TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

CA Unicenter Network and Systems Management (Discontinued) vs. SolarWinds Observability

Save this comparison

Save this comparison

Add Product

Recommended Comparisons

    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)

    Score3.1 out of 10
    N/AUnicenter Network and Systems Management (Unicenter NSM) from CA Technologies reached end of life (EOL) in 2015.N/A

    SolarWinds Observability

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability aims to provide a comprehensive, integrated, and full-stack solution designed to optimize performance, improve availability, and reduce remediation time by correlating data from across the IT ecosystem, including networks, servers, applications, databases, and more.

    $5

    per month node

    Pricing
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)SolarWinds Observability
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    Essentials
    $5
    per month per node
    Advanced
    $9
    per month per node
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)SolarWinds Observability
    Free Trial
    NoYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details—Pricing is set per node, per month, and billing is annual. The prices listed are base prices that could increase depending on your environment. Please speak to a representative to get a quote.
    More Pricing Information
    Best Alternatives
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)SolarWinds Observability
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon CloudWatch
    Score7.8 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Cisco Meraki Dashboard
    Score9 out of 10
    LogicMonitor
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
    Score7.7 out of 10
    ManageEngine Site24x7
    Score10 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)SolarWinds Observability
    Likelihood to Recommend
    3.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.0
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    2.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    CA Unicenter NSM (Discontinued)SolarWinds Observability
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Discontinued Products
    It's a decent system if you're a pure IT shop and want to become ITIL-aligned. It forces everyone into an ITIL mentality - service level agreements, change management, and asset tracking. It's very rote, for better and for worse. It's not appropriate at all as a customer-facing or non-IT facing self-service tool. You will never get your end users to really understand how to use the interface.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    - For small teams serving big organizations - it's a really simple tool to install and set up relatively quickly. - the new installer is also great - I don't have to understand what modules need to be installed; it's all streamlined. - The HCO Licensing allows you to run the Additional polling engines at a scale where the previous licensing model didn't. We can deploy APEs in locations now, which would not have been worth the investment in previously as there weren't enough devices in that location/region to spend the $$$$ on an APE License.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Discontinued Products
    • ITIL ticketing (incidents, problems, etc.).
    • Change orders.
    • Matching up its asset management system with incidents/change orders.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Automated dependency mapping is a big hit.
    • High availability is extremely simple to implement.
    • Simple to use and drill into issues.
    • Analysis of growth patterns driving the recommendation engine.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Discontinued Products
    • The user interface (UX) is antiquated and clunky. Compared to ServiceNow, it feels like it's 15 years behind.
    • It's complicated - We do routine internal training just to get people to use it correctly.
    • It doesn't have an automated way of discovering assets. Everything has to be force-fed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Can be complex to setup
    • Is strongest with network resources
    • Assumes a fairly large amount of base knowledge
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Discontinued Products
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    - decent ease of use - good training materials - good documentation - acceptable level of expected knowledge
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Discontinued Products
    We have to hire 2 full-time 3rd-party consultants to run this application. That tells me it's not a very IT-friendly, vendor-supported application. Compare that with, say, SolarWinds, which is much easier for regular IT staff to customize without sacrificing features and capability. Sure, we have to bring in Loop1 to consult for us when we need to do a major SolarWinds config change or need a really unusual custom query built, but we never need more than 10 hours of consulting per month.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Discontinued Products
    I did not select CA. If it were up to me, I would migrate us to ServiceNow. The user interface on ServiceNow is 100% more modern and 200% more user friendly. With ServiceNow, the front page for end users makes it clear: one button that says "Ask for something" and one button that says "Report a problem". That's what our end users need. The biggest problem we have in our organization is that our end users don't report issues to the Help Desk often enough and rarely ask for things through the Help Desk. A clean, simple self-service option like this would open up a world of new information for our customer service team.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Solarwinds has the best overlap of the two others I've mentioned - the other two tools (Datadog and Dynatrace) are great in their own way but Solarwinds is just good at everything; if I had to pick one tool of the above, it would be Solarwinds for the compatibility and ease of use, the other tools are more focused on being great at certain things while Solarwinds is the jack of all trades.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Discontinued Products
    • It helped make us an ITIL shop.
    • It was integral during our large IT consolidation 10 years ago in merging 10 different IT departments into one by converging on one ticketing system for all IT issues.
    • Its lack of user-friendliness has gated us from being able to deploy a true self-service IT help desk.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • one license requiring 1 PO to be raised
    • sharing costs between departments for monitoring under one platform using APEs
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds Observability Screenshots

    Screenshot of ITOM Executive DashboardScreenshot of Observability MapsScreenshot of Performance Analysis DashboardScreenshot of Application Alerting DashboardScreenshot of Network Path Analysis