SolarWinds Network Device Monitor vs vRealize Network Insight comparison

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor vs. vRealize Network Insight

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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

SolarWinds Network Device M...

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

27th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

vRealize Network Insight

Ranking in Network Monitoring Software

23rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Infrastructure Monitoring (23rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of vRealize Network Insight is 0.6%, down from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Network Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Vijay Samant

Assistant Manager at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Monitor network utilization and manage bandwidth efficiently with live monitoring and reliable fault management capabilities

I use SolarWinds Network Device Monitor for monitoring network utilization, bandwidth utilization, uptime, and downtime. It also assists in incident management SolarWinds Network Device Monitor provides live monitoring capabilities, which are very useful. Its fault management capabilities are…

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NiteshKumar1

Principle consultant at Infosys

The tool's configuration is easy and artifacts are easily accessible through professional services and the web

The product is highly regarded, and many customers have been using it along with other VMware products like vSphere and VMware vCloud Usage Insight. However, recently, there's been a trend among customers, especially those using VMware for a considerable period, to explore the potential of migrating to the public cloud. The common concern among these customers is how the VMware products will perform in the public cloud environment. Migrating instances from VMware to different platforms is not easy, especially when dealing with many instances across multiple customers. Customers are keen to maintain the functionality of their existing VMware products but prefer to run them on the public cloud instead of on-premise servers. Our clients for vRealize Network Insight are enterprise businesses. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is monitoring."

"The alerting functionality in SolarWinds Network Device Monitor helps us stay informed during off-hours by sending alerts if our main links or devices are impacted, allowing us to quickly address any issues."

"Overall, I rate SolarWinds Network Device Monitor ten out of ten."

"The deployment process is quick."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"I like the mapping that you could do and the dashboards were very pretty."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is it can alert you when a device is not working."

"This product proactively tells us about issues before the users notice."

More SolarWinds Network Device Monitor pros

"Whenever we say "valuable" with respect to the network, it's more towards the security. The firewall rule issues it shows us and the recommendations that we get from vRNI are the most valuable features because they are actually making our network more secure."

"I find that the interface of most VMware products is very similar, which I consider an advantage due to its ease of use compared to other tools like Splunk."

"The solution is extremely intuitive and user-friendly. When you log in to the application you are presented with a dashboard that is very reasonable for an initial user, and you can then customize it to your specific needs. But for all the data that we've found, we've only had to go through two or three drill-downs to get into that information."

"The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable."

"The initial was straightforward. You can have it up and running in one hour."

"A lot of time is saved when you use this type of software solution for the network. We have moved systems into the new data center and the servers and systems are much faster because of the very low latency between virtual machines."

"vRNI can trace the flow of each and every packet and it is easy for us to troubleshoot all the issues that we do have with the networking. We can trace down the packet to a point where it has been dropped."

"It's very user-friendly in the sense that the querying is just regular language like you and I speak or write. You don't need to know any SQL-query type of language to be able to get what you want out of it."

More vRealize Network Insight pros

Cons

"If everything were in the package so that everything was ready to go out of the box, that would be ideal."

"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor could improve the features. We don't have the complete model for the database, and the monitoring for the database is up and down. We expect that we could monitor the blocking items on the database but we don't have that feature."

"Although I haven't explored all of the features available, I wouldn't mind if the software were made to be a bit more customizable."

"The solution should have AI-powered issue-resolving capabilities"

"The solution lacks in performance monitoring."

"The reporting feature needs improvement because we are unable to configure reports that were included during initial implementation."

"In terms of price, it could be less expensive."

"The security could always be improved."

More SolarWinds Network Device Monitor cons

"There's enough information there, especially in the visualizations, but I would love to see this in a kiosk mode, where I could have a dashboard for interested stakeholders to see and appreciate what's going on. Then, moving on to a more practical level for our Help Desk, our operations team could benefit by seeing, in real-time, a visual view of the network."

"The IT infrastructure industry is expected to evolve towards a hybrid cloud model in the next five to ten years. In this model, most of the customer's resources reside on-premise within a private cloud setup, such as VMware. Another segment operates within public cloud environments like Azure and AWS, and a portion remains in traditional data centers. There should be seamless interoperability between public and private clouds. AWS and VMware need to work together to make it possible. Whether users interact with on-premise infrastructure or configure resources in the public cloud, the user experience must be seamless."

"The solution can be improved by making it more compatible with other brands, allowing for better integration."

"I would like to see them expand the capabilities to infrastructure types other than just VMware."

"I would like to see more interoperability on the firewall and low balancer sides."

"While it's not exactly a feature, what normally happens when we are trying to look at the VM flow portion is - although Network Insight does have options to integrate a few physical switches into it - we can't really get an end-to-end flow of the network. We might be using a few switches that are not supported by Network Insight. That is where they can improve, in the support for more physical switches and network devices."

"I'd like to see better support for being able to search the hardware NetFlow data. It ingests fairly well, but you can't tell, in a lot of cases, what source the data came from. I'd like to see more support for picking specific sources. That way you could really make a compelling use case. There are also some difficulties where it can't exactly trace the path between source and destination but if you hit the reverse flow on the same search it shows the entire path."

"vRNI needs more remediation where it hooks into NSX."

More vRealize Network Insight cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Thankfully, it doesn't take a lot of manpower to install and deploy."

"SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is not an expensive solution."

"The price of the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor is good."

"I find the cost of SolarWinds Network Device Monitor reasonable for our company. Though, I'm not aware of the exact licensing cost."

"Well, we had a perpetual license and the renewal was $20 to $25,000."

"When compared with other solutions SolarWinds is more expensive."

"The enterprise license is good for the SolarWinds Network Device Monitor. However, it is expensive, they should reduce their price."

"The product is expensive."

More SolarWinds Network Device Monitor pricing and cost advice

"The solution has helped us to reduce time, increase performance, reduce costs, and even easily manage networks. We are probably seeing 10 to 20 percent labor savings because we are able to be very specific and focused on what we want to do. It ends up saving the customer money and makes us be more efficient on our cost deliveries."

"They should include the product in NSX because it's important to have it for deployment."

"Cost always has room for improvement, you could always make it cheaper. But I think it's a good value for what you pay for it."

"It reduces costs. It takes something that may be challenging and makes it more usable and visual by being able to bring in tools, seeing what their impact is, such as microsegmentation and application rationalization, and seeing it quickly."

"vRealize Network Insight is expensive."

"It's an expensive product because we have a lot of nodes."

"It has brought more money into our company."

"I rate vRealize Network Insight's pricing a seven point five out of ten."

More vRealize Network Insight pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

I rate the product's initial setup process a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one means it is a difficult phase and ten is an easy process.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

SolarWinds pricing is on the higher side, and in India, every customer is cautious about commercial aspects.

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Network Device Monitor?

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor should include automatic diagrams in its network solutions. Additionally, there is a challenge with having to add an additional polling engine after 10,000 element...

What do you like most about vRealize Network Insight?

The tool's ease of configuration and use and the availability of information and artifacts through professional services and the web are key factors that customers find valuable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for vRealize Network Insight?

Broadcom is known for increasing product prices, making them expensive compared to what people used to pay. I liken the subscription model to not truly owning what you pay for.

What needs improvement with vRealize Network Insight?

Right now, I do not see a specific area for improvement. My main concern is understanding the intentions of Broadcom, which has acquired VMware. Broadcom should improve by going back to what was wo...

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Product Reports

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor

Download SolarWinds Network Device Monitor product report

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor report

vRealize Network Insight

Download vRealize Network Insight product report

Also Known As

Network Device Monitor

Arkin

Overview

Network Device Monitor is a free tool that makes it easy to monitor the real-time performance and health of a single device on your network with a desktop dashboard that alerts you when your device is in trouble.

SolarWinds

VMware vRealize Network Insight delivers intelligent operations for software-defined networking and security. It helps customers build an optimized, highly-available and secure network infrastructure across multi-cloud environments. It accelerates micro-segmentation planning and deployment, enables visibility across virtual and physical networks and provides operational views to manage and scale VMware NSX deployments.

VMware

Sample Customers

Air Rarotonga

NTTi3, VCIX-NV, VMware Networking and Security Business Unit, Illumio, CompuNet

SolarWinds Network Device Monitor vs. vRealize Network Insight