SolarWinds NPM and ThousandEyes compete in network performance and monitoring solutions. While SolarWinds NPM offers a broader range of traditional network features, ThousandEyes provides superior visibility for cloud and ISP dependencies.
Features: SolarWinds NPM offers modular pricing, extensive SNMP-based monitoring, and a strong alert system. It supports multiple vendors and customizable dashboards with integration options across SolarWinds modules. ThousandEyes provides end-to-end monitoring, detailed insights into network paths, and it addresses complex cloud environments.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM could improve automation for node additions and integrations, and offer a more unified interface. It also faces performance criticism with large data sets. ThousandEyes could expand application monitoring capabilities, increase integration options with Cisco and third-party tools, and enhance customization and user interfaces.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM is typically deployed on-premises, with hybrid cloud setups sometimes complicating deployments. It gets mixed reviews for technical support, which is knowledgeable but occasionally slow. ThousandEyes emphasizes simplicity in on-premises and hybrid cloud setup, receiving praise for technical expertise but has slower response times for non-critical tickets.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM has competitive pricing but can become expensive with additional modules, providing good ROI with optimized network spending. Its licensing system can be complex. ThousandEyes offers value for cloud network visibility despite high upfront costs, offering significant ROI for processing considerable data volumes.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
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.
We contacted the support team, and they resolved it within a couple of hours.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
Scalability with ThousandEyes is straightforward as you don't really need to scale; it's designed to monitor multiple applications, accommodating 50 or 100 applications simultaneously.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
ThousandEyes is not very stable; sometimes you have to reboot the servers to get actual results.
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.
Features such as taking backup of the devices or configurations of the devices can be included in further versions of SolarWinds NPM.
Having a dedicated incident alert system for URL alerts would help manage noise and streamline operations, especially during patch upgrades.
An area where ThousandEyes can be improved is in providing more in-depth packet analysis; we've found instances where ThousandEyes indicates everything is okay, but it's actually not.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
The best features ThousandEyes offers include monitoring page load times, assessing how long it takes for an application to load, checking for packet loss and jitter, and monitoring the routing path from the user to the server hosted in the cloud or on-premises.
ThousandEyes provides the exact error from the client, making troubleshooting more efficient.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| SolarWinds NPM | 4.4% |
| ThousandEyes | 3.4% |
| Other | 92.2% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 59 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 33 |
| Large Enterprise | 84 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 5 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 11 |
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.”
ThousandEyes is a Network Intelligence platform that delivers visibility into every network an organization relies on, whether public or private. ThousandEyes enables users to optimize application delivery, end-user experience and ongoing infrastructure investments.
With cloud, enterprises can innovate much faster, but the growing number of cloud and SaaS applications means that more apps are being delivered over the Internet. This increases dependence on the Internet, a public “best effort” network, and other third-party infrastructures, substantially reducing the ability of IT teams to predict, visualize and control operational behavior. This results in a chaotic and unmanageable IT environment, making issue resolution a time-consuming ordeal, potentially impacting reputation and revenue. ThousandEyes has innovated an approach based on an unmatched distribution of smart agents across the Internet and enterprise, providing visibility all the way to the end user. ThousandEyes gathers and analyzes massive volumes of Network Intelligence data from all of these vantage points, enabling organizations to solve even their most obscure performance problems in minutes. By using ThousandEyes in the planning and testing phases of cloud adoption, customers can also strategically identify and fix underlying problems before production deployment of business-critical applications.
The ThousandEyes solution is ubiquitous across industry sectors, and since launching in mid-2013, customers have come from a diverse set of industry sectors, which include Silicon Valley technology companies, financial services, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, retail, manufacturing and education.
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