Cisco Nexus Dashboard vs. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Cisco Nexus Dashboard
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Cisco Nexus Dashboard provides a simplified, centralized data center dashboard that enables businesses to manage their hybrid cloud network operations.N/A
SolarWinds NPM
Score 8.3 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
Cisco Nexus DashboardSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
NPM
$1,638
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Cisco Nexus DashboardSolarWinds NPM
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Cisco Nexus DashboardSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Considered Both Products
Cisco Nexus Dashboard
Chose Cisco Nexus Dashboard
Better ecosystem and support model.
Chose Cisco Nexus Dashboard
With NI we now have capability to go deep into Fabric and understand the flow. It offers us one single plane of glass for everything we have within our ACI Fabrics in the DatCenter
SolarWinds NPM

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Cisco Nexus DashboardSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Cisco Nexus Dashboard
-
Ratings
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
7.9
231 Ratings
4% below category average
Automated network device discovery00 Ratings7.8210 Ratings
Network monitoring00 Ratings8.7231 Ratings
Baseline threshold calculation00 Ratings8.1201 Ratings
Alerts00 Ratings8.9228 Ratings
Network capacity planning00 Ratings7.8188 Ratings
Packet capture analysis00 Ratings7.2130 Ratings
Network mapping00 Ratings7.1190 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings7.9212 Ratings
Wireless infrastructure monitoring00 Ratings7.2153 Ratings
Hardware health monitoring00 Ratings8.8215 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Cisco Nexus DashboardSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Small Businesses
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.2 out of 10
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Intermapper
Intermapper
Score 8.5 out of 10
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)
Score 8.8 out of 10
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Cisco Nexus DashboardSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.2
(36 ratings)
8.6
(237 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(27 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.0
(21 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
8.8
(6 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 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
8.8
(6 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
Cisco Nexus DashboardSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Cisco Nexus Dashboard Insights is a powerful network monitoring software. It may assist you in more effectively monitoring your network. With the program's assistance, we can detect a wide range of network flaws and irregularities. Furthermore, it eliminates an interruption in the services we offer our consumers while also allowing us to reduce our high rates. Technicians no longer need to utilize CLI to copy and paste hundreds of coding lines. If you want a powerful programmable management program for your next-generation data centre, this is the program for you.
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
  • It is a flexible tool that helps streamline and facilitate the development of new services.
  • Ideal for automating tasks such as network modification, configuration, and removal, which provides great time savings.
  • Ensures services without interruption and without difficult scheduling.
  • It has a simple user interface and excellent support, made up of several providers.
  • It facilitates the administration of managed services.
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
  • With the latest version release of Cisco Nexus Dashboard to version 3.0.1 I can say that most of the features have already improved but one of the wishlists that I want for ND is the possibility of extracting lists of Anomaly.
  • Include older versions of Firmware in the list of choices when doing the firmware upgrade analysis, currently only the recommended is in the list of choices.
  • If possible, include all the prechecks in the Firmware pre-upgrade analysis same in the script provided by Cisco.
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
No answers on this topic
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
For the end user, it is relatively easy to use. However, some training and practice is a must because the NSO is not as straightforward as the traditional router CLI. For the administrator, Cisco Network Service Orchestrator (NSO) is just like another program running on the Linux system--there is no big difference.
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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
Great and effective automation functionalities and the tools on network security management are the best and easy data reports building. Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller feature for the network monitoring and easy management of various services and even offers the best analytics and also powerful integration tools for easy data migration.
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SolarWinds
Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
Read full review
Support Rating
Cisco
No answers on this topic
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's an upgrade from DCNM and worth looking into. We're trying to solve the issue of Creating and maintaining VLAN fabrics. Speed and ease of use are much better than other options. The app is great; the functionality is solid. Though It can have an improved UI, and user navigation could be simpler. It helps track your data and pipelines; you can set it up in different ways to monitor different flows about where its data is. It has in-built integration with Splunk, which is what was helpful.
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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
The platform is very well done, and to date, I have had no complaints about the implementation of the platform and no security issues or vulnerabilities. Cisco in all its product releases new versions to resolve security issues or bugs that appear on the platform, this is a big plus.
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SolarWinds
From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable
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Return on Investment
Cisco
  • From the experience of use, I can affirm that the tool improves the user experience since it reduced the time in the administration of the infrastructure, the prediction of events, as well as the suggestions for solving the problems.
  • all the aforementioned has been simplified thanks to the tool, in turn, it helps us to maintain the network in high availability.
  • The impact has been very positive due to the simplification of the administration, which in turn reduces the detection times, leading to a reduction in costs.
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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.