PacketTrap (Discontinued) vs. SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
PacketTrap (Discontinued)
Score 1.0 out of 10
N/A
PacketTrap was network monitoring software acquired by Dell but discontinued in 2013.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
PacketTrap (Discontinued)SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
NPM
$1,638
per year
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PacketTrap (Discontinued)SolarWinds 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
PacketTrap (Discontinued)SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Top Pros
Top Cons

No answers on this topic

Features
PacketTrap (Discontinued)SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
PacketTrap (Discontinued)
-
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 Ratings8.0201 Ratings
Alerts00 Ratings8.8228 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 Ratings8.7215 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PacketTrap (Discontinued)SolarWinds 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
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.2 out of 10
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
Cisco Prime LAN Management (discontinued)
Score 7.6 out of 10
Nmap
Nmap
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PacketTrap (Discontinued)SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
1.0
(1 ratings)
8.6
(237 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(27 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(21 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 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
-
(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
PacketTrap (Discontinued)SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
Likelihood to Recommend
Discontinued Products
I would have said 10 if they didn't kill the product. I know Blue Folder took a piece of this, but we never got into it and just changed to Auvik and PRTG.
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.
Read full review
Pros
Discontinued Products
  • Network monitoring was pretty on point. Not a lot of false positives.
  • Easy to deploy.
  • Easy to use.
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
Discontinued Products
  • Come back! After Dell purchased this, they ended support for it. In my experience, it was one of the better tools.
  • Integration with other systems, but again, it is EOL, so doesn't matter.
  • MiB library needs a refresh, but again, EOL.
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
Discontinued Products
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.
Read full review
Usability
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Discontinued Products
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
Discontinued Products
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
Discontinued Products
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.
Read full review
Online Training
Discontinued Products
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.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Discontinued Products
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Discontinued Products
Again, the main piece was config backups. That is a real big deal, when you are dealing with a lot of customers that don't have a change management process. So changes can be done to a networking device and we need to be able to review what it was one day and what it changed to the next. This happens a lot with internal IT departments, that break something and you support them as an MSP.
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
Discontinued Products
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
Discontinued Products
No answers on this topic
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.