New Relic vs. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
New Relic
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
New Relic is a SaaS-based web and mobile application performance management provider for the cloud and the datacenter. They provide code-level diagnostics for dedicated infrastructures, the cloud, or hybrid environments and real time monitoring.
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
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
New RelicSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Editions & Modules
Free (Forever)
$0
No credit card required; 100 GB free ingest per month, 1 free full user + unlimited basic users, 8 days retention, 100 Synthetics Checks
Telemetry Data Platform
$0.25
per month per extra GB data ingest (after first free 100GB per month)
Incident Intelligence
$0.50
per month per event (after first 1000 free events per month)
Standard
$99
per month per full user (after first free full user - unlimited free basic users)
Pro
Contact sales team
Enterprise
Contact sales team
NPM
$1,638
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
New RelicSolarWinds NPM
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
New RelicSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Considered Both Products
New Relic
Chose New Relic
Pricing was the primary factor. The cost associated with New Relic works better within a budget line than either of their competitors.
SolarWinds NPM
Chose SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
SolarWinds vs NewRelic is apples to oranges. New Relic provides a lot of metrics for our applications that NPM was never designed to do. However, NewRelic Infrastructure provides a much better visualization (a closer to real-time look) of hardware utilization than NPM does.

PRTG
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
New RelicSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
New Relic
-
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
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User Ratings
New RelicSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(126 ratings)
8.6
(237 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.8
(16 ratings)
9.3
(27 ratings)
Usability
7.5
(8 ratings)
9.0
(21 ratings)
Availability
9.1
(2 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
9.1
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(7 ratings)
8.0
(28 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.5
(8 ratings)
10.0
(7 ratings)
Configurability
7.3
(3 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.0
(1 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.1
(2 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(2 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
New RelicSolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
New Relic
New - relic is well suited if you want to analyse the performance of your services and you want to improve it. Integration with multiple services with same account gives a clear picture of flow of your APIs if you have micro-service architecture. New-relic is less appropriate when you want to do logging of your system. As it does not emits every single calls
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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
New Relic
  • gives us an monitoring of all our underlying servers and also we can configure some alerts upon them like CPU and memory alerts.
  • Kubernetes cluster monitoring with new relic for EKS gives us and minute details of our cluster utilisation like node usage, pods memory request and limits
  • Network traceability for each and every request with response time analysis is great we can trace which component is responsible for generating response delay
  • log managements of the logs the infrastructure is generating we can view logs through there only
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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.
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Cons
New Relic
  • I would like to see sort of simulator inside the user interface, that way we can send requests directly from it to test some configuration instead of setting up a test environment in our end.
  • It would be nice if the data ingestion can be filtered by APM's. That way we can know which application is ingested most data.
  • It would be nice if we could ingest logs (apache, system logs, and other logs) and correlate them with the APM.
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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
New Relic
The only issue that we have had with New Relic is that the price might be a little expensive for smaller companies. The amount of data you store in New Relic impacts the cost, and can get away from you if you don't work closely with the vendor. Overall though the application is top notch.
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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
New Relic
As an engineer, New Relic has been very quick and easy for me to pick up/install/use. It has been less easy for some of the less technical-minded folks in our organization and their UI still is inconsistent multiple years after refactoring their platform to be New Relic One.
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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
New Relic
Never observed an outage
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SolarWinds
Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
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Performance
New Relic
there are times where browser cache will cause issues that require you to clear your browser before continuing.
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SolarWinds
Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
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Support Rating
New Relic
There are times I feel that the initial support is lacking. And in some cases the automated responses of not hearing anything are annoying if the reason why there has been no movement is because we are still waiting to hear back from NR support. So, i think they should loose the automation as it can seem disingenuous
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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
New Relic
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
New Relic
It's better to start by implementing New Relic in one project and test everything. Try to follow best recommended practices and read all the official documentation. Everything seems well tested. Then, start by installing agents to the rest of your projects and keep a close look to all logs and metrics New Relic gives you.
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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
New Relic
New Relic is the most full-featured offering that we've found, and is incredibly easy to start using with a PHP app. The New Relic agent is installed as a PHP extension so it is able to monitor and track the performance of any PHP app being run by the web server. Other tools required the installation and setup of a PHP dependency at the application level.
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.
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Scalability
New Relic
Agent deployment is easily integrated into our workflow. Adding the agent to new servers is quick and painless
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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
New Relic
  • Less time debugging issues or letting issues go unknown
  • We know of issues before our customers
  • One common tool for logs, apm, infrastructure, and most alerting. Makes for easier developer experience.
  • Cost is expensive and is one of highest engineering spends
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.