Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

SolarWinds NPM vs Zenoss Cloud comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

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 NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zenoss Cloud
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
77th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
52nd
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
39th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (30th), Event Monitoring (14th), Server Monitoring (26th), Container Monitoring (10th), AIOps (25th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.5%, down from 5.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zenoss Cloud is 0.4%, down from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.
ClaudiaChen - PeerSpot reviewer
Generates close to real-time alerts so users can resolve issues, but needs more integration and public cloud monitoring features
As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's easy to understand, even if you are not too technical."
"From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization."
"The ability to customize the views and dashboards is nice. SolarWinds also allows us to access the data via the API. That's probably the feature I liked the most."
"I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation."
"The abnormal traffic notifications are good. Most of them are remote, and it is very good for notifications and monitoring for the traffic."
"The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less."
"The product offers good documentation that helps with initial training."
"The most valuable feature is the flexible discovery mechanism."
"It's easy to use."
"They have also accommodated many state-of-the-art technologies like Docker and ZooKeeper."
"Its Docker Container concept is mind blowing. It is the first monitoring tool which comes with Docker features."
"The custom built integration is one of the most valuable features because you can see all the especially critical items."
"What I like most about Zenoss Service Dynamics is that it monitors the devices and gives close to real-time alerts. For example, in case the device is not available, Zenoss Service Dynamics generates an alert so my team can resolve the issue."
 

Cons

"Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product."
"I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility."
"Technical support can be slow to respond."
"The response time of the support team needs to improve"
"The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work."
"SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."
"The dashboards for this solution could be improved. We would like to divide the dashboards to give a clear view to our management team to show what we have and what deficiencies exist in our network."
"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor."
"Now it is stable, but they should design threshold parameters in percentage instead of raw values."
"The AI aspect needs to improve."
"There was a problem with Zenoss and storage monitoring."
"The inclusion of a feature to show a graphical view of the network would be a helpful improvement."
"It would be ideal if the product offered sound alerts."
"There is room for improvement with the administrative part. They introduced Control Center to manage things in Zenoss 5. The services that Zenoss provides remained the same, but the administrative part, since they introduced Docker, etc., has become a little complex"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Most of the licenses are perpetual, and the annual maintenance charges are not high."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"USD $15,000 annually for maintenance."
"Though I don't remember the price for SolarWinds NPM, its price is somewhat okay when you compare it with other tools in the market. The price isn't too high and isn't too low, so it's okay."
"The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
"I find that the pricing is acceptable."
"The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
"Our customer reports that the solution is somewhat costly and licensing is a bit complicated."
"It is very cost-effective compared to the tools I worked with in the past. The company is gaining a lot with respect to the cost factor. It provides agentless monitoring and in a very cheap way."
"It depends on the customer, what he wants."
"There are additional costs you'll have to pay apart from the license fee for Zenoss Service Dynamics. I can't remember exactly how much my company is paying because I don't handle the finance part, but the cost is paid annually. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I'm rating the solution three out of five."
"The pricing depends on the environment, the number of services, and the size of the data center. It can go from $100,000 to a million dollars."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Network Monitoring Software solutions are best for your needs.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Educational Organization
38%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
In my experience, I worked with many monitoring software, but the one that gave me the most functionalities of a large-scale company is Zenoss, due to its ability to monitor completely hybrid and a...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Cloud Monitoring, Zenoss Service Dynamics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
2degrees, Rackspace, State of North Dakota, El Paso Independent School District, NWN Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Zenoss Cloud and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.