SolarWinds NPM vs Spiceworks vs VMware Aria Operations for Applications comparison

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SolarWinds NPM, Spiceworks, and VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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
"It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation.""It gives us a map of the network setup and one console to see the entire network.""The interface is user-friendly, making it easy to use.""All the features are very good. The monitoring of the equipment, the configuration manager, and the IP address monitoring are great.""The solution is extremely stable. We haven't had any issues in that regard. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches, or crashes.""Reporting tools are a great feature along with the ability to create customized reports for you""Technical support has always been great. They are very responsive. We've been satisfied with their level of support.""SolarWinds dashboard is very fast. Also, their interface is very good, it looks very user-friendly. The product allows me to see a summary of the network being monitored at a glance."

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"Tickets by e-mail, with actions by hastag.""It's easy to understand.""The solution is very stable. It's reliable and efficient.""The most valuable features are the inventory and personalization.""It was easy to integrate Spiceworks with our existing setup.""The nice thing about Spiceworks is always it's free. Monitoring of printers for low toner. Finding machines that have low memory or low hard disk space.""If you're in the market for a low-cost service desk system, Spiceworks is a good software solution to start out with, especially when it comes to startups and those organizations that don't currently have any existing service desk software in place.""The solution is easy to use and easy to manage."

More Spiceworks Pros →

"For us, the ease of deployment in combination with TMZ was the most important part because we don't have to manually deploy a complex monitoring solution. We can more or less do that with the click of a button, and we are not dependent on the developers to provide us with all the necessary features and functions to make that work. We can just deploy it on a workload cluster and monitor at least a good part of the workload. If we want to go into detail, we clearly need to make changes, but for a good part of application monitoring, it gives us good insights.""This solution allows me to have true visibility for any metrics when it comes to my cloud, and private.""The solution is great for virtualization and preparing the infrastructure in Tanzu to test products. It's very fast and has good visibility.""The most valuable aspects of the solution are its ease of use and its ease of implementation.""No issues with stability.""Tanzu itself, integrated with multiple solutions, bestows support and security upon a container platform, especially when it comes to managing open-source container platforms such as Kubernetes.""VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you. Therefore, the best aspect is the support.""People are very pleased with the implementation."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Pros →

Cons
"The integration with video apps could be better.""There should be a little bit more integration in some of the other tooling and utilizing the APIs of devices or tools could be a little bit better.""I would like to see some enhancement on the reporting side, such as making it a little bit easier to create reports or having a larger assortment of canned reports.""Being able to detect devices that are trying to connect wirelessly would make using this solution much easier.""The integration with the APIs and the web servers deployed can definitely be improved.""SolarWinds NPM needs to increase its elements. One polling engine can only support 10,000 elements then it becomes slow. There are limitations even if you have the full SLX version license.""SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery.""The only thing that can be improved is to continually add to the existing capabilities of the product."

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"Having an integrated asset management tool, where I can plug in things that are offline, would be good.""There are a lot of disadvantages to Spiceworks because it's not an agent-based solution.""The SNMP sniffer requires a lot of work to get right.""Sometimes, it can be difficult to integrate what you need.""The GUI must be improved.""It would be nice to have remote access to the solution via a tablet. They also need remote control from a PC. Right now, to complete the technical support process, you have to have a tool to access the PC, and check the problems.""Since Spiceworks is a free tool, it's not very scriptable or customizable.""The network mapping could be improved. Putting together an actual bonafide network map would be really nice."

More Spiceworks Cons →

"The initial setup should be easier and more seamless.""The documentation and integration with Kubernetes could be improved.""They could make it more easy to plug-in data so that a nontechnical person will be able to use it, like accountants or finance people. That way they don't have to ask us.""In the new version, I would love to see more prediction capabilities. It would be great if one could see the alerts get a little more enriched with information and become more human-friendly instead of the technical stuff that they put in there. I think those would be really awesome outcomes to get.""It could use a URL document server. Everything in the market is moving towards automation and everybody's looking for the single click operations as well relational data locality.""The implementation is a long process that should be improved.""The main problem I have is that the license cost is very high.""Its billing model is consumption-based. I understand the consumption-based model, but it is not necessarily easy to estimate and guess how many points or how much we are going to consume on a specific application up until we get to that point. So, for us, it would be helpful to have more insights or predictability into what we can expect from a cost perspective if we are starting to use specific features. This can potentially also drive our consumption a bit more."

More VMware Aria Operations for Applications Cons →

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 →

  • "The product is free! Get it now."
  • "It's free."
  • "It might be about $300 annually for a bigger company. If you pay annually, it's better and cheaper."
  • "Seeing that it is a low-cost solution, I would advise you to go ahead with Spiceworks and experiment with it to see if you can get things working properly, especially if you currently don't have any existing service desk software in place."
  • "The tool is cheap."
  • More Spiceworks Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Different locations require different setups. In your terms, around 300 to around 400K USD."
  • "I don't have the details. In our case, there is a mixture in place. We have production usage, and we are also doing training for VMware. So, we also have a training instance. It is worth the money you would spend on it. That's because if you were to build all of this yourself by using some of the open source tools, then you would need a lot of time."
  • "The licensing costs are very high, particularly when you consider that we have to purchase a level 1 license for every integration, such as the load balancer, HAProxy, and the MSSP. And if you want to use vSAN, that's another license. Then, of course, Tanzu Observability has its own separate license."
  • "I would rate the pricing as three out of five."
  • More VMware Aria Operations for Applications 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: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 »
    Top Answer:The solution is easy to use and easy to manage.
    Top Answer:The GUI must be improved. The GUI looks old-fashioned. The vendor must do some web development for it.
    Top Answer:VMware comes with a support team, and if you have trouble, you can easily create a ticket, and VMware will help you… more »
    Top Answer:It's hard to set up Tanzu clusters. It's hard to do a POC. Once you set up a customer's environment, you easily see the… more »
    Ranking
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    7.0
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    8.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor, SolarWinds Network Bandwidth Analyzer
    Tanzu Observability, Wavefront, Wavefront by VMware, VMware Tanzu Observability
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.”

    From network inventory and network monitoring to help desk software, and mobile device management (MDM) to cloud services detection, Spiceworks helps you manage everything about your IT workday from one easy place.

    VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront is a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing the performance and availability of applications and infrastructure in real-time. 

    With its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, visualizing and analyzing data becomes effortless. The real-time alerting system ensures timely issue resolution, while scalability and a user-friendly interface provide a seamless experience for smooth operations.

    Sample Customers
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Broward Center for the Performing Arts, Symantec, Webroot, EMC, Pertino
    1. Atlassian 2. Cisco 3. Databricks 4. DigitalOcean 5. Equinix 6. Fidelity Investments 7. Google 8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise 9. Honeywell 10. IBM 11. Intel 12. JetBlue Airways 13. LinkedIn 14. Lyft 15. Mastercard 16. Microsoft 17. MongoDB 18. Netflix 19. Nvidia 20. Oracle 21. PayPal 22. Pinterest 23. Qualcomm 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. SAP 27. Spotify 28. Square 29. TMobile 30. Twitter 31. Uber 32. VMware
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company12%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company7%
    Government5%
    Manufacturing Company5%
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company16%
    Construction Company10%
    Non Profit6%
    Hospitality Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company17%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Government7%
    Construction Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm16%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise33%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business50%
    Midsize Enterprise29%
    Large Enterprise21%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business31%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise50%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business30%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise60%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise67%
    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.