SolarWinds NPM vs TruView vs cPacket Cx Series [EOL] comparison

The Cx 4100 and Cx 8100 expand the capability of the cPacket Integrated Monitoring Fabric (IMF) by delivering wire-speed millisecond precision predictive behavioral analysis and load balancing across up to 4 x 100G links. With the transition to 100G, the ability to reliably monitor at full-line rate becomes a challenge that legacy monitoring solutions struggle to handle. The Cx 4100 and Cx 8100 expand the IMF to support these 100G requirements, and when combined with the other elements of the IMF (cVu, cStor and cClear), they provide the highest level of network visibility and analysis available for end-to-end visibility, capacity planning, and security analytics. With immediate access to the packet-level details customers can identify problems proactively, such as network spikes and bursts, oversubscription, misconfiguration, and equipment failures. With its advanced Distributed Monitoring Architecture, and patented Algorithmic Fabric Chip technology, cPacket can reduce troubleshooting time by over 80% compared to centralized legacy monitoring solutions.

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.”

Visual TruView by Fluke Networks is a unified solution for Application Aware Network Performance Management (AANPM). TruView embeds the most important data sources such as packet, transaction, NetFlow/IPFIX, and SNMP to present analytics in a time-correlated single dashboard view. These correlated views help you quickly see how well the infrastructure is transporting applications and how well those applications are performing in the context of end-user experience. And, TruView’s integrated 10 Gbps full line rate stream-to-disk packet capture ensures you’ll never miss an important event again.