SolarWinds NPM and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller compete in the network management category. SolarWinds NPM seems to have the upper hand due to its ease of deployment and customizable reporting.
Features: SolarWinds NPM offers diverse functionalities, ease of deployment, and integration with Microsoft Active Directory. It supports multiple devices and provides an alerting system with customizable reporting. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller delivers robust network management, valued for automation capabilities, and integration with Cisco's network infrastructure, enhancing its effectiveness in enterprise environments.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM needs improvement in network discovery, resource utilization, and manageability of alerts. Some features require separate purchases, limiting its all-in-one appeal. Cisco Nexus Dashboard could improve performance reliability, simplify reporting, and expand integration with various network vendors to meet user demands.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM provides flexible deployment options, covering on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. While its customer service faces some criticism for response times, it is supported by a strong community. Cisco Nexus Dashboard is generally deployed on-premises or in private clouds, recognized for its technical expertise, though occasionally hampered by response delays.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM's pricing is competitive for its robust features, though costs can rise with additional modules. It offers quick ROI due to effective network management. Cisco Nexus Dashboard, considered expensive, provides value with tailored network automation features and strong integration with Cisco hardware, leading to substantial ROI for Cisco ecosystem users.
The Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC) offers a comprehensive solution for managing Cisco NX-OS switches in hybrid-cloud environments, providing automation, visibility, and consistent operations. Designed to simplify and enhance data center management, NDFC integrates with Cisco Nexus Dashboard to streamline network connectivity, reduce deployment times, and ensure seamless transitions with minimal disruptions. Its modular architecture, new user interface, and support for non-Nexus OS platforms make it a robust tool for LAN, SAN, and IP Fabric for Media management. Additionally, NDFC enhances fabric reliability, automates workflows, and supports cloud connectivity with AWS and Microsoft Azure, making it ideal for businesses adapting to increasingly complex digital environments.
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.”
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