It takes a while for them to add new features and functionality."

"One of the biggest things that made us start to look at another product is we're not able to have an end to end monitoring from a user perspective throughout the system and back to the user. All the monitoring is from inside out, we need something that also can give us from outside in."

"Integrations with other devices. I want to have a product that has full integration with my active directory so I can track user activity."

"Integrations with other devices. I want to have a product that has full integration with my active directory so I can track user activity. I want to track my complete user activity, so I'm looking for a product to implement in the near future, which will have full integration with my network and active directory users. It became very difficult to track user activity."

"Importing the maps and being able to customize them could be easier."

"The point system is not clear and clarity around this would improve our understanding of the system."

"Setting up WhatsUp Gold is complicated and not easy because it requires managing SNMP and many complex settings in the devices it's monitoring, and fine-tuning it to fit our needs is also not very easy."

"One of the biggest things that made us start to look at another product is we're not able to have an end to end monitoring from a user perspective throughout the system and back to the user."

More WhatsUp Gold cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive. I rate the tool's pricing model an eight out of ten."

"The pricing can be on the expensive side when considering competing products."

"This is a well priced solution."

"There is a license needed to use WhatsUp Gold."

"The tool's price is reasonable. WhatsUp Gold is cheaper than SolarWinds."

"The choice of version depends on the number of points, or devices, that you want to monitor, and this makes the product expensive."

"There are some subscription charges that are quite heavy. I need to pay for support every year and these charges can be quite expensive. Aside from the initial cost for the tool, you need to pay additionally for support."

"It is per device, per year. The pricing is very clear. If you have a service agreement, you get all of your major upgrades and minor upgrades. It was under $10,000 to go all-in with all of the different add-ons for it."

"The most valuable feature is the cost compared to other solutions."

More WhatsUp Gold pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Construction Company

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

10%

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	14

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with LightStep?

There are a lot of workflows and connectors. In terms of licensing, users would want the product to offer them the ability to tailor the tasks offered in the solution to suit their needs.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for LightStep?

I use the solution in my company since it has multiple tenants available. Basically, what happens in business is that you have a hybrid setup model, and for that, you extensively use a cloud platfo...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering LightStep?

I recommend the product to others. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

See all answers

What do you like most about WhatsUp Gold?

The interactive mapping interface for scrolling, zooming, and drilling down on an element to learn about a network issue is good. When we see a network there will sometimes be a spot that has one l...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for WhatsUp Gold?

Clients find the licensing calculator confusing, but we simplify this for them by collecting relevant information first. The licensing is based on devices, providing better cost-effectiveness than ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with WhatsUp Gold?

It would be great if WhatsUp Gold could add features that simplify management with AI, as it is currently too complicated to manage.

See all answers

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 4% of the time

ScienceLogic vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 3% of the time

NinjaOne vs WhatsUp Gold

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Cloud Observability

March 2026

Download ServiceNow Cloud Observability product report

Buyer's Guide

WhatsUp Gold

March 2026

Download WhatsUp Gold product report

Also Known As

LightStep

No data available

Overview

ServiceNow Cloud Observability is a comprehensive platform designed to enhance visibility, control, and performance monitoring of your IT infrastructure and applications. It seamlessly integrates log management, trace management, metrics monitoring, and infrastructure monitoring in real-time, leveraging AI and machine learning for automated tasks and actionable insights. With benefits including improved visibility, faster incident resolution, enhanced application performance, simplified IT operations, and reduced costs, this cloud-native solution is ideal for businesses of all sizes with complex IT infrastructures. It integrates seamlessly with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM), supports OpenTelemetry standards, and provides AI-powered insights along with pre-built dashboards and reports.

ServiceNow

Explore and manage your entire network infrastructure effortlessly with WhatsUp Gold's robust layer 2/3 discovery, creating a detailed interactive map from the edge to the cloud. Monitor devices, wireless controllers, servers, virtual machines, applications, and traffic flows across various environments. Real-time alerts ensure optimal performance, allowing you to meet or exceed SLAs. The platform offers customizable maps, dashboards, and alerts for easy network management. Quickly resolve issues with intuitive workflows, reducing Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR). WhatsUp Gold's integrated log management provides easy visibility and control of device log data, allowing monitoring, filtering, searching, and alerting on syslogs or Windows logs. Archive logs to comply with regulatory requirements and preserve historical data, all through a user-friendly interface. Streamline network monitoring and issue resolution with WhatsUp Gold, making network management efficient and hassle-free.

Progress Software

Sample Customers

InVision, Twilio, Lyft, Yext, DigitalOcean,

Artoni Trasporti, Austin Independent School District, Banca Marche, Burke County North Carolina, Cambridge University School of Clinical Medicine, Clayco, Community Integrated Care, Desca, Deutsche Bergbau, Flexi-Van, Gropper, Hamleys, Hammonds Furniture, Knowledge IT, Idras S.P.A., Sibeg, Swann Engineering, Trivium Lindenhof

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. WhatsUp Gold

March 2026

Free Report: ServiceNow Cloud Observability vs. WhatsUp Gold

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