Cisco Meraki Insight vs. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Within healthcare, services, or manufacturing organizations the Cisco Meraki systems have performed remarkably well. The security standpoint of Cisco aligned equipment needs no additional mentioning other than they are the top choice for Federal, State, and Local governments as well as a plethora of organizations from different market areas.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is excellent on node monitoring, for servers, switches, voice routers, etc. It also provides quick information on the dashboard, so you can take a look an in a few seconds determine is an entire site is down, if portions are down, and what may be causing the issue. We have experienced some difficulty when working with our wireless environment. It is less than natural when attempting to determine if a wireless access point is down itself, or if the switch feeding the access point is down, either port or switch. It does a very good job telling you if a switch is down, but troubleshooting the devices (specifically access points) it struggles.

Incentivized

• Configuration options.
• Easy to use Dashboard.
• Reporting

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Expensive maintenance fee.
• Expensive equipment.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.

Incentivized

Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Cisco Meraki has made the world of management so much easier, allowing IT Administrators and Business Management personnel to enjoy more time on the business needs and less time managing equipment.

Incentivized

We use NPM along with PRTG Network Monitor. While NPM is great at monitoring network devices and network links and some aspects of the servers, PRTG provides more in-depth monitoring for Server systems, applications and application ports such as Web Ports etc. PRTG also provides a more comprehensive Root cause analysis.

Incentivized

Just about every department we've been asked to provide access to has been able to utilize this system. Be it from a CCTV perspective or for environment reporting, Cisco Meraki Insight can fit into this situation with ease, and without a great deal of training, our users found the system very intuitive.

Incentivized

From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable

Incentivized

• The ease of use saved us many hours of billable time.
• Support added lots of value.
• Licensing and equipment cost really put a damper on overall value (being so high).

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized