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Pico Corvil Analytics vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 10, 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

Pico Corvil Analytics
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
73rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
9
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of Pico Corvil Analytics is 0.5%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Ted Hruzd - PeerSpot reviewer
Helpful support agents, beneficial issue detection, and high availability
The creation of charts and real-time windows was somewhat cumbersome. The vendor's website had an application called App Agent that required improvement. This API was designed to track message rates between microservers ingested into a microservice memory map. It allowed users to monitor the number of transactions that occurred at specific points within the application, and it was quite impressive. However, it had some limitations, and it mainly served as a tool for basic tracking. The protocols it employed could reveal the type of server-to-server communication and the specific order types, but it was not able to provide a more in-depth analysis of the application. The vendor has the potential to integrate application metrics more extensively into their product suite. The product suite could benefit from more out-of-the-box predictive analytics capabilities, such as projecting market or symbol movements. However, it is unclear whether the vendor currently provides this functionality. Users may need to adjust their software to perform such analysis independently.
Masud Alam - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers alerting service to trigger alerts and easy to manage
For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices and device/interface monitoring. We have also used NCM (Network Configuration Manager) for our network. We use the alerting service to trigger alerts based on specific thresholds, like CPU or memory utilization exceeding a certain percentage. There are AI network initiatives in SolarWinds NPM for some lengthy issues. For example, it shows availability reports. But for bandwidth monitoring, it's not very clear how much bandwidth is being consumed. SolarWinds provide real-time bandwidth monitoring. It is not difficult to manage the network with SolarWinds. We have one customer with a satellite location. If we have a large network with, let's say, 43,000 elements, and our current SolarWinds license supports only 30,000, we would need to create another polling engine to accommodate the additional 13,000 elements. It's limited to the polling engine, so we can only support 30,000 elements per engine. So it's only for 30,000, but we have at least 40,000 elements in our network.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has all the decoders so it's capturing every network packet and it's decoding in real-time and it's giving us latency information in real-time... It's the real-time decoding and getting the latency information statistics that we find the most useful."
"We're able to quickly drill down and find answers to events that are happening in real-time, using Corvil's analytics tools. That's the feature which is most in the spotlight..."
"Time-series graphs are very good for performance analysis. We can do comparisons... We can say this is the latency in the last 24 hours, and this was the same 24-hour period a week ago and overlay the two time-series graphs on top of each other, so we can see the difference. That's a really powerful tool for us."
"The performance metrics are pretty good. We've got everything from the network layer to the actual application layer. We can see what's going on with things like sending time and batching."
"We like the dashboards because they essentially organize all the sessions into one viewpoint."
"The analytics features of Corvil are really good... As long as you know what the field is in the message, you can build your metrics based on that field... It means you can do the analytics that you actually care for. You can customize it..."
"We can use CLI with the UI for configuring the new monitoring system, which is good."
"As part of my role in monitoring multiple client connections, I would use Pico Corvil Analytics to set up alerts for performance issues, such as TCP resends and dropped packets. These alerts would trigger when the volume was low and performance was poor, allowing me to work with our trading partners to find a resolution. I would present them with the statistics I had and together, we would identify the source of the issue. This collaboration resulted in the client often reconfiguring their systems. For example, we may find that a network connection needed to be made. Overall, this proactive approach helped to maintain strong connections with our clients and minimize disruptions to trading revenue."
"The ability to quickly identify downtime is the most valuable."
"The people in technical support are very good."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"This solution offers a very good view of our network and allows us to effectively monitor performance."
"It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass."
"The nice thing about SolarWinds is that it's kind of all-in-one. I can manage the status of my networking devices, whether they are up or down, I can see how much traffic is going across an interface, and I can run a report that tells me exactly what that traffic is."
"From web interfaces to custom monitors and alarms, this product has a high level of flexibility that can be molded to suit your business needs, regardless of the size of your organization."
"It is scalable."
 

Cons

"The creation of charts and real-time windows was somewhat cumbersome. The vendor's website had an application called App Agent that required improvement. This API was designed to track message rates between microservers ingested into a microservice memory map. It allowed users to monitor the number of transactions that occurred at specific points within the application, and it was quite impressive. However, it had some limitations, and it mainly served as a tool for basic tracking. The protocols it employed could reveal the type of server-to-server communication and the specific order types, but it was not able to provide a more in-depth analysis of the application. The vendor has the potential to integrate application metrics more extensively into their product suite."
"It's quite difficult to see, sometimes, how hard your Corvil is working. When we had a very busy feed that chucked out a lot of data it wasn't working very well on Corvil. We had to raise a case for it. It turned out to be that, in fact, we were overloading Corvil."
"While the product is scalable, it's not easy to scale. It needs investment hardware and network bandwidth consideration. It's not something you can just do overnight."
"Overall, the Corvil device needs a little bit of training for people to handle it. If that could be reduced and made more user-friendly, more intuitive, it would be better."
"I have seen errors where the CNE and the CMC haven't synced because of something missing in the CMC, which was there in the CNE. We would get some type of error, but it doesn't actually say what exactly was missing in the CNE."
"For FIX protocol, maybe we could have built-in configurations for signatures and decoders. Also, for certain protocols, which are newer, we would like to just add the signatures within the decoders itself."
"There is definitely room for improvement in the reporting. We've tried to use the reporting in Corvil but, to me, it feels like a bolt-on, like not a lot of thought has gone into it. The whole interface where you build reports and schedule them is very clunky."
"The analytics feature is very nice, but it's mostly software. We are hoping that it could be embedded in ASICs, so it could be faster."
"An area for improvement would be the use of modular licenses, which are not practical for big clients."
"The solution's network discovery and node addition processes need more work."
"The response time of the support team needs to improve"
"Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing."
"A need for improvement is in the technical support provided by SolarWinds."
"Consolidation of platforms would provide a smoother experience."
"SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."
"Fortigate firewalls are one example of a product that we are unable to monitor properly via SolarWinds NPM."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very expensive. Corvil could work on the pricing."
"I like the way they've decoupled the hardware now... Everything's based on the licensing side now. The way they do the packs is fair. It's very flexible in that we're not charged per decoder, we're charged for a certain pack. Whether we use one decoder or 20 decoders, as long as they're in the same pack, there's no extra charge. Expensive but fair is how I'd summarize it."
"Corvil has reduced the time it takes us to isolate root causes."
"It is pricey versus its competitors."
"As I am working more with Corvil, it looks like it is improving diagnostic times."
"Pico Corvil Analytics is expensive. There are several competitors in the market. Selling this solution to a trading firm might be challenging as there are several other solutions available that can perform basic similar operations, such as using Wireshark and Python scripts to obtain the required values. However, that does not nearly approach the comprehensive end-2-end automated depth of metrics and their correlations that Pico Corvil Analytics provides."
"We bought a box from Corvil and it was $200,000 for one big CNE. Then there are obviously the recurring maintenance fees. The licensing is perpetual but the maintenance fees are not."
"The pricing is very expensive for SolarWinds. That's a huge disadvantage for it."
"It is expensive."
"Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"The standard licensing fees are what we're paying. It's about $20,000 a year for all our licensing."
"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."
"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution. Small businesses can't afford it. Due to its pricing, most smaller enterprises like manufacturing companies are not interested. For example, we have a client who is also interested in traffic monitoring, but they are not purchasing SolarWinds because of the cost."
"I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
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Comparison Review

it_user174738 - PeerSpot reviewer
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
54%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Real Estate/Law Firm
4%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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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

Corvil
Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

NASDAQ, Commerzbank, Pico Quantitative Trading, CME Group, Interactive Data, Tokyo Stock Exchange Inc.
Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
Find out what your peers are saying about Pico Corvil Analytics vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.