SolarWinds NPM vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

SolarWinds and Broadcom are both solutions in the Cloud Monitoring Software category. SolarWinds is ranked #8 with an average rating of 8.5, while Broadcom is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.8. SolarWinds holds a 4.4% mindshare in CMS, compared to Broadcom’s 2.2% mindshare. Additionally, 92% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

SolarWinds NPM

Read 160 SolarWinds NPM reviews

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7,488 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Read 14 VMware Aria Operations for Applications reviews

6,376 Views
2,805 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

SolarWinds NPM

VMware Aria Operations for ...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 9, 2024

SolarWinds NPM and VMware Aria Operations for Applications are competitors in the network and application performance management industry. SolarWinds NPM has an edge due to its broader feature set and competitive pricing, while VMware Aria Operations for Applications is appreciated for its integration capabilities with container platforms.

Features: SolarWinds NPM includes advanced network fault and availability management, integration with multiple vendors, and robust alerting. It provides real-time visibility into network performance and modular pricing options. VMware Aria Operations for Applications focuses on integrating with container platforms, supporting open-source technologies, and offering real-time visibility with in-depth insights into application health.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds NPM users note issues with network discovery, alert configuration, and licensing flexibility. Improvements in reporting, security, and support responsiveness could enhance usability. VMware Aria Operations for Applications could improve integration with diverse IT environments, setup processes, and prediction capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds NPM supports on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments but faces setup challenges. Customer service is generally good, with concerns about sales tactics and support consistency. VMware Aria Operations for Applications integrates with cloud solutions and receives positive feedback on customer service and resource deployment.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds NPM offers competitive pricing but costs can rise with additional modules. Users report substantial ROI through proactive network management. VMware Aria Operations for Applications, while flexible, incurs high integration costs, making it a cost-intensive option despite offering consolidation benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds NPM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications Report (Updated: June 2026).

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds NPM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

June 2026

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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

SolarWinds NPM

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

4th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

8th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

160

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (2nd)

VMware Aria Operations for ...

Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring

17th

Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (16th), Container Monitoring (5th)

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, up from 4.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 2.2%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud Monitoring Software Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SolarWinds NPM	4.4%
VMware Aria Operations for Applications	2.2%
Other	93.4%

Cloud Monitoring Software

Featured Reviews

Vivek Jaiswal

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.

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Ajay Shukla

Consultant at HCLTech

Automation and insightful diagnostics elevate operations while improvements are welcome

The new version 8.18 has brought significant improvements. The main purpose of using this tool is having a single console to manage all entities. The cloud integration capabilities, including private, public, and hybrid, are already well-implemented. The ability to manage multiple vCenters across different geographical locations is very effective. The new Skyline health feature and certificate and licensing management are particularly useful improvements. The dashboard's overview tab provides comprehensive information about current vCenter status, resizable amounts, reclamation opportunities, anomalies, diagnostics, licensing, and certificates. However, there is room for improvement in application analysis. The current functionality lacks detailed monitoring at the kernel level, focusing mainly on CPU, memory, and storage matrices. Enhanced application monitoring capabilities, including tracking downtime for specific types of applications such as transactional or e-commerce applications, would be beneficial.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SolarWinds NPM is useful for any company that has business-critical applications running over a network and they want to monitor the network behavior."

"It's just having visibility of the entire networking estate for myself and for my clients; that's the main benefit of it and it's probably the best product out there."

"All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great."

"The solution provides comprehensive monitoring that includes proactive items such as advance notifications and engineer tickets for code breaks, allowing engineers to quickly resolve issues before major outages occur."

"It is stable, scalable, reliable and not too expensive."

"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."

"Technical support from SolarWinds is the best."

"The most common feedback I receive as a consultant is how the product ultimately finds issues and bottlenecks in the enterprise that the engineers were previously unaware existed."

More SolarWinds NPM pros

"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."

"I find VMware Aria Operations for Applications to be very stable, and I would rate it a ten out of ten."

"Wavefront gives us the complexity we need, instead of spending time coming up with a nice dashboard from some other means, or just creating and coding our own app."

"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."

"Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes."

"This solution will give you a single pane of glass for everything, and centralized monitoring."

"VMware Aria Operations for Applications offers significant features such as real-time statistics, the ability to identify possible issues within the VM environment, and helpful heat maps."

"People are very pleased with the implementation."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications pros

Cons

"SolarWinds is expensive. That's why it's primarily banks using the solution."

"They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices."

"The only other issue I have is that sometimes when upgrading, it becomes complicated to manage the upgrade."

"You certainly can have stability issues."

"SolarWinds NPM should be more flexible to accommodate specific customer requirements quickly."

"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."

"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)."

"They have had a rather large security breach in the past. It's cost some companies customers."

More SolarWinds NPM cons

"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."

"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."

"The implementation is a long process that should be improved."

"VMware technical support has declined since the Broadcom acquisition. Previously, they were more focused on issue resolution, but now they prioritize licensing verification before providing support."

"They just need more capability. A few areas still need more enhancements in the technology capability space."

"Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more."

"I find that there could be improvements in the support service response time, as the urgency varies unless specified as Priority 2 or 1 cases."

"I would like to see integration with Kubernetes cluster and APIs so that you can manage the entire stack."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution's pricing is low compared to a lot of other tools in the market."

"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten"

"The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine."

"There is a permanent license and also a subscription level which has annual fees. The price of the solution is fair."

"The solution can become very expensive and commercially not viable in countries, such as India."

"I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."

"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."

More SolarWinds NPM pricing and cost advice

"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."

"I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."

"The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."

"Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."

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Comparison Review

it_user174738

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…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Construction Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	59
Midsize Enterprise	33
Large Enterprise	86

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

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...

See all answers

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?

From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

The solution includes cost drivers that can be configured according to your environment. You can input server-wise, CPU-wise, storage, and memory costs per hour or day. Once cost drivers are provid...

See all answers

What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?

I have been involved in several projects where I had to implement automation and monitoring alerting. I performed automation using VMware Aria Operations for Applications. There is an automation ta...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds NPM

May 2026

Download SolarWinds NPM product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware Aria Operations for Applications

May 2026

VMware Aria Operations for Applications report

Download VMware Aria Operations for Applications product report

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer

Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability

Overview

SolarWinds NPM is a network performance monitoring tool offering a user-friendly interface with customizable dashboards. It provides real-time tracking of device health, latency, and bandwidth utilization, supporting diverse integration and scalability needs.

SolarWinds NPM's robust features include real-time monitoring of network performance and efficient tracking of device health, latency, and bandwidth utilization. The tool is appreciated for its ease of deployment, scalability, and support for integration with other tools. Features like SNMP monitoring, NetPath, and comprehensive reporting enhance its diagnostic capabilities and network visibility. However, users identify areas for improvement such as real-time analytics, advanced customization options, and enhanced scalability for larger enterprises. Better customer support, improved integrations, and security measures are also desired.

What are the key features of SolarWinds NPM?

User-Friendly Interface: Simplifies navigation and operation.
Customizable Dashboards: Allows personalized data views.
Real-Time Monitoring: Provides instant updates on network performance.
Strong Alerting Capabilities: Offers immediate notifications for issues.
Scalability: Supports growth with ease.
Integration: Works smoothly with other tools for comprehensive monitoring.
SNMP Monitoring: Tracks device stats effectively.
NetPath: Helps visualize network paths and performance.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Improved Network Visibility: Enables proactive issue resolution.
Enhanced Diagnostics: Facilitates quicker troubleshooting.
Real-Time Performance Data: Supports informed decision-making.
Ease of Deployment: Reduces setup time and complexity.
Infrastructure Monitoring: Ensures network stability and reliability.
Custom Integration: Adapts to existing IT environments.

In enterprise environments, SolarWinds NPM is deployed to monitor network health and device status, sending alerts for any issues. It provides visibility into network performance, tracking bandwidth utilization and server metrics efficiently. Its applications span from monitoring routers, switches, and firewalls to supporting infrastructure monitoring across industries.

SolarWinds

VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing the performance and availability of applications and infrastructure in real-time.

With its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, visualizing and analyzing data becomes effortless. The real-time alerting system ensures timely issue resolution, while scalability and a user-friendly interface provide a seamless experience for smooth operations.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard

1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds NPM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

June 2026

Free Report: SolarWinds NPM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications

Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.

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