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ManageEngine OpManager vs SolarWinds: Network monitoring software comparison
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When it comes to network monitoring solutions, you have a lot of options. This feature comparison of two popular tools, ManageEngine OpManager and SolarWinds, will help you make the best choice for your business.
Ensuring high-quality performance of your network and digital environments is critical for supporting the success of your organization. Whether your performance concerns involve bandwidth consumption, delayed response times or memory utilization, a network performance monitoring solution can help you determine the root of your problems so you can resolve them quickly.
By conducting scans on your network and organizational devices, these products can troubleshoot issues and provide insight on the best methods for responding to them before they cause severe damage to your infrastructure. This comparison of two of the top performance monitoring software solutions, ManageEngine OpManager and SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor, will shed some light on their relative merits.
ManageEngine OpManager is an integrated network monitoring software solution that provides continuous, real-time monitoring of network devices. The tool provides users with in-depth visibility and control over their network to determine the root cause of issues and fix them quickly.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor is a solution for monitoring on-premises, hybrid and cloud networks and devices in real time. It enables SMBs and enterprise organizations to gain insights to manage their data centers and IT infrastructure.
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To help you choose the best option for your performance monitoring needs, we’ll look at both solutions and compare their compatibility and features
With the ManageEngine OpManager, users can experience end-to-end monitoring of their network IT infrastructure, including WAN links, local and non-computing devices and wireless networks. The tool monitors the health of their network and more than 2,000 key built-in performance metrics, such as jitter, packet loss, latency, errors, RTT (round-trip time), speed and discards. The product provides real-time monitoring of Windows and Linux server memory, CPU and disk utilization and the performance of hosts and VMs of the VMware, Xen, Hyper-V and Nutanix server virtualization platforms.
ManageEngine OpManager’s network performance monitoring has multi-level thresholds to alert users of violations. With hop-by-hop performance, users can determine the cause of latency and analyze performance bottlenecks for fast resolution. The tool also offers device-based network monitoring.
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor offers users deeper visibility into their multi-network environments with real-time monitoring. The solution provides monitoring for networks, cloud servers, Cisco network devices, WAN optimization tools, switches, servers, routers, other SNPM- or WM-enabled devices and more. The tool monitors based on health and performance metrics, which include network traffic anomalies, application delivery, response times, availability, router traffic and slowdowns. Its network device scanner can automatically find devices on a network and map them for real-time monitoring. It can also monitor wireless networks for failures, issues or deficiencies to give users a clear view of performance metrics.
Users of the ManageEngine OpManager solution have in-depth visibility of their network infrastructure through physical and virtual server monitoring. They can view default dashboards or create custom dashboards through the use of more than 200 performance widgets for easy network visibility and control. In addition, OpManager’s simple network mapping tool is helpful for IT infrastructure management and network regulation, as it allows users to construct a network topology map and choose the network’s seed device and network layout type.
Users can easily identify network issues and their causes with the network map, and virtual machine topography maps help them see the relationships between virtual machines, hosts and data stores in their virtual network. Other helpful network visualization features and capabilities include network planning, path analysis and action-oriented enterprise visibility.
SolarWinds NPM solution has visualization features that enable users to develop insights from their performance data. The tool displays performance metrics on network availability, current and historical performance and more, which it then displays in charts and dashboards that users may customize to their liking. Users can also easily visualize and compare different data types within the platform.
The network topology tools allow users to view the connections between all vendors, networks, applications and devices. The visual traceroute tool lets them see the packet paths from source to destination, and with hop-by-hop analysis, they can visually analyze critical network paths in on-premises, hybrid and cloud environments.
SolarWinds’ mapping tools let users view intelligent maps with data from the software’s topology, or users can customize maps of their own. NetPath maps application and service performance to the network infrastructure. The Worldwide map resource lets users view nodes and groups of nodes on a realistic geographical map, and the Orion maps show the physical and logical relationships between entities monitored by the Orion Platform products. With Orion map time travel, users can even visualize how their network looked at the time an issue occurred.
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ManageEngine OpManager provides more than 100 built-in reporting profiles available on the UI, including the relevant monitored data. In addition to the default reports, users can generate custom reports to suit their needs by using Advanced Reports to create a new report with specified criteria. These reports can be scheduled periodically and automatically emailed to authorized users.
The OpManager data center performance monitoring also enables users to easily detect variations in their data center devices, based on three parameters: network connectivity, server performance and storage performance. Three levels of alerts exist as well: Attention, Trouble and Critical, based on the issue’s intensity. In addition, with Alert Actions and the alarm escalation rule, users can configure their alert notification and alarm escalation settings.
With the SolarWinds NPM solution, users can schedule reports using customizable templates for reporting network availability and other performance metrics. The system is equipped with intelligent alerts for network performance monitoring as well. It analyzes historical data to set network performance baselines, and users can send alerts when the baselines have been met.
Dependency- and topology-aware alerts can be set to notify users of specific events, such as low server health, critical hardware failures, high CPU or memory use, device outages, malware presence, downtimes exceeding custom thresholds, status request failures, intrusion attempts and system changes. Users can customize their network performance monitoring alerts by modifying default alerts or developing their own alerts for significant events. Alerts display detailed information on the events, including the node name, time, and severity of the alert, so users can quickly determine the root causes of their issues.
So which performance monitoring solution should you choose to increase the operational efficiency of your organizational network? The answer to this question likely depends on the needs and specifications of your organization. If you have a hybrid network with many components and devices across various destinations, SolarWinds NPM may provide you with monitoring and visualization capabilities that could benefit your monitoring needs. However, some users will prefer the ManageEngine OpManager solution for its alarm escalation and alert action customization options. The best performance monitoring tool is subjective to the organization’s needs, and buyers should consider how each tool’s features can address their needs as they decide on a solution.
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ManageEngine OpManager vs SolarWinds: Network monitoring software comparison
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