AppDynamics vs. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AppDynamics
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
AppDynamics is an APM and Mobile APM program, with application mapping and predictive capabilities. These capacities enable automated remediation and code-level diagnostics in real time. It can be deployed on-premise or as a SaaS.N/A
SolarWinds NPM
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds NPM is a monitoring and performance management platform. It provides performance troubleshooting support, auto network discovery, customizable thresholds, and can be rapidly deployed.
$1,638
per year
Pricing
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
NPM
$1,638
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppDynamicsSolarWinds NPM
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Considered Both Products
AppDynamics
Chose AppDynamics
Cisco's AppDynamics solution has been used for several years because it has a low level of complexity for registering alarms, editing dashboards, instrumenting monitoring agents, managing user credentials, and integrating with other systems, stability, and low volume of new …
Chose AppDynamics
AppDynamics, in our organization, has given us a comprehensive and real time view of our environment. Appdynamics is great for drilling down and identifying trouble spots quickly.
SolarWinds NPM
Chose SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
SolarWinds NPM is easy to use, user-friendly, more cost-effective compared with other vendor products, and has very good software product support.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
AppDynamics
8.5
65 Ratings
11% above category average
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
-
Ratings
Application monitoring9.365 Ratings00 Ratings
Database monitoring7.263 Ratings00 Ratings
Threshold alerts9.163 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive capabilities8.062 Ratings00 Ratings
Application performance management console9.062 Ratings00 Ratings
Collaboration tools7.651 Ratings00 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring8.735 Ratings00 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting8.933 Ratings00 Ratings
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
AppDynamics
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
8.1
231 Ratings
3% below category average
Automated network device discovery00 Ratings7.8210 Ratings
Network monitoring00 Ratings8.8231 Ratings
Baseline threshold calculation00 Ratings8.4201 Ratings
Alerts00 Ratings9.2228 Ratings
Network capacity planning00 Ratings7.9188 Ratings
Packet capture analysis00 Ratings7.2130 Ratings
Network mapping00 Ratings7.1190 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings7.9212 Ratings
Wireless infrastructure monitoring00 Ratings7.5153 Ratings
Hardware health monitoring00 Ratings9.1215 Ratings
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AppDynamicsSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
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User Ratings
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.9
(65 ratings)
9.4
(237 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.4
(27 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(21 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(6 ratings)
8.0
(28 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(7 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Platforms for software as a service (SaaS) frequently cater to a large number of users with a variety of needs and usage patterns. Because AppDynamics offers multi-tenant monitoring capabilities to track performance across various customer environments, it is a good choice for SaaS platform monitoring. SaaS providers can maximize resource utilization, proactively detect and resolve performance issues, and provide a dependable and consistent user experience for their clients with AppDynamics.
Read full review
SolarWinds
Solarwinds NPM is well suited for medium to large networks, it may be a bit heavy for the SOHO environment as most of the tools and reports are designed for monitoring KPIs which may not be critical for a small shop. NPM can handle large networks with several sites and mixed technologies ranging from networks, server systems, storage devices and SLA reporting.
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Pros
Cisco
  • AppDynamics delves deeply into traceability and profiling at the code level. By identifying and refactoring any hidden performance hogs in our code, we can directly observe the performance improvements.
  • AppDynamics provides real-time dashboards and in-depth insights into each layer of the application stack, lifting the curtain on performance.
  • AppDynamics gives us the ability to proactively detect and resolve performance issues. We are able to keep things running smoothly for our users and stop outages.
  • We can monitor stability and performance prior to, during, and following releases with AppDynamics, which helps to minimize regression risks and facilitate smooth rollouts.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • Out of the Monitoring of almost all Network Devices.
  • Build custom pollers to monitor which is not supported out of the box.
  • Further you can alert on these custom metrics and Out of the box metrics.
  • It provides you great dashboards, Reports features.
  • You can integrate it with any MoM layer tools either using its API or sending out traps.
  • Out of the box Integration with Service Now ITSM Tool.
Read full review
Cons
Cisco
  • Improving the clarity and comprehensiveness of the documentation could benefit users. Clearer documentation ensures that users can make the most of all the functionalities
  • Leverages AI and machine learning for intelligent insights, aiding in issue identification and prediction.
  • Competitive, with AI-driven features becoming increasingly common in APM solutions.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • The software upgrade process is a little hairy and has caused me trouble on occasion.
  • The server that it needs to run is a bit of a resource hog along with the SQL server.
  • Some additional features like the network map are a bit clunky compared to some other products that we use.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
its working for us, we are familiar and comfortable with the tool and its proven valuable/indispensable in helping evaluate our code.
Read full review
SolarWinds
The entire IT staff relies on NPM in its daily operations. It would be impossible for us to maintain our level of service without it. If SolarWinds gets to proud of their product and begins to over charge for it, we would be forced to reconsider and use a different product. But as it stands it is worth the price to renew it.
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Usability
Cisco
It is very user friendly as we were quickly able to adjust to its usability and the vendor who onboarded us with the product delivered phenomenal after sales vendor support. The dashboards are also easy to setup so you can view what is relevant to yourself as a System Administrator.
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SolarWinds
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is quite an extensive product, covering all our bases and requirements. There are a lot of customizable options and features which you can work with for their alerting which is really useful. I haven't found anything yet which I thought SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) could do, but it actually couldn't so overall it works nicely and does the job.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
Read full review
Performance
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
Read full review
Support Rating
Cisco
AppDynamics has its own community site that includes forums and a knowledge base. On the forums, you can converse with other members of the community and ask technical questions as you have them. Though this forum isn’t filled with people there are active members for you to gain some valuable insights.
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SolarWinds
In all of the times that we called support, someone at SolarWinds had the answer for us in a timely manner. Through thwack and other internet searching, we have been able to resolve all of our issues that arose to our satisfaction. The support staff have always been knowledgeable of their products or had a fellow support staff member to rely on to get the needed answers.
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Online Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
The training is good but during the implementation, you can get situations not learned during the training. The trainer was very open to hearing the questions about use cases and always sharing his experience. I really recommend having official training to take advantage of all features that the NPM can bring.
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Make sure your inventory is accurate. Stand up some virtual machines for testing prior to installation. Make sure your database and its credentials are setup. Think about things you want to monitor that may not be obvious - UPS units, Door hardware, PBX systems, Fabric Channel switches, firewalls, routers, switches. Try to setup SNMP on these devices and have an IP that you will assign to the new server. If you do that it will go well.
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
It is distinguished from these programs because the platform provides visualizations of application processes, showing the interplay between various parts and services. Understanding the architecture of complicated apps and finding their weak spots is greatly aided by this.
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SolarWinds
We selected SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor because of the capabilities of the product versus the price. The tools also work well with their other products and support is fairly good. We have never had a problem when we needed to make a call.
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Scalability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable
Read full review
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • AppDynamics has played a pivotal role in optimizing our applications for a seamless user experience. The proactive monitoring and quick issue resolution have translated into improved user satisfaction and increased retention rates.
  • The initial cost and effort associated with implementing AppDynamics might be considered a negative impact, particularly for organizations with budget constraints. However, the long-term benefits have justified this initial investment.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • SolarWinds allows us to proactively address hardware issues before they impact the business. We recently had a server that was experiencing issues sporadically and we were able to use the data from SolarWinds to track down and correct the issue before it tanked the server.
  • SolarWinds gives our IT department some piece of mind knowing that they'll be alerted of any issues real time.
  • We can use SolarWinds data to justify needed to replace or upgrade certain equipment that is key to our core business.
Read full review
ScreenShots

SolarWinds NPM Screenshots

Screenshot of Network monitoring software used to reduce network outages and detect, diagnose, and resolve multi-vendor network performance issues.Screenshot of See relationships for routers, switches, interfaces, volumes, and groups, updated automatically without user intervention to maintain the network, not network maps.Screenshot of Reduce visibility gaps into critical network switches, firewalls, and load balancers with Network Insight for Cisco Nexus, Cisco ASA, and F5 BIG-IP.Screenshot of Reduce the flood of unnecessary network alerts. Create alerts based on simple or complex nested trigger conditions, defined parent/child dependencies, and network topology.Screenshot of Identify dead zones and improve wireless coverage. With its network monitoring tool, users can access out-of-the-box wireless reports, including wireless availability and rogue access points.Screenshot of Configure alerts by calculating dynamic baseline threshold data with network performance monitoring software.