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Dell CloudIQ 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

Dell CloudIQ
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
37th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
5th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
160
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of Dell CloudIQ is 0.9%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.4%, down from 3.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.4%
Dell CloudIQ0.9%
Other95.7%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Haseeb Sheikh - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager Enterprise Solutions at a media company with 201-500 employees
Proactive monitoring has improved availability and capacity reporting for my infrastructure
The current features including availability, performance, and capacity are good enough, and I think more of better alerting along with improved thresholds of alerts should be implemented. It is helpful, but it should also include the capability to detect zero-day attacks if there are any. I think the remediation could have been better. For example, if I am upgrading my firmware or BIOS or firmware of the infrastructure, it should give me exact CVSS scores and remediation data provided against the CVSS scores. I think the Dell CloudIQ app could be more interactive. If there is a possibility that I can open tickets or SRs via the Dell CloudIQ app, that would be a good feature.
Vivek Jaiswal - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Central monitoring has improved outage alerts and now needs smarter detection and modern dashboards
Regarding the automated network topology and mapping feature in SolarWinds NPM, I am not satisfied with it. For static monitoring, it is acceptable. However, if it is possible, I would need a feature in SolarWinds in the future for some kind of malfunctioning detection, such as malware attacks or that type of environment. We did not have any facility to detect that in SolarWinds. I think it would be better to incorporate those types of features. Regarding customization options in SolarWinds, the ability to customize the dashboard has room for improvement. The dashboard is quite old, and we need some improvement in it. Nowadays, we have multiple tools with AI-based monitoring and web-based dashboards. SolarWinds also has a web-based dashboard, but I think there is scope for improvement in the UI. There may be other areas I would like to improve in SolarWinds NPM.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Fewer vulnerabilities have been observed in the four years we have used the solution."
"CloudIQ allows us to monitor our servers centrally, and we can receive notifications in case of issues, like a potential hard drive failure."
"Has really nice roll-up dashboards."
"This solution would be very helpful for anybody that is solely using Dell equipment."
"I use Dell CloudIQ for the availability and capacity reporting, which is very helpful in terms of capacity and availability reporting, and if there is any fault or faulty drive or faulty part, I am alerted on time with that, which is the main benefit that avoids any unplanned outage."
"We chose this solution because it is a free product offered from Dell which you can use to monitor, manage and optimize cybersecurity."
"The dashboard is clear and user-friendly."
"It's convenient because you can access it from a mobile device without needing a laptop."
"At the moment, our main tool is SolarWinds NPM, and we keep using it, especially for monitoring cloud devices."
"You can monitor performance counters effortlessly."
"SolarWinds NPM has a colorful UI and many easy-to-use features. It does not need to be configured as much and is also easy to install."
"There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM; we can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can be useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting, and it is very helpful."
"This solution has improved our organization because it saves time, in that I do not need to visit every workstation in order to update it, as I can do everything remotely, including running PowerShell scripts or performing standard updates, and I can also help customers remotely."
"What I like about SolarWinds is the application health monitoring system, which is a very good system that I recommend to big companies in the pharmaceutical or the banking industries with large networks and very critical servers."
"The reports are excellent; they give good graphical information and a lot of great details about everything that's going on in my network, and it's easy to read and understand due to its visual nature."
"Technical support has always been great."
 

Cons

"It can improve the reporting facility to create custom reports or dashboards."
"Supporting legacy systems is an area that can be improved."
"There is a need for improvement in predictive maintenance, which I assume is somewhat AI-driven."
"Doesn't do well in terms of integrating with technologies other than Dell."
"CloudIQ doesn't do well in terms of integrating with technologies other than Dell."
"PowerScale is the only file system offered and that is limiting."
"Getting through support has become a difficult thing. Dell's support has degraded since they took over EMC. It's a bit difficult to use."
"The main limitation of CloudIQ is that it is intended to be used exclusively with Dell hardware."
"Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
"It would be beneficial if NPM offered support for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), as currently, it does not support this and we are migrating our services there."
"There isn't a great deal of flexibility to create custom metrics that can be discovered easily or custom aggregation schemes."
"Bulk Node attach is chaos."
"Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers (which have no connection to the public internet)."
"The solution could improve in many areas, such as the marketing and description of the products, providing areas of improvement, cloud capabilities, and being able to be more streamlined with the current integration points with other applications."
"It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds. The performance is slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is more expensive than NetApp which offers file systems in various price ranges."
"I believe it is a free product because we don't pay for it."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"Some solutions are open source and free."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"The pricing is in the middle. It's not particularly cost-effective, but it's not overly expensive either."
"The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
"The NPM component of the system costs approximately $1,000 USD per year."
"The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Developer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
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
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Construction Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise85
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Dell CloudIQ?
The current features including availability, performance, and capacity are good enough, and I think more of better alerting along with improved thresholds of alerts should be implemented. It is hel...
What is your primary use case for Dell CloudIQ?
I moved to a new organization where I am also using Dell CloudIQ. I use Dell CloudIQ to monitor PowerStore as well as Dell PowerEdge servers.
What advice do you have for others considering Dell CloudIQ?
For performance analytics, I have my own NMS in-house that I use. I have deployed a VApp on-premises with all of the servers and storage integrated, and it sends telemetry data directly to Dell. My...
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

No data available
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

North Carolina State University
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell CloudIQ vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.