Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance and SolarWinds NPM compete in the network management category. While both are effective, SolarWinds NPM seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive features and flexibility.
Features: Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers efficient fault management, performance monitoring, and ensures service reliability. SolarWinds NPM provides a comprehensive range of features including modular pricing, scalability, and high customization through user reviews. It effectively integrates with multiple networks and offers enhanced alerting systems.
Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM users experience issues with network discovery, limited update automation for network maps, and a need to purchase additional modules for extended features. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance faces criticism for a cumbersome interface, inconsistent support, and deployment complexity. SolarWinds NPM's heavy resource utilization is also a concern for users seeking lightweight solutions.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM benefits from strong customer engagement and knowledgeable support, although there are mentions of pushy sales tactics. It supports broad deployment scenarios including hybrid and public clouds. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance provides consistent technical support and a comprehensive customer experience yet faces critiques on response times with primarily on-premise deployment focus.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM offers value for money with flexible licensing options, resulting in satisfactory ROI through cost savings and operational efficiencies. The cost for additional modules can rise quickly. Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance remains competitive in pricing but is less flexible in scaling, offering higher overall costs with significantly improved network reliability.
Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance offers real-time application and network performance monitoring, VPN management, and network diagnostics across multiple sites.
Organizations use Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance for active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and troubleshooting performance issues. Deployed both on-premise and in the cloud, it supports IT infrastructure, security, and analytics with end-to-end performance measurement across cloud data centers. The modern, intuitive interface features TWAMP for real-time traffic accuracy and standardized reports, along with insightful dashboards for circuit performance, latency, jitter, and throughput monitoring.
What are the most important features?In industries like finance and healthcare, Cisco Provider Connectivity Assurance ensures robust performance monitoring and quick diagnostics for VPNs and internet lines. It aids in maintaining the integrity and security of data transference, facilitating active and passive monitoring, stress testing, and performance troubleshooting across geographically dispersed locations, ensuring seamless operation and compliance with industry standards.
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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