ControlUp vs Nagios XI vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between ControlUp, Nagios XI, and SolarWinds NPM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring.
To learn more, read our detailed IT Infrastructure Monitoring Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most valuable features in ControlUp are endpoint monitoring and the many features that are available.""It has a great career time monitoring tool.""The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities.""It shows you so many details of what's going on in that log-on that, if there's a problem, you can identify it in five minutes.""ControlUp has an easy installation process.""The most valuable feature is the granularity of visibility into the resources that are in use by our applications.""Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service.""When using ControlUp, the core feature that we have found valuable is its UI. It is a valuable tool to view the analysis reactions of a base core Level 2 or Level 1 team so that they can complete the necessary troubleshooting."

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"Nagios is stable and it's easy to use the monitoring software, which is why we chose this product.""The most valuable feature is the monitoring of processes.""The most valuable feature is the dashboard, where I can have a single screen that provides a summary for hundreds of servers.""I can monitor a software made in-house to software of bigger companies.""The most useful aspect of this solution is the ability to customize it for the client agent.""The features I've found the most useful are the plug-ins, the fact that you can connect almost everything to it. That's very useful.""Nagios XI helped me to draw the network and check for system failures.""Though I downplayed the administrative NCC GUI, this is by far the strongest aspect of the Nagios XI product."

More Nagios XI Pros →

"The alerting and usage tracking notifications on disk space capacity, network and processor utilization.""A product that is well-tested and trusted in demanding situations.""What I've found most valuable about the solution is that it's scalable.""The most valuable features are language support and technical support.""The biggest thing for me is that it provided enough information for me to monitor. It alerts and provides you with the information you need.""It is considerably cheaper compared to other tools.""The solution is very user-friendly.""It is scalable."

More SolarWinds NPM Pros →

Cons
"ControlUp could improve the integration. Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop monitoring has better integration.""Solve is a quick and intuitive tool for quickly mapping data together, however, once you have the view of the data that you like, it is difficult to share this with colleagues.""Something I would love to see from a partner perspective would be maybe a way to do this in a surface hosting provider.""The most common complaint that I have heard, at least within our organization, is about reporting. They have their own reporting. It's just that it doesn't yet include everything that you can look at within the application. You can only report on specific metrics or collections.""We'd like to see the mobile app working again so that we can get alerts 24/7. This is especially useful for the person on call.""Integration is always a problem, and we feel that we are doing our best and the service provider thinks they are doing their best. I guess if ControlUp's system could be more capable or if people could understand the integration part, that would be better.""It can be improved by including script-based scheduling.""The graphical user interface needs to be improved from version to version."

More ControlUp Cons →

"It can be quite difficult to know which drivers and agents to use when setting up.""The PNP4Nagios plugin not working easily with XI is an issue for me, because some open source monitoring plugins do not work out of the box. But in the end, you learn to live with it.""The pricing has recently risen. I know they've changed what is covered under the license, however, it doesn't change the way we use it and adds nothing to our experience, and yet we now have to pay more.""Improve the documentation, examples, and best practices, therefore users can understand how to do things.""I would like to see more customization in the network map because it is a bit tricky to use it.""The product's stability could be even better.""The product does not have SAP monitoring.""The scalability of Nagios XI is scalable. However, it is not easy to do."

More Nagios XI Cons →

"I think Solar Winds NPM needs to create a profile with documentation responsibility.""Sometimes there are issues when upgrading to a new version of the product.""The reporting module that got integrated into the system itself, used to be a standalone solution and I preferred that.""The scalability can be better.""Consolidation of platforms would provide a smoother experience.""The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market.""The solution could be more secure.""One of the challenges with SolarWinds is that in order to pull the data, we have to have a lot of false positives."

More SolarWinds NPM Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "We are satisfied with the price compared to other solutions."
  • "Personally, I would say that the only thing I could compare it to is another monitoring tool that we use, Nagios."
  • More ControlUp Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing is really cost efficient. The licensing is perpetual and can be renewed very easily."
  • "You can grow into the higher-priced scale as they learn how to utilize the features for Nagios XI."
  • "For the cost of the commercial product and support, and taking into account the open source characteristics of it, I believe it is difficult to a better value."
  • "We are using the free version of this solution."
  • "This solution is very expensive, at approximately $5,000 USD when I purchased it, which is why I haven't upgraded my version in several years."
  • "The licensing fees for this solution are approximately $3,000 USD per year."
  • "The pricing is high with separate licensing for the product and support."
  • "Nagios Core does not have any payment, but Nagios XI requires payment for the license."
  • More Nagios XI Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I’d suggest that people be aware that licensing has tiers."
  • "Excluding the costs of running VMs and physical blade servers, our licensing costs run around US$200,000/year for over 60 polling engines."
  • "I think that the cost has risen, but the functionality and versatility is way above other products."
  • "The licensing model is such that you can purchase only what you need; and then grow into the next level by paying only the difference in price and the associated maintenance costs."
  • "The price points are more than competitive when compared to other vendors."
  • "I believe the original setup cost was around $3500 with an annual cost of around $1200-$1500 to renew the support license. This would bring the average day-to-day cost of around $5-$6 over three years."
  • "You have to license it per year, for the support. You don't really need to have support once you've already set it up. Once you install SolarWinds, you can skip on the licensing. It will still work."
  • "The pricing needs to be improved. It is too high. One full engine costs around $10 000, which is why we don't have high availability right now."
  • More SolarWinds NPM Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Anonymous User
    I have researched a quite a few network monitoring tools which can be used for various monitoring purposes of not only the servers, but the intermediate routers as well. There are majorly three types of these softwares. Ones which are completely open-source, you can do almost anything you want using these, but they require quite some expertise before you can use them. Then there are the ones that are not open source, the enterprise softwares and cost you some money, but on the other hand, they are extremely easy to set-up and learn. You can have them up and running in a matter of minutes. And then there are those which are completely cloud based. They can be free of cost or charge some money depending on the software. The good thing about these is that you don’t have to install any extra software, and it can be managed completely online but then again these have limited features and you cannot exploit them to the full extent as you can do with the open-source and to some extent the enterprise software, so I won’t suggest you to use these, because these are generally not the complete solutions and require other support software to achieve the same. Below I have listed the outstanding pros and cons of the various Network analyzers that you can look into Nagios Pros: Nagios offers an extensive set of collector plug-ins that allows users to gather performance and availability data from a broad range of operating systems, including  Windows and Netware Nagios… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:When using ControlUp, the core feature that we have found valuable is its UI It is a valuable tool to view the… more »
    Top Answer:They have standard and platinum licensing. We have a platinum license.
    Top Answer:This solution be improved by including load throttling tools. For example, I can identify a service where we spend a lot… more »
    Top Answer:It is an open-source platform with valuable features for performance and stability.
    Top Answer:I don't deal with the licensing aspect of the product.
    Top Answer:The product's stability could be even better.
    Top Answer:It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are… more »
    Top Answer:From my point of view, SolarWind is the best tool.
    Top Answer:We are partners with SolarWinds and we sell a lot of Network management to large enterprises also because of… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    2,018
    Comparisons
    1,312
    Reviews
    6
    Average Words per Review
    864
    Rating
    8.7
    Views
    10,655
    Comparisons
    8,242
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    343
    Rating
    8.1
    Views
    11,967
    Comparisons
    6,603
    Reviews
    28
    Average Words per Review
    492
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
    Learn More
    Overview

    ControlUp is a digital experience monitoring management platform that makes it possible for IT teams to deliver a work-from-anywhere experience for employees. The solution makes fixing and preventing issues easy, enabling IT teams to make smarter decisions. It also provides monitoring performance, availability, and useful productivity metrics.

    The ControlUp platform supports:

    • Any digital workstyle
    • Physical endpoints
    • Virtual desktops
    • Apps
    • SaaS
    • Web apps
    • Unified communications tools

    ControlUp Features

    ControlUp has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Out-of-the-box device and performance metrics
    • Custom metric and device data collection
    • Non-intrusive, secure agents with offline mode
    • Custom reporting
    • Easy-to-use dashboards
    • Scalable SaaS infrastructure
    • Built-in troubleshooting & remediation actions
    • Remote assist
    • Custom script actions
    • Multiple scripting languages
    • Automation and alerting

    ControlUp Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing ControlUp. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Wide range of platform options: ControlUp offers multiple platform options including Windows, macOS, Linux, and IGE, independent of device location.
    • Powerful analytics: With ControlUp, you can analyze across your entire infrastructure or you can collect detailed individual device performance.
    • Optimizes performance: The solution enables you to remediate issues and optimize performance with its support of both manual and automated actions.
    • Minimize user downtime: ControlUp helps you catch common issues that lead to workflow interruptions. Self-correcting capabilities and comprehensive early-warning systems address issues before they impact employee productivity.
    • Resolve issues faster: The solution enables you to spend less time on support calls and more time driving value via its real-time troubleshooting and remediation solutions.
    • Increased visibility of remote environments: Gain real-time visibility across your entire network and find new ways to deliver the best end-user experience possible.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the ControlUp solution.

    A Chair, IEEE Consumer Technology Society - Dallas,Texas, USA at a non-profit says, “In terms of the public cloud, ControlUp's features make us feel very secure. Security, uptime, and reduced capital expenditures are the main reasons we use ControlUp. So basically, the money that we consume is based on the amount of time we are using a service. ControlUp offers a return-on-investment type of approach that helps us.”

    A VP Virtualisation and Citrix Engineer at BlackRock mentions, “Solve is quickly becoming one of the most-used features. Its interface allows us to connect to all 54,000 monitored endpoints in real-time. The script-based actions have allowed us to extend the core reporting capabilities. Combined with the triggers, we have been growing their usage to fix things before they become an issue. Lastly, the controller view allows us to compare the configurations of settings side-by-side which is extremely helpful when tracking down the RCA of an issue.”

    A Senior Citrix Remote Access Engineer at Rabobank comments, “The high-level view of the estate coupled with powerful administration tools has been great. We can see real-time performance and trends and can create triggers for common issues with associated scripts that can automate a lot of the previous manual remediation steps.”

    Nagios XI provides monitoring of all mission-critical infrastructure components, including applications, services, operating systems, network protocols, systems metrics, and network infrastructure. Third-party add-ons provide tools for monitoring virtually all in-house and external applications, services, and systems.

    Nagios XI uses a powerful Core 4 monitoring engine that provides users with the highest levels of server monitoring performance. This high degree of performance enables nearly limitless scalability and monitoring powers.

    With Nagios XI, stakeholders can check up on their infrastructure status using the role-based web interface. Sophisticated dashboards enable access to monitoring information and third-party data. Administrators can easily set up permissions so users can only access the infrastructure they are authorized to view.

    Nagios XI Benefits and Features

    Some of the benefits and top features of using Nagios XI include:

    • Extensive IT infrastructure monitoring: Comprehensively monitor all of your organization’s infrastructure’s components. Hundreds of third-party add-ons let you monitor virtually any internal application, service, or system.

    • Proactivity: With built-in, automated trend analysis and capacity planning charts, organizations can plan infrastructure upgrades before legacy systems encounter unexpected issues. IT staff, business stakeholders, and end users are notified via email or SMS with details of the outage so they can begin handling the issue immediately.

    • Multiple integration options: Numerous available APIs allow seamless integration with in-house and third-party applications. Thousands of community-developed add-ons that extend monitoring and native alerting capabilities as well as custom interfaces are available, allowing you to customize Nagios XI to your company's needs.

    • Complete visibility: Get a single view of your entire IT operations network and business processes. The Nagios XI dashboards provide at-a-glance access to monitoring information and third-party data. Views give users quick access to the most useful information.

    • User-friendly interface: Customize the layout, design, and settings for each user’s GUI, providing clients and team members with the flexibility they need. Administrators can easily delegate control over monitoring configuration management, system settings, and more to end users and team members using the built-in web-based configuration interface. A configuration wizard guides users through the process of monitoring new devices, services, and applications without understanding complex monitoring concepts.

    • Configuration snapshots: Snapshots allow you to save and archive your most recent configurations. Later on, you can revert back to them whenever you like.

    • Advanced user management: Ensure a secure infrastructure environment by easily setting up and managing user accounts and assigning custom roles with just a few mouse clicks.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Nagios XI stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its integration options and monitoring abilities, as well as its alerting features.

    David P., a senior DevOps engineer at EML Payments Ltd, writes, “We use Nagios as a network discovery tool. We use Nagios to maintain our uptime statistics and to monitor our services. It has allowed us to be much more sophisticated in our monitoring and alerting.”

    An IT-OSS manager at a comms service provider notes, “Nagios XI has a custom API feature, and we can expose custom APIs for our integration. This is a great feature.”

    SolarWinds NPM is a network monitoring solution that enables you to detect, diagnose, and resolve network performance issues and outages quickly and efficiently. The solution is a powerful tool that can help you increase service levels, reduce downtime with multi vendor network monitoring, simplify the management of complex network devices, improve operational efficiency, and much more.

    SolarWinds NPM Features

    SolarWinds NPM has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Increased scalability
    • Fault, performance, and availability monitoring
    • Dynamic network discovery and mapping
    • Cross-stack network data correlation
    • Customizable topology
    • Dependency-aware intelligent alerts
    • Intelligent maps
    • Automated capacity forecasting, alerting, and reporting
    • Logical and physical network monitoring
    • Monitor Azure vNet gateway visibility

    SolarWinds NPM Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing SolarWinds NPM. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Comprehensive monitoring for advanced network devices: With SolarWinds NPM, you can gain insight into the health and performance of your load balancers, Cisco ASA and Palo Alto Networks, firewalls, and Cisco Nexus switches.
    • Hardware health monitoring: SolarWinds NPM makes it easy for you to monitor, alert, and report on key device metrics, including power supply, fan speed, and temperature.
    • Customizable performance and availability reports: With this feature, you can choose from more than 100 templates to schedule and also generate custom network performance reports.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the SolarWinds NPM solution.

    PeerSpot user Andrew N., Senior Network Engineer at Element Critical, says, “The "Performance Analyzer" feature is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's able to do the bounded graphs of all the interface stats, from errors to broadcasts and to current traffic. With a click of a button you're able to, in one interface, look at historical data for those items.” He also adds, “From the troubleshooting point of view, just having that peace of mind is great. And, The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes."

    Daniel S., Systems and Data Warehouse Supervisor at MMSD, mentions, “The alerting and usage tracking is a valuable feature because it alerts us when we're getting near capacity on disk space, network utilization or processor utilization. It helps us manage our capacity and enables us to be proactive.”

    A Senior Vice President and CIO at a financial services firm explains, “As we look to add more servers to our virtual environment and to understand the impact, the solution allows us to dig into the historical charts related to capacity planning. It also gives us visibility of spikes and allows us to track down the reasons for their occurrences. So too, it makes room for potential processes that have gotten hung or runaway and to know when it's time to reboot a server or service.”

    Dinesh N., Digital Innovation at Bobcat Company, states, “The best part of the solution is the sharing display. It gives a general public ID wherein everyone can link to a public display. That's a good feature.”


    Fazal A., Implementation & Support Specialist at 360Factors, comments, “We have configured multiple alerts for our network devices, including routers and switches, so that we are notified if any interface goes down. In the event an interface goes down, we have multiple reports that include availability monitoring, network uptime monitoring, and network downtime monitoring. These reports are on multiple schedules such as the end of the day, end of the last business day of the week, monthly, and quarterly. This gives us the ability to provide reports to our management and let them know the performance of our network.”

    Sample Customers
    B/E Aerospace, North Carolina SECU, Vancouver Island Health Authority, University of Florida
    Nagios has over one million users globally, including AOL, DHL, McAfee, MCI, MTV, Yahoo!, Universal, Toshiba, Sony, Siemens, and JPMorgan Chase.
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm57%
    Non Profit14%
    Energy/Utilities Company14%
    Computer Software Company14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Computer Software Company14%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Insurance Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider32%
    Manufacturing Company24%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Retailer8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization47%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise34%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise35%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise33%
    Buyer's Guide
    IT Infrastructure Monitoring
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.