SolarWinds has three main competitor groups:

• IT teams that don't have professional tools. They use free or open source tools like Nagios that require a lot of work and customization and custom scripts.
• Low-end tools that are often somewhat less expensive, but offer significantly less functionality. These are great for smaller teams, who often upgrade to SolarWinds as their needs grow. This category includes WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, ManageEngine, and SpiceWorks.
• Big, complex, monolithic monitoring systems from HPE, CA, VMware (vROps), IBM (Tivoli), Microsoft (SCOM), and BMC which are hard to use, expensive to manage and maintain, and cost millions, but have been in use for years. The effort to move to something better is too big.

SolarWinds offers over 30 products in different categories including virtualization, storage, databases, systems management, network, and security. Each of these products has a set of competitive products.

Currently, Datadog appears to be the leading player in the monitoring market. It's a powerful tool, but it can be somewhat more complex to set up and operate compared to SolarWinds. Choosing between the two often comes down to understanding your specific needs and your target audience. Additionally, cost considerations are important to keep in mind, as Datadog tends to be on the higher end of the price spectrum.

We evaluated Nagios and Nimsoft at the time.

Nimsoft seemed similar to what we were previously using and didn’t want to repeat history.

With Nagios, we found it to be highly customizable, but requiring us to build out everything. We were at a stage where we didn’t know the possible heights of monitoring we could reach, but knew there was more than what we had.

SolarWinds fit the bill because it gave many possibilities in monitoring with a good amount of out of the box capabilities.

Oh my gosh, we evaluated all of them. Like I said above, I do vendor reviews every year and the result is always the same.

No one offers the same level of functionality across so many different devices/services in a single tool at such a good price.

We may be buying a small license for Azure service monitoring until SolarWinds has a solution for sale.

Most recently, I reviewed Thousand Eyes, Exoprise, SCOM, Riverbed’s tools, Net Scout, and a half dozen others I don’t recall. All were interesting, but none were competitive price wise.

I didn’t evaluate other options. I had previous experience and my boss was willing to go with my advice without having to do a comparison.

It had been decided upon before I was employed here; I just got to implement it.

We were only using tools from VMware and we didn’t look at other options. Knowing SolarWinds from using Orion and other applications they sell, I wanted to have my monitoring software to be as integrated as possible. We looked no further.

The high price of this solution has us looking into other solutions, rather than scale.

This solution caught my attention and I didn't bother looking at others.

A customer is trying to move some of the VMs to Azure. It is the latest trend, and people are moving from on-premises VMs to cloud-based VMs.

Azure Monitor seems to be more powerful on the log analytics and the application level side, but it is less powerful on the systems side, for example, listening port or service.

I have used other applications. After evaluating SolarWinds, we think it’s a good choice.

We compared SolarWinds SAM with ManageEngine. 

We looked into Zabbix and decided to switch to it.

We didn't really evaluate other options. By this point, we were committed to the “one monitoring tool” policy. Our goal was to reduce the number of dashboards to as few as possible.