SolarWinds ipMonitor vs. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SolarWinds ipMonitor
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a lightweight performance monitoring tool. It enables monitoring from a single console and out-of-the-box visibility, with some automation available.
$1,570
installation
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
SolarWinds ipMonitorSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Editions & Modules
ipMonitor - 500 Monitors
$1570
installation
ipMonitor - 1000 Monitors
$2620
installation
ipMonitor -2500 Monitors
$5770
installation
NPM
$1,638
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds ipMonitorSolarWinds NPM
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SolarWinds ipMonitorSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds ipMonitor
Chose SolarWinds ipMonitor
SolarWinds NPM provides more functionalities than ipMonitor. It is for medium - large enterprise and provides lots of monitoring options.
Chose SolarWinds ipMonitor
I had some limited exposure to Zabbix that was provided by the client for monitoring the existing network. I found it not as informative as I previously experienced using ipMonitor and we were preparing for a network migration. I ended up setting up remote monitoring using …
Chose SolarWinds ipMonitor
There are some great free or low-cost tools out there. It all depends on your budget and size. We have used a wide variety of products over the years but we recently switched our entire monitoring backbone to SolarWinds products only. They cover just about everything and …
SolarWinds NPM
Chose SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
None.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
SolarWinds ipMonitorSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
SolarWinds ipMonitor
6.7
24 Ratings
20% below category average
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
7.9
231 Ratings
4% below category average
Automated network device discovery6.710 Ratings7.8210 Ratings
Network monitoring8.024 Ratings8.7231 Ratings
Alerts8.223 Ratings8.8228 Ratings
Network mapping6.619 Ratings7.1190 Ratings
Customizable reports4.223 Ratings7.9212 Ratings
Baseline threshold calculation00 Ratings8.0201 Ratings
Network capacity planning00 Ratings7.8188 Ratings
Packet capture analysis00 Ratings7.2130 Ratings
Wireless infrastructure monitoring00 Ratings7.2153 Ratings
Hardware health monitoring00 Ratings8.7215 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SolarWinds ipMonitorSolarWinds 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
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SolarWinds ipMonitorSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(24 ratings)
8.6
(237 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(1 ratings)
9.3
(27 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(6 ratings)
9.0
(21 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.8
(7 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
SolarWinds ipMonitorSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
SolarWinds
SolarWinds ipMonitor is well suited in situation where customer do not wants to hold the responsibility of underlying monitoring infrastructure management such as Servers, Database, website and their high availability. And of course when you need Network, Servers, Services fault and performance monitoring. When you have specialized network monitoring requirement such as Configuration backup, netflow traffic analysis then this is not the right tool.
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
SolarWinds
  • Both network devices and servers may be easily located on the network.
  • It notifies the user whenever any network device undergoes a change in status.
  • Powerful reporting capabilities that provide vital data about your network's devices (uptime, space, utilization of resources on your devices)
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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
SolarWinds
  • It is a very complete and versatile software, but its price can be somewhat high for small companies.
  • During the analysis of the collected data the process can be somewhat slow, so it takes more time than expected.
  • Its configuration process can be somewhat complex since it requires several configurations so having prior knowledge is helpful.
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.
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Likelihood to Renew
SolarWinds
I have very few pieces of software, that are specific to IT and IT services, that just work. Honestly, I don't need the support as it never breaks, but I believe in rewarding vendors that make valuable products
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
SolarWinds
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a perfectly decent network mapper and performance metric gatherer, but it is held back by the UI, which can be hard to navigate once you have more than a couple dozen assets in there. It is fairly priced, but it also sometimes takes a really long time before results come in.
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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
SolarWinds
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
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Performance
SolarWinds
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
SolarWinds
Although I had not much support ticket with ipMonitor support team but I can share my overall experience with SolarWinds products and support team. I am working with SolarWinds support team since last 7 years and in last 2-3 years I have seen a significant improvement in knowledge documentation which is helping end users to troubleshoot problems by themselves. Apart from this SolarWinds phone call based support is very nice as tickets and emails might take some time but a direct phone call can get your job done quickly comparatively.
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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
SolarWinds
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
SolarWinds
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
SolarWinds
We were trying to evaluate different providers and ipMonitor suited us because we had on-prem and cloud instances and management decided to check the paid tool. The ipMonitor is a very responsive tool and it served the purpose well but as IT is evolving and needs are changing, we discontinued the ipMonitor and shifted to Zabbix due to the customization which was the need at the time.
Read full review
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.
Read full review
Scalability
SolarWinds
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
SolarWinds
  • We currently use an outside service to monitor critical network nodes. We will do away with that service shortly.
  • We no longer have to wait to hear from our users if there is a network device down. We will be proactively alerted and we can begin to remediate immediately helping to limit downtime.
  • After initial setup and some tweaking, it requires little to no time to maintain.
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 ipMonitor Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Easy to navigate GUI interfaceScreenshot of Remediation FunctionalityScreenshot of Network Discovery Wizard

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.