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SolarWinds NPM vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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

SolarWinds NPM
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
158
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (3rd)
VMware Aria Operations for ...
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
31st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
23rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
12
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (29th), Container Monitoring (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Cloud Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.2%, down from 4.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is 1.7%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

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.
ToniLindberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Troubleshooting capabilities have improved application monitoring and support engagement
I can see what happens end to end, which is pretty beneficial. The solution has troubleshooting capabilities, providing a direct connection to knowledge base articles from VMware Broadcom. When I encounter an error, I can search directly within the system to see what solutions have been employed by others. It has a familiar interface, which makes it easy to get started.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future."
"Can easily be interconnected with other management systems."
"I would rate the overall solution nine out of ten due to its capabilities, however, its complexity is a major drawback."
"You can monitor performance counters effortlessly."
"The most valuable feature is the way it monitors the environment, and how user-friendly the console is for the end-user. The interface is also very easy and it captures all the information very well."
"It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"For end-user performance monitoring, we like features such as availability of our all devices."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation."
"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights."
"No issues with stability."
"The features I find most valuable is the querying and alerting capabilities."
"I gladly recommend VMware Aria Operations for Applications because it is cost effective and has commendable AI response capabilities."
"People are very pleased with the implementation."
"The stability of Aria Operations for Applications has improved significantly over the years."
"The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility."
 

Cons

"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"We also had to be attentive to vulnerabilities, because SolarWinds NPM have some issues in that area. We had to work with our security team, so that they could help us check and backup the data, and check what they needed to secure."
"There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better."
"The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product."
"The reporting module that got integrated into the system itself, used to be a standalone solution and I preferred that."
"Each model has different features, so clients need to purchase a separate model for SQL monitoring, database monitoring, network traffic analyzer, HTTP traffic, etc. So each feature they need is in a different model, but customers would prefer an all-in-one solution."
"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."
"In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get."
"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."
"An area for improvement would be more in-depth reporting, such as analyzing disk IO during business hours compared to after hours."
"The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high."
"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless."
"The solution could be expensive, which might be a limiting factor."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are a lot of sub-products and it just continued to increase the price."
"I would rate the pricing a five out of ten"
"When I compare the cost of CA Spectrum to that of SolarWinds NPM, the cost of CA Spectrum is way too high, and the cost of SolarWinds NPM is pretty low."
"I find that the pricing is acceptable."
"There can be fees in addition to the licensing fees if you add on."
"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."
"The price is more expensive than some other products, such as ManageEngine."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
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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
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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...
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
The cost of VMware Aria Operations for Applications is fair and reasonable compared to what we receive in support and packages from VMware.
What needs improvement with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
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.
What is your primary use case for VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront?
Our primary use case for VMware Aria Operations for Applications is to enhance application monitoring tasks, allowing us to set up alerts for different components and send them via SMTP to a team d...
 

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. VMware Aria Operations for Applications and other solutions. Updated: May 2025.
860,592 professionals have used our research since 2012.