NetBrain vs SolarWinds NPM comparison

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16,027 views|8,948 comparisons
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetBrain and SolarWinds NPM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Network Troubleshooting solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM Report (Updated: May 2020).
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
"Chain management is a good feature. I don't get it on other solutions.""NetBrain is a very simple tool.""Enables maps to be drawn out.""A reliable, time-saving tool for providing accurate layer 2 and layer 3 network mappings.""This product has good network monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities."

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"What I've found most valuable about the solution is that it's scalable.""Being able to easily, and quickly obtain disc space statistics from servers and determine how much was free or used on various volumes.""The most important feature is reporting. The reports that are generated are useful and they save a lot of time with respect to monitoring.""It combines and presents information from many different sources, giving a corporate-wide vision on a single pane of glass.""It did a good job of the collection and then an investigation of the net flow of information for understanding the applications that were being used at certain locations.""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.""The connectivity of the solution is very good.""We can proactively fix historical issues, so we won't face those problems in future."

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Cons
"Support needs to improve for the installed product and some of the reporting could be more flexible to provide more complete cataloging.""Each device needs to be configured to allow NetBrain to poll for the information it needs, which can be very time-consuming for a large network.""It would be nice if the setup was a little simpler. Also, if the solution could provide more training materials for new people coming into our company so they can quickly learn how to use the functionalities.""The IP interface brief isn't consistent.""The solution could integrate more automation."

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"This solution would benefit from expanding on the capabilities within the API.""This product could improve by adding cloud monitoring. I want SolarWinds NPM to do much more integration, and have more involvement in cloud monitoring, like AWS or Google, or Azure. I feel like it requires lots of improvement for cloud monitoring in NPM.""It is difficult for stakeholders to translate technical requirements, which results in difficulties selecting a platform or implementing a solution.""The integration with video apps could be better.""There isn't support available to us as they don't offer support in our country.""It would be good to have high security.""The reporting module that got integrated into the system itself, used to be a standalone solution and I preferred that.""Better offline license management. I’ve had to get in touch with customer support several times simply to remove an expired license from our NPM servers."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The product is expensive, but less expensive than some of the competition and worth the price."
  • "Licensing is based on a per-device basis, which means that it can get very expensive if you have a large number of devices."
  • More NetBrain 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:NetBrain is a very simple tool.
    Top Answer:The solution is licensing and on-premises. You need to download the software and enable the license on any X86 machine server. We pay a yearly subscription fee. It's economical. It was not very… more »
    Top Answer:NetBrain is a very simple tool, however, it's not an NDR. It doesn't have the capabilities to run PCAPs and so on. The solution could integrate more automation. If the product has to be evolved, it… 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
    15th
    Views
    137
    Comparisons
    83
    Reviews
    0
    Average Words per Review
    0
    Rating
    N/A
    Views
    16,027
    Comparisons
    8,948
    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

    Managing today’s networks with yesterday’s manual processes is no longer a viable solution. NetBrain’s network automation platform provides actionable insights into your network to help you make better and faster decisions - particularly when you’re troubleshooting, securing, and making changes to the network.

    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
    CompuCon, TD Ameritrade, Move Inc.
    Microsoft, Federal Express, Hewlett-Packard, and MasterCard
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government10%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    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
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business19%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise50%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business12%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise33%
    Buyer's Guide
    NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM
    May 2020
    Find out what your peers are saying about NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM and other solutions. Updated: May 2020.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    NetBrain is ranked 15th in Network Troubleshooting with 6 reviews while SolarWinds NPM is ranked 4th in Network Monitoring Software with 146 reviews. NetBrain is rated 7.2, while SolarWinds NPM is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetBrain writes "Good monitoring and troubleshoot capabilities, improves overall network traffic visibility". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds NPM writes "High-level, comprehensive, and proactive monitoring in a user-friendly interface". NetBrain is most compared with Cisco DNA Center, ThousandEyes, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, SolarWinds Network Automation Manager and LiveAction LiveNX, whereas SolarWinds NPM is most compared with Zabbix, PRTG Network Monitor, ManageEngine OpManager, ThousandEyes and LogicMonitor. See our NetBrain vs. SolarWinds NPM report.

    We monitor all Network Troubleshooting 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.