Cisco UCS Manager vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco UCS Manager and SolarWinds NPM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed Cisco UCS Manager vs. SolarWinds NPM 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 hardware is very powerful and it is a stable solution.""The solution is highly scalable, mainly because of the templates that make it easy for you to actually edit on the system.""Cisco UCS has different layers of security, and you can do multiple installations of your LIAMs on top of the server and Blade. You can install VMware, Windows Server, Hyper-V, etc.""Cisco UCS Manager is overall a good package because it gives a GUI interface and a CLI.""It is more robust than other solutions. So, the stability is good.""The reporting functionality will give you any report you want.""What I like most about Cisco UCS Manager is the ease of administration. It also allows the central management of maintenance, installation, and configuration activities.""We can configure the Cisco UCS Manager, the profiles and interactions with the resource we manage."

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"The solution is easy to install and it takes a couple of hours.""Their support team is efficient, and it is easy to set up.""The most valuable features are language support and technical support.""It is very extensible with 'SWQL' and APIs to where we are beginning to integrate it with network automation.""Technical support is very helpful with our upgrades.""The product is lightweight in terms of memory use, requiring only 10 megabytes or less.""I believe the ease of setup and use, including everything, from the initial installation to the discovery of devices is the most valuable.""There are a lot of valuable features with SolarWinds NPM. We can receive a lot of detailed data from the monitoring that can use useful for investigations, especially when you are troubleshooting. It is very helpful. Overall it was a very good experience."

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Cons
"Cisco UCS Manager should have a simplified deployment in the sense of not having multiple machines, demilitarized zones, and on-premise options.""I would like to see Cisco UCS optionally work as a hyper-converged system because right now, it only operates as a converged system.""There is room for improvement in the software part of Cisco UCS Manager. It should be more user-friendly, especially when creating policies.""The installation and upgrade sytems need to be improved.""Cisco UCS is expensive compared to others. The Cisco UCS Chassis is more expensive than a standalone server, but some companies require standalone servers because of their production load and affordability. You need to pay more if you require more features on the Blade or if you need more ports on the switch.""The interface and the way it is constructed is very complex. They should work to simplify it. It's quite difficult for somebody who doesn't know the product very well. Users should be able to get proficient with it faster. There's definitely room for improvement there.""I want to be able to schedule multiple sequential updates in one go.""The integration with other solutions could be better. I think Cisco can only integrate using Intersight. There is a second interface available as a SaaS platform, in the cloud, or on-premise. It's based on the Redfish protocol, which is standard for all the B-series servers in the market. We can integrate other solutions using API."

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"Currently lacks integration with SMS services.""The dashboard of the solution is an area with certain shortcomings that need improvement.""SolarWinds needs to be improved such that it is on par with the leading products in the market.""The scalability can be better.""An area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the short retention period. Currently, it's just for seven days of data, which is very low, making it hard for my organization to keep that data. SolarWinds recommended a seven-day retention period, but my organization needs a fourteen-day data retention period. Hence, I'd like an increase in the retention period or the database limit in SolarWinds NPM because you can't go back to the data for any investigation if seven days have passed. Another area for improvement in SolarWinds NPM is the database, which needs to be a bit more mature. I want a modified database in the next release of SolarWinds NPM. I'd also like more options added to groups because, currently, it's very limited.""The solution needs to integrate with additional SDN technologies that are part of the hyper market.""Scalability is a bit tricky because it requires more gateways in order to get the performance you may need. It also requires a lot of licensing.""SolarWinds NPM could improve by adding the deepest inspection, performance networking, and IP address discovery."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "With product discounts which can be negotiated, the product is a great value."
  • "You buy the hardware and then you get Cisco UCS Manager for free."
  • "The pricing for Cisco UCS Manager is okay for its market, so it's a four out of five for me."
  • "Cisco UCS is more expensive than Dell and HP, but it is more reliable. I see less issues and it's quite stable."
  • "Cisco UCS Manager’s annual licensing fee is expensive."
  • More Cisco UCS Manager 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:It is more robust than other solutions. So, the stability is good.
    Top Answer:In comparison to other solutions, it is expensive. In HP servers, for example, we have HP SIM, and in Dell DXL, there's Dell Open Manager. Cisco UCS Manager is not as familiar with upgrades… more »
    Top Answer:There is room for improvement in the software part of Cisco UCS Manager. It should be more user-friendly, especially when creating policies. For example, if I am putting a maintenance policy, the… more »
    Top Answer:It actually depends on the exact purpose or kind of devices (network devices, servers, something else). Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better for a cloud monitoring or… 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 scalability, products like Network Performance Monitor & Netflow Traffic Analyzer are… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    2,163
    Comparisons
    1,824
    Reviews
    7
    Average Words per Review
    554
    Rating
    7.3
    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
    Cisco UCS Manager helps significantly reduce management and administration expenses by automating routine tasks to increase operational agility. Customers can extend the benefits of Cisco UCS Manager globally across an enterprise to thousands of servers in multiple domains with Cisco UCS Central Software.

    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
    Management Science Associates, Peak 10, Virtual Consulting Professionals
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider42%
    Consumer Goods Company8%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company33%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Government7%
    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 Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise10%
    Large Enterprise62%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise74%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise33%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cisco UCS Manager vs. SolarWinds NPM
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco UCS Manager vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Cisco UCS Manager is ranked 31st in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 20 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in IT Infrastructure Monitoring with 146 reviews. Cisco UCS Manager is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco UCS Manager writes "Stable and resilient, but slightly more complicated to deploy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". Cisco UCS Manager is most compared with Cisco Intersight, Nutanix Prism, Zabbix, Datadog and HPE OneView, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and LogicMonitor. See our Cisco UCS Manager vs. SolarWinds NPM report.

    See our list of best IT Infrastructure Monitoring vendors.

    We monitor all IT Infrastructure Monitoring reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.