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SolarWinds NPM vs Zenoss Cloud 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 Network Monitoring Software
3rd
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
4th
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
159
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Zenoss Cloud
Ranking in Network Monitoring Software
76th
Ranking in IT Infrastructure Monitoring
51st
Ranking in Cloud Monitoring Software
39th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
Application Infrastructure (33rd), Event Monitoring (14th), Server Monitoring (27th), Container Monitoring (9th), AIOps (26th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Network Monitoring Software category, the mindshare of SolarWinds NPM is 4.4%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zenoss Cloud is 0.6%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Network Monitoring Software Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds NPM4.4%
Zenoss Cloud0.6%
Other95.0%
Network Monitoring Software
 

Featured Reviews

Tochukwu Uzomba - PeerSpot reviewer
Rich modular monitoring capabilities offer tailored monitoring needs with good support
SolarWinds NPM is used for monitoring different solutions like database, infrastructure, and network performance. Each of these requires separate solutions, and SolarWinds provides modular options for monitoring Based on my experiences, SolarWinds NPM can handle large network infrastructures…
ClaudiaChen - PeerSpot reviewer
Generates close to real-time alerts so users can resolve issues, but needs more integration and public cloud monitoring features
As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"The product covers our needs for the basic care and feeding of servers, whether they are physical or virtual."
"SolarWinds has greatly helped us, especially in tracing when the SoundCloud Software goes down without any apparent reason."
"The solution ranks as one of the top five monitoring tools."
"SolarWinds' network and server application monitoring features are strong."
"It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network."
"The most valuable features are language support and technical support."
"It's easy to use."
"The custom built integration is one of the most valuable features because you can see all the especially critical items."
"What I like most about Zenoss Service Dynamics is that it monitors the devices and gives close to real-time alerts. For example, in case the device is not available, Zenoss Service Dynamics generates an alert so my team can resolve the issue."
"The most valuable feature is the flexible discovery mechanism."
"The product offers good documentation that helps with initial training."
"Its Docker Container concept is mind blowing. It is the first monitoring tool which comes with Docker features."
"They have also accommodated many state-of-the-art technologies like Docker and ZooKeeper."
 

Cons

"One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."
"SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."
"This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API."
"They need to work on their automation and automatically discover devices. They are not very good at automatically discovering devices."
"The reporting is good, but I want it to be a little easier when creating custom reports. The reports are all on the website now, but it takes some know how to get some to display the way you would like."
"The solution does not offer much customization so is somewhat inflexible."
"I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility."
"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."
"The AI aspect needs to improve."
"As Zenoss Service Dynamics is more for network-centric devices and you want to monitor, for example, a server, its services, IP addresses, and interfaces, if it's a network and you're going to monitor multiple items, you'll be charged multiple times. This is what Zenoss Service Dynamics needs to improve to make sure that customers pay just one fee to monitor the entire server. What I'd like to see in Zenoss Service Dynamics in the future is a public cloud monitoring feature, particularly for the Azure public cloud. Another additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the solution is integration with the Azure public cloud because I know that there are some services from Azure that Zenoss Service Dynamics is currently unable to monitor."
"It would be ideal if the product offered sound alerts."
"There was a problem with Zenoss and storage monitoring."
"The inclusion of a feature to show a graphical view of the network would be a helpful improvement."
"Now it is stable, but they should design threshold parameters in percentage instead of raw values."
"There is room for improvement with the administrative part. They introduced Control Center to manage things in Zenoss 5. The services that Zenoss provides remained the same, but the administrative part, since they introduced Docker, etc., has become a little complex"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price could be improved on"
"We pay approximately $4,000 annually for SolarWinds NPM. There are no additional fees required other than the standard fees."
"We have a perpetual license for this solution, and my impression is that this solution is cheap."
"We pay a yearly licensing fee."
"It's expensive and there are costs in addition to the standard licensing."
"The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
"We have a multi-year license for the use of this solution. There are additional costs for recourses in the environment."
"You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
"It depends on the customer, what he wants."
"The pricing depends on the environment, the number of services, and the size of the data center. It can go from $100,000 to a million dollars."
"There are additional costs you'll have to pay apart from the license fee for Zenoss Service Dynamics. I can't remember exactly how much my company is paying because I don't handle the finance part, but the cost is paid annually. On a scale of one to five, with one being the cheapest and five being the most expensive, I'm rating the solution three out of five."
"It is very cost-effective compared to the tools I worked with in the past. The company is gaining a lot with respect to the cost factor. It provides agentless monitoring and in a very cheap way."
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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
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Performing Arts
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business59
Midsize Enterprise33
Large Enterprise84
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Large Enterprise5
 

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 the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
In my experience, I worked with many monitoring software, but the one that gave me the most functionalities of a large-scale company is Zenoss, due to its ability to monitor completely hybrid and a...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
Cloud Monitoring, Zenoss Service Dynamics
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
2degrees, Rackspace, State of North Dakota, El Paso Independent School District, NWN Corporation
Find out what your peers are saying about SolarWinds NPM vs. Zenoss Cloud and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
868,787 professionals have used our research since 2012.