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NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 8, 2026

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

NetApp Data Infrastructure ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
46th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
18th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.3
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Migration (16th)
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
6th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
161
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the IT Infrastructure Monitoring category, the mindshare of NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights is 1.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 3.5%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM3.5%
NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights1.4%
Other95.1%
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Punit Waghela - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited
Reduces troubleshooting time and improves operational efficiency through a single console
NetApp technology, specifically NetApp Cloud Insights, has significantly impacted the way my customers do business. One customer had multiple components, such as a VMware environment, Cisco switches, NetApp storage, and backup tools. Previously, the customer had to monitor all these tools individually each morning by logging into every console to check for errors or performance issues. It used to take them about 1 or 2 hours, but after we installed NetApp Cloud Insights, the time spent was reduced to just 5 minutes with a single console where they could monitor everything. The customer can integrate their VMware servers, Cisco switches, and storage with NetApp Cloud Insights to quickly identify any problems and resolve issues efficiently, demonstrating a reduction in complexity and monitoring time. The values that NetApp Cloud Insights delivers to my customers are evident in real examples, such as an application team running their application on a single VM connected through a switch and storage. When they experience a performance issue, the VMware team needs to identify the source of the slowness, whether it's from the server, switch, or storage, which requires a time-consuming investigation of each component. Without NetApp Cloud Insights, this process is slow and stressful for both the application team and the VMware team, but with the tool, a single click allows the customer to pinpoint the issue directly, improving response times to performance problems immensely. The evolving cybersecurity landscape and the proliferation of AI highly influence my customers' technology decisions, as having NetApp storage in their environment allows them to detect ransomware attacks effectively. NetApp guarantees data recovery in case of such attacks, and here, NetApp Cloud Insights plays a crucial role; it can identify where a ransomware attack originates, allowing the IT team to respond rapidly, such as disconnecting affected devices to mitigate the damage, especially crucial when multiple users are involved.
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

"It is good for giving an overview of the systems and for tracking long-term trends, and it is handy for root cause analysis, e.g. it can eliminate whether storage is the cause of an issue."
"All our production clusters are in Cloud Insight. It provides a single pane of glass, giving us visibility into the environment, which allows us to understand if any issues are going on across any of our clusters."
"What it provides to us has extreme value, helping us to get the full utilization out of our investment in storage."
"Its ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of your environment is brilliant. There is a price associated with it. Whenever you target a NetApp environment, it is included in the price but whenever you want to add different vendors, like VMware and Cisco, the price greatly spikes. Inventorization helps us a lot to visualize the environment."
"Cloud Insights' best features are visibility and the connector to move the workloads."
"The solution is easy to deploy."
"The solution’s ability to quickly inventory our resources, figure out interdependencies across them, and assemble a topology of our environment—the performance and metrics and dashboards for doing that—is amazing."
"NetApp Cloud Insights helps reduce the time spent on problem resolution by up to 50% for my customers, making their operations significantly more efficient and productive, which is a perfect outcome."
"I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable."
"ROI for Solarwinds products is excellent."
"Having all 3 products tied together gives me the data I need to accurately pinpoint a problem within moments, instead of collating data from various applications and servers."
"With just three modules, I can monitor server performance (whether it’s a VM, in the cloud, or an on-premises server."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to use a few custom properties to manage multiple nodes and alerts; thus, saving hardware resource usage."
"Being able to provide a history of interface behavior helps the organization in a multifaceted way."
"This product is extremely flexible and customizable, with significant out-of-the-box monitoring and, with custom properties and some ingenuity, you can get it to do pretty much anything else."
"In a few short years, SolarWinds has empowered us to provide robust infrastructure monitoring, including a converged view of our servers, both the physical and virtual servers, and the storage and application environments."
 

Cons

"The visualization needs some improvement because there are occasional delays while the system queries information."
"There is room for improving the creating and managing or modifying of reports. That is still a difficult task to do and requires knowledge beyond the storage itself. I would love to see reporting improved so that we can create reports by dragging and dropping pieces into a report form and publish a report that way."
"The biggest challenge though is the licensing model for Cloud Insights. For example, for our environment, the price of purchasing was close to the price of the storage itself, which is why we didn't actually pursue using Cloud Insights further."
"In my opinion, one area where NetApp Cloud Insights could be improved for the next release is the console, which I find a bit complex."
"Even though I work with NetApp, it still takes time for me to navigate and find components, so new customers might require considerable hands-on experience to efficiently use the console, indicating that it could be more user-friendly."
"In a perfect world we would have something built, right out-of-the-box, that can identify what we call "noise," and reduce the amount of data."
"When I did need support because I was having problems with the solution, the first or the second line just didn't understand it. They were providing this only on a software as a service basis. So, they were asking all the wrong questions."
"Their pricing model needs improvement."
"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."
"The interface could be made more user-friendly."
"The aesthetic widgets should be dynamic widgets, so the customization can be even more customizable."
"Real-time analytics is the major weakness of the SolarWinds NPM platform today."
"It would be good to have high security."
"Customer service: I rate technical support everywhere from poor to great."
"SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license."
"It is not that stable. As a Windows software, I have seen issues with SolarWinds, and sometimes the performance is slow."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is based on the device you purchase and includes support services."
"The licensing model could be improved. We love that you can use it for free for looking at NetApp products. You only need licenses to look at non-NetApp products, but as soon as you do that, you start utilizing licenses that actually would have been free in the public. So, there is a bit of an anomaly in the licensing model."
"Be aware of the capacity licensing and understand how that works, because it is based on capacity. Getting an understanding of that is the biggest thing."
"The licensing is complex. The calculation depends on what you're ingesting. A terabyte of one product is not a terabyte of another product. Virtual machines don't equate so easily. It's all about the end-use managed units and having an easy place to reference how far those units go."
"The solution is expensive."
"We are billed based on management units, so we can purchase units based on six months, twelve months, twenty-four months, or thirty-six months upfront or pay as you go depending on our requirements."
"Most of the licenses are perpetual, and the annual maintenance charges are not high."
"There's standard licensing, and then it depends on the size of the customer."
"The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"SolarWinds NPM has different pricing models available. The cost of the solution is less than some competitors."
"The cost of the personal perpetual license for SolarWinds NPM is approximately $2,000."
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees."
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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
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise10
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise87
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with NetApp Cloud Insights?
In my opinion, one area where NetApp Cloud Insights could be improved for the next release is the console, which I find a bit complex. Even though I work with NetApp, it still takes time for me to ...
What is your primary use case for NetApp Cloud Insights?
It is a monitoring and analysis tool. In our environment, we have different technologies such as VMware, Nutanix, or maybe a backup tool. Instead of monitoring them through different consoles, with...
What advice do you have for others considering NetApp Cloud Insights?
NetApp Cloud Insights delivers significant efficiencies in addressing performance issues as experienced by an application team running on a single VM. The VMware team must methodically check each c...
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

Cloud Insights
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.