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Cisco Intersight vs SolarWinds NPM 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco Intersight reduces costs and time via hyper-converged tech, simplifying management and improving user satisfaction over time.
Sentiment score
7.4
SolarWinds NPM quickly proves cost-effective by enhancing network visibility, reducing support costs, and optimizing resource use for profitability.
It simplifies the onboarding of new hardware, reducing time spent on manual installations and configurations.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.2
Cisco Intersight's support is available 24/7, praised for competence but can be slow for complex issues. Ratings vary.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM's service is knowledgeable but response times vary, with some customers finding direct support unsatisfactory.
For complex issues, it's challenging to get the right engineer quickly unless you have a specific contract like CX.
Cisco technical support is helpful.
Cisco provides better support than anyone else.
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.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.9
Cisco Intersight is highly scalable, effortlessly managing multi-environments and automating tasks, with high user satisfaction across various settings.
Sentiment score
6.9
SolarWinds NPM is scalable, integrates globally, but managing resources and licensing is essential for effective performance and expansion.
I rate its scalability a ten out of ten due to its capability to manage multiple domains and automate service requests.
Cisco Intersight is scalable enough for our needs, allowing management in a multi-environment setup and working remotely while deploying servers.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.3
Cisco Intersight is generally stable and secure, but upgrades and documentation gaps may pose challenges, affecting stability ratings.
Sentiment score
7.5
Proper configuration and adherence to documentation ensure SolarWinds NPM's stability, though upgrades occasionally cause issues requiring support.
It is always accessible online, secure, and allows access from any location, following strict authentication standards.
Some steps are not included in the official documentation, which can create challenges.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
 

Room For Improvement

Cisco Intersight needs improved hybrid cloud integration, enhanced automation, AI assistance, easier migration, setup, and broader device management.
SolarWinds NPM needs UI enhancements, better integration, responsive support, and more flexibility for improved efficiency and customer satisfaction.
There is a significant issue regarding migration from UCS Manager into Intersight without formatting the Fabric Interconnects (FI), which is problematic in a production environment.
It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like ChatGPT.
When registering our devices and servers using tokens, auto-detection could make it easier by automatically identifying resources and adding them to the platform.
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.
 

Setup Cost

Opinions on Cisco Intersight pricing vary, though most agree it offers fair value and justifiable investment for enterprises.
SolarWinds NPM offers scalable, valuable monitoring solutions with flexible pricing, starting from $2,000, based on deployment size and modules.
Cisco Intersight's license cost is very high compared to AWS and Azure solutions, which have lower initiation costs.
The pricing is fair and reasonable, particularly for enterprises.
The pricing mechanism sounds fair.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
 

Valuable Features

Cisco Intersight provides integration, orchestration, analytics, and automation for enhanced manageability, scalability, and security in data centers.
SolarWinds NPM provides comprehensive network management with customization, scalability, and real-time monitoring to enhance performance and integration.
It also provides predictive analysis, predicting data leaks and making it easy to scale up servers remotely without requiring physical interference.
It provides visibility into other products and storage, and is beneficial for environments where Cisco and other vendors coexist, allowing full visibility of the entire infrastructure.
This solution has provided time savings and required fewer people to operate this tool, rather than direct cost savings.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
The most valuable feature for us is the database performance analyzer, which we use a lot.
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Intersight
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Management (11th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Cisco Intersight is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.9%, down from 4.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Hussein Taha - PeerSpot reviewer
Expands well, offers great features, and gives a great inside view of all our data centers
The major challenge for us and for Cisco Intersight is the upgrade process. Sometimes when we ask for the upgrade, we had to have a discussion internally with the team and with our Cisco tech engineer regarding the latest version. The current version for us was 4.52B and we were exploring the idea of moving to 2C, and they recommended going first to 2E. When we asked why they told us that version was very stable and came highly recommended. I know there is a difference between the long-term upgrade and the feature upgrade. Sometimes you need the new batches to eliminate any vulnerabilities or fix any bugs.
MohitKumar - PeerSpot reviewer
High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface
The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market. The solution supports many vendors by default and just included Meraki SDN with the new release, but continued expansion is important. We created a custom method to pair with unsupported vendors but that can produce a lag in performance so future releases should expand SDN support. The solution does a good job of automating features but could expand that even more.
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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
Computer Software Company
35%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
52%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Intersight?
Intersight can validate our environment.
What needs improvement with Cisco Intersight?
I would like AI to be more integrated into Cisco Intersight. It would be great to have a chat session mode AI so that when I am on standby and encountering issues, I could engage with it, much like...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Intersight?
We use Cisco Intersight ( /products/cisco-intersight-reviews ) for operational tasks. We run patches and import firmware updates from the Cisco site. In the event of a component failure, such as a ...
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...
 

Also Known As

Intersight
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

EXMAR, RapidScale
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Intersight vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.