SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) vs. ThousandEyes

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
ThousandEyes
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
ThousandEyes offers Digital Experience Monitoring that integrates application performance monitoring within a broader network monitoring platform. It primarily focuses on connectivity monitoring and supports SaaS and hybrid systems monitoring.N/A
Pricing
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)ThousandEyes
Editions & Modules
NPM
$1,638
per year
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds NPMThousandEyes
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalOptional
Additional Details——
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)ThousandEyes
Considered Both Products
SolarWinds NPM
Chose SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
SolarWinds NPM is a good entry tool for smaller companies as it provides you a decent baseline to monitor your network. To unlock the full potential you need to add agents and it falls pretty quick. It is not as good as enterprise tools like ExtraHop. Also it is not as easy to …
Chose SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
SolarWinds gives a more holistic view of your environment. The price was on par for value received and the usability was a little easier with SolarWinds than the other tools. The reporting out of SolarWinds was a little easier to grasp for us, as well. Overall, it's a great tool.
ThousandEyes
Chose ThousandEyes
ThousandEyes has far more service endpoints available in the Internet and much easier to setup monitors
Chose ThousandEyes
Simple Network Management Protocol cannot achieve what an agent-based monitoring solution can. Access layer testing gives you visibility into the user's endpoint. ThousandEyes is able to provide both telemetry and user experience in a bundled solution. The way that Cisco has …
Chose ThousandEyes
One of the biggest differences is the ability to use an enterprise-agent. This is huge because not all web applications are available on the internet. There are a number of internal-only applications that we need to collect data on and monitor availability. Being able to test …
Chose ThousandEyes
ThousandEyes provides end to end path visibility from end users all the way to the applications from remote locations through the WAN to the Cloud. No other platforms provides such visibility to identify issues that impact end user experience.
Chose ThousandEyes
Thousandeyes is in a separate class and provides multi hop analysis
Chose ThousandEyes
To be honest for our use we utilize both PRTG as well as ThousandEyes for different and unique purposes. ThousandEyes could do everything however it does become a bit cost-prohibitive. We were able to gain access to ThousandEyes from our Cisco licensing on other products and …
Chose ThousandEyes
A thousand eyes offer more insight into the internet compared to other products. It has really good network performance monitoring and network mapping capabilities. Alerting and reports are much better and the dashboard visual is great. Customer service is very very responsive.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)ThousandEyes
Network Performance Monitoring
Comparison of Network Performance Monitoring features of Product A and Product B
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)
7.9
231 Ratings
4% below category average
ThousandEyes
-
Ratings
Automated network device discovery7.8210 Ratings00 Ratings
Network monitoring8.7231 Ratings00 Ratings
Baseline threshold calculation8.0201 Ratings00 Ratings
Alerts8.9228 Ratings00 Ratings
Network capacity planning7.8188 Ratings00 Ratings
Packet capture analysis7.2130 Ratings00 Ratings
Network mapping7.1190 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable reports7.9212 Ratings00 Ratings
Wireless infrastructure monitoring7.2153 Ratings00 Ratings
Hardware health monitoring8.8215 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)ThousandEyes
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NinjaOne
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Score 9.2 out of 10
SolarWinds Pingdom
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Score 7.7 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
PingPlotter
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Score 9.4 out of 10
Catchpoint
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Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprises
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Score 8.8 out of 10
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Score 9.1 out of 10
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User Ratings
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)ThousandEyes
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(237 ratings)
9.0
(63 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.3
(27 ratings)
7.6
(3 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(21 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.0
(28 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM)ThousandEyes
Likelihood to Recommend
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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Cisco
At least for me, it is a very important tool to diagnose bandwidth / Routing issues. Any global company should have ThousandEyes, it will avoid you many headaches. You'll need to invest in servers (on-prem and remote) in all locations in which you need, you can take advantage of all the monitoring tools.
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Pros
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
Cisco
  • Alerting on outages. ThousandEyes provides a few different options to receive alerts: you can have alerts emailed to a subset of (or all) users, there is a basic Slack integration, and if more flexibility is required (or your preferred method of being alerted isn't built-in) webhooks can be used to hit another API.
  • Speeding up mean time to resolution (or mean time to innocence if you're a more siloed and blame-happy organization). Failure alerts can be configured to include the cause of the failure instead of just "resource x is down." For example, the alerts can come out and say that a website was down due to an HTTP 500, which will help prevent staff from spinning their wheels trying to diagnose the network from the client to the web server.
  • Post mortems and root cause analyses. After an outage has been resolved, it is possible to go back for up to 30 days without losing any level of detail for the test in question, and to view information like the DNS response received, the network path taken by the traffic, and any added latency incurred by an individual link. It can also be used to view Internet routing changes surrounding the incident.
  • Support. Every ticket or chat I have opened has been met by a friendly and helpful staff member that has been able to provide helpful insight into what is causing a particular issue, and what steps they will take on their side to resolve an issue or provide suggestions of steps to take on our side if necessary.
Read full review
Cons
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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Cisco
  • Continue to innovate and support more and more services. In the world of IOT and point to point traffic being more and more prevalent creating a flexible product is fantastic. Build on the end user product, last mile and even more sharing.
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Likelihood to Renew
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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Cisco
We will definitely renew and maybe even extend our usage of ThousandEyes. We have been using ThousandEyes now for a couple of years and it has shown us major benefits. With the new options it offers for SD-WAN for us it is a no brainer to renew our current licenses
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Usability
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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Cisco
I'm happy with the monitoring part, now if you want to know the benefits cost related and usability I'm not the person who can answer that.
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Reliability and Availability
SolarWinds
Always available. Always is important to plan the software available during the machine/application setup.
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Cisco
No answers on this topic
Performance
SolarWinds
Pages load slow, especially the bettors map. Could be that my server is old.
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Cisco
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
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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Cisco
You have online support from the tool itself 24/7 and they are very responsive. We also have a specific account manager and specific engineer assigned to help us with very specific questions for our environment. The level of response to our requirements is always super high. We have requested specific features to be added and these have been developed and introduced very quick tot he product (within weeks). Their DevOps and agile approach seems to pay off.
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Online Training
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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Cisco
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
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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Cisco
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
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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Cisco
Simple Network Management Protocol cannot achieve what an agent-based monitoring solution can. Access layer testing gives you visibility into the user's endpoint. ThousandEyes is able to provide both telemetry and user experience in a bundled solution. The way that Cisco has built in the enterprise agents to their 9300 and 9500 switches has made exposure to the platform widespread.
Read full review
Scalability
SolarWinds
From the direction and information I have been given it is very flexible and scalelable
Read full review
Cisco
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
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.
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Cisco
  • Real time visibility about network health can prepare us for outages
  • Less time wasted troubleshooting end user network issues when ThousandEyes can give clarity which saves time doing extra work
  • Before doing business with a SaaS product we can use ThousandEyes to give historical datat on network uptime.
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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.

ThousandEyes Screenshots

Screenshot of Path visibility demonstrates outages.Screenshot of ThousandEyes End User Monitoring delivers both on-demand and real-time visibility into each employee’s experience of SaaS and Internally-hosted applications, as well as underlying wireless LAN, WAN, Internet connectivity and system health.Screenshot of ThousandEyes Internet Insights™ combines a massive data set with algorithmic outage detection to provide near real-time insights into the SaaS applications and networks your business relies on. With Internet Insights, you can manage digital experience at Internet scale.Screenshot of