SolarWinds NPM vs Zabbix comparison

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:

• Increased scalability
• Fault, performance, and availability monitoring
• Dynamic network discovery and mapping
• Cross-stack network data correlation
• Customizable topology
• Dependency-aware intelligent alerts
• Intelligent maps
• Automated capacity forecasting, alerting, and reporting
• Logical and physical network monitoring
• Monitor Azure vNet gateway visibility

SolarWinds NPM Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Comprehensive monitoring for advanced network devices: With SolarWinds NPM, you can gain insight into the health and performance of your load balancers, Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks, firewalls, and Cisco Nexus switches.

• Hardware health monitoring: SolarWinds NPM makes it easy for you to monitor, alert, and report on key device metrics, including power supply, fan speed, and temperature.

• Customizable performance and availability reports: With this feature, you can choose from more than 100 templates to schedule and also generate custom network performance reports.

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.”

Zabbix is a free software tool traditionally used for monitoring your organization’s IT infrastructure, including networks, servers, virtual machines, and cloud services. Zabbix makes it possible for you to maintain control of your infrastructure by collecting any metric from any source. The solution also offers agentless monitoring, synthetic monitoring, custom collection methods, and data transformation.

Zabbix offers:

• Network monitoring
• Server monitoring
• Cloud monitoring
• Application monitoring
• Service monitoring

Zabbix Features

Zabbix has many valuable key features, including:

Action Log, Anomaly Detection, Auditing, Automated Actions, Availability Reports, Capacity Planning, Custom Scripts, Custom Templates, Data Retrieval, Drill-Down Reports, Encryption, Event Correlation, History Data Analysis, Metric Collection, Multiple Authentication Methods, Multiple Severity Levels, Native WMI Support for Windows Agent, Network Discovery, Notifications, Root Cause Analysis, Trend Prediction, WMI Support, Web Services Widget-based Dashboards, Zero-Maintenance

Zabbix Benefits

There are several benefits to implementing Zabbix. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Flexible deployment options: Zabbix can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud to help you stay fully in control of your data.
  
  
• Unlimited scalability: Zabbix is scalable to any infrastructure. It can easily scale for your personal home, or can scale for a large enterprise environment.
  
  
• Ready-to-use templates: Zabbix comes with ready-to-use templates which makes it easy to integrate with systems you already use.
  
  
• External vault: Zabbix enables you to keep your data secure and safe by providing an external vault storage option.
  
  
• High availability: By using Zabbix’s high availability solution, you can negate the risk of data loss and gain 24/7 uptime.
  
  
• Partner and vendor-backed: The solution is backed by 250+ global partners and multiple external vendors, giving you confidence in the solution.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Zabbix users.

PeerSpot user Shibu B., Regional Manager/ Service Delivery at ASPL Info Services, says, "The solution is quite mature and very stable. The monitoring capabilities of the product are excellent.” He also adds, “The solution is very easy to scale and the product is open-source, meaning there aren't any licensing costs associated with it.”

Julian L., Senior Specialist Critical Infrastructure at an educational organization, comments that the solution is “A complete solution that doesn't cost anything, does what I need it to do, and has easy-to-use templates and very good scalability.” He also mentions “The agents are pretty cool. They're easy to roll out. The standard out-of-the-box templates are also pretty easy to use. The integration with other learning products is also good.”

Faycal N., CEO/Founder at Zen Networks, praises the product, mentioning, “Its overall flexibility is most valuable. When our customers have some custom applications that are not necessarily covered by the community or a standard monitoring tool, we use Zabbix to build our own modules with our own templates. This feature has been useful in using Zabbix for infrastructure and IT monitoring. It has also been useful for industrial equipment monitoring. Zabbix is very lightweight. It is efficient in terms of performance because it doesn't use a lot of resources."