

SolarWinds NPM and Nagios Core are prominent competitors in the network monitoring tools category. SolarWinds NPM seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive network performance insights and ease of use despite being more expensive, while Nagios Core offers flexibility at a lower cost but requires more technical expertise.
Features: SolarWinds NPM offers robust network monitoring capabilities including quick setup, high configurability, and comprehensive network performance insights. It is praised for its strong monitoring, scalability, and broad device support. Nagios Core, as an open-source tool, stands out for its high customizability, ability to monitor a wide range of endpoints, and integration with various ticketing systems.
Room For Improvement: SolarWinds NPM requires additional purchases for many features, which can be costly, and has resource utilization challenges with occasional bugs on new updates. Nagios Core's manual configuration is tedious and needs technical expertise, its interface is outdated, and the lack of built-in advanced features compared to commercial solutions is notable.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM supports on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments but might require external support for complex installations. Customer service receives mixed reviews, ranging from knowledgeable to delayed responses. Nagios Core excels in open-source flexibility but demands significant configuration skills, and its community-driven support may lack the immediacy of commercial solutions.
Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM's licensing costs can be substantial, escalating with additional modules, but it offers considerable ROI by optimizing infrastructure spend. Nagios Core's open-source nature reduces licensing costs, offering excellent value for those who invest in customization and technical expertise.
The return on investment is significant as the solution effectively reduces costs while being worth its expense.
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.
The solution is scalable.
SolarWinds NPM is scalable and effective in handling large network infrastructures.
I tried many other solutions at work, however, in terms of Nagios, I haven't seen any disruption or downtime.
The NPM product is stable, particularly when used for simple network monitoring.
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.
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.
It is not too pricey and is adequate.
PRTG's package offers all features in one bundle, which is cost-effective.
The solution is considered expensive.
It has a very handy dashboard, providing live alerts and visibility for everything.
Whenever any node is down in our network, whether it is a server or any network device, we receive information through email that the device is down.
It provides a detailed overview of the network, which is valuable.
SolarWinds NPM has specific modules for monitoring different network capabilities, which provides rich features for carrying out specific tasks.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| SolarWinds NPM | 3.4% |
| Nagios Core | 1.9% |
| Other | 94.7% |

| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 20 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 11 |
| Large Enterprise | 22 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 59 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 33 |
| Large Enterprise | 85 |
This is IT infrastructure monitoring's industry-standard, open-source core. Free without professional support services.
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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