SolarWinds NPM Alternatives: Modern Network Monitoring for Enterprises and Service Providers
SolarWinds NPM Alternatives: Modern Network Monitoring for Enterprises and Service Providers
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) has been a fixture in network operations for years, especially for SNMP-based, on-premises environments. Many mid-to-large enterprises and network service providers still rely on NPM and related modules like NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) for day-to-day visibility.
At the same time, network architectures have changed. Hybrid and multi-cloud, SD-WAN, SaaS, and AI-driven operations all place new demands on network monitoring. As a result, more teams are actively evaluating SolarWinds alternatives and comparing SolarWinds competitors that offer modern observability, cloud-scale analytics, and predictable SaaS economics.
This article explains:
- Where SolarWinds NPM and NTA are strong
- Where they struggle in large and hybrid environments
- What to look for in a SolarWinds NPM alternative
- How Kentik addresses SolarWinds limitations
- How other common SolarWinds competitors (LogicMonitor, PRTG, Nagios, WhatsUp Gold, ManageEngine, Zabbix, ThousandEyes, Catchpoint) fit into the picture
What Is SolarWinds NPM?
SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is a network monitoring tool focused on device health, interface utilization, and fault management. It discovers network devices, polls them via SNMP, and presents performance dashboards, network maps, and alerting. NPM is part of the broader SolarWinds portfolio, which includes modules such as:
- NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA) for basic flow and top-talker views
- Network Configuration Manager (NCM) for configuration backup and compliance
- Server & Application Monitor (SAM) and other IT monitoring products
Most deployments are on-premises, built around a Windows application server, an MS SQL Server database, web front ends, and one or more polling engines.
Strengths of SolarWinds NPM
SolarWinds NPM remains a solid solution for many traditional monitoring use cases:
- Mature SNMP-based monitoring for routers, switches, and firewalls
- Automatic device discovery and mapping, with topology views
- Customizable alerts and dashboards tailored to network teams
- Extensible via modules (NTA, NCM, etc.) for broader IT operations
- A large user community and ecosystem, including templates and best practices
For organizations with primarily on-premises infrastructure and established SolarWinds skills, NPM is a known quantity that can provide reliable device-level visibility.
Limitations of SolarWinds NPM and NTA
As networks grow in scale and complexity, several limitations of the SolarWinds model become more apparent.
Legacy, On-Prem Architecture and Operational Overhead
SolarWinds NPM is architected as a traditional, on-prem application:
- Mid-to-large deployments often require multiple servers (application, SQL, web, additional pollers), plus storage and backups.
- Upgrades, patching, performance tuning, and database maintenance all fall on your team.
- The newer SolarWinds SaaS offerings expose only a subset of on-prem capabilities, so many enterprises still run Orion infrastructure themselves.
This architecture introduces friction when you need to grow quickly, extend visibility to new regions, or integrate with cloud-first operations.
Siloed Modules and Fragmented Workflows
While SolarWinds presents a unified web interface, its core capabilities live in separate modules:
- NPM for device health and topology
- NTA for flow and “top talker” analysis
- SEM and other tools for logs and security
In practice, this creates context-switching and duplicated configuration. Flow, device metrics, and logs often remain in different silos, which slows investigations and complicates cross-domain analysis.
Rudimentary Flow Analytics
SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer is designed to answer a narrow set of questions, such as “What is filling this interface?” It is strong at top-talker and top-N views, but limited when compared to modern traffic analytics platforms:
- Flow data is oriented around simple “Top X” reports.
- There is minimal enrichment (for example, limited BGP, GeoIP, or custom business dimensions).
- There is no general-purpose query engine to explore traffic in arbitrary ways.
For operators who rely on flow data for DDoS visibility, traffic engineering, capacity planning, or subscriber analytics, these constraints can be significant.
Limited Cloud and Streaming Telemetry Support
SolarWinds was built for on-prem infrastructure. While it has added integrations over time, many teams find:
- Limited out-of-the-box visibility into VPC/VNet flow logs, cloud gateways, and east-west cloud traffic
- Dependence on SNMP polling, with no support for modern streaming telemetry (gNMI, etc.) in NPM
- A monitoring model centered on fixed devices and static sites, rather than elastic cloud infrastructure
For hybrid and multi-cloud environments, these gaps can leave blind spots.
Lack of Built-In AI and Network Intelligence
SolarWinds NPM and NTA were not designed as AI-first platforms. Alerts are primarily based on static thresholds, and investigations rely heavily on human interpretation and manual drill-down.
By contrast, many newer platforms use machine learning to baseline traffic and performance, surface anomalies, and accelerate root-cause analysis. If your operations model is shifting toward AI-assisted workflows, this difference becomes increasingly important.
Business and Risk Considerations
Two recent developments often come up when teams evaluate SolarWinds:
- A widely reported software supply-chain attack against the SolarWinds Orion platform in 2020 led many public- and private-sector customers to reassess their risk posture and vendor dependencies.
- In 2025, SolarWinds agreed to be acquired and taken private by Turn/River Capital, a private-equity firm. As with any take-private transaction, customers may watch closely for changes in product investment, pricing, and long-term strategy.
These factors don’t invalidate SolarWinds as a solution, but they are part of the broader evaluation context for enterprises and service providers.
Why Teams Look for a SolarWinds Alternative
Given these limitations, NetOps and NetSec teams typically look for a SolarWinds NPM alternative when:
- They have outgrown a polling-centric architecture and need big-data scale.
- They are expanding into cloud, SaaS, or SD-WAN and want consistent visibility.
- They want to reduce tool sprawl, unifying flow, metrics, logs, and synthetics.
- Leadership is pushing toward AI-assisted operations rather than purely manual investigations.
- They want predictable pricing without opaque module or polling-engine costs.
The rest of this article focuses on what to look for in a modern alternative, and how Kentik compares to both SolarWinds and other common network monitoring tools.
What to Look for in a SolarWinds NPM Alternative
Unified Network Visibility (Flow, Metrics, Cloud, Synthetics)
A modern platform should unify:
- Flow and traffic analytics (NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, VPC flow logs, etc.)
- Device metrics (SNMP, streaming telemetry, system health)
- Routing data (BGP, IGP where relevant)
- Logs and events (syslog, traps)
- Synthetic tests (HTTP, DNS, ping, SaaS reachability)
Instead of separate modules, look for a single data model and UI that correlates these signals automatically. That reduces context-switching and gives a more complete view of cause and effect.
Modern SaaS Architecture
A strong SolarWinds alternative should:
- Be delivered as SaaS, with secure collectors or agents where needed
- Offload infrastructure management (database scaling, upgrades, patching) to the vendor
- Support global deployments without building your own central monitoring stack
- Offer APIs and integrations to fit into existing ITSM and observability workflows
This architecture allows teams to spend more time on using insights and less time running the monitoring tool itself.
Advanced Flow Analytics, Not Just Top-Talkers
For service providers and large enterprises, flow data is central to:
- DDoS detection and mitigation
- Capacity planning and traffic engineering
- Peering and transit optimization
- Customer and application analytics
An alternative to NTA should provide:
- Rich, unsampled flow ingestion at line-rate
- Deep enrichment (BGP, GeoIP, cloud metadata, host metadata, custom dimensions)
- A query engine for ad-hoc analysis (not just canned reports)
- Visualizations (e.g., Sankey diagrams, path views) that make complex patterns obvious
AI-Assisted Troubleshooting and Anomaly Detection
Look for platforms that apply AI and machine learning to:
- Learn normal baselines and detect meaningful anomalies
- Reduce alert noise by correlating multiple signals into a single incident
- Provide plain-language explanations of likely root causes
- Suggest next steps or recommended queries for investigation
This is where legacy tools struggle the most. AI-assisted workflows can materially reduce MTTR and level up junior engineers.
Transparent Pricing and Lower Total Cost of Ownership
Finally, consider the commercial model:
- Transparent SaaS pricing (for example, device-based for NMS and FPS-based for flow)
- No surprise hardware, polling-engine, or database costs
- Ability to start small and scale gradually without a large up-front capital project
In many cases, teams move to a SolarWinds alternative not just for capabilities, but also to improve cost predictability.
Kentik as a SolarWinds NPM Alternative
Kentik is a network observability platform built to meet these requirements for modern enterprises and service providers. It combines advanced flow analytics, a cloud-scale NMS, cloud and SaaS visibility, synthetics, and AI-driven insights in a single SaaS platform.
Unified Network Visibility in One Platform
Kentik ingests and correlates:
- Flow and traffic data (NetFlow, sFlow, IPFIX, VPC flow logs, and more)
- Device metrics and events (SNMP, traps, syslog, streaming telemetry)
- Routing information (BGP, IGP where applicable)
- Cloud telemetry (AWS, Azure, GCP)
- Synthetic tests from global and private vantage points
All of this lives in one unified data model, with views that pivot seamlessly between traffic, devices, paths, and applications. That means:
- No separate “NPM vs NTA vs DDoS” modules to keep in sync
- Fewer blind spots between on-prem, cloud, and the public internet
- Faster investigations when you need to move from symptom to cause
Advanced Flow Analytics + NMS Metrics
Where SolarWinds NTA focuses on top-X views per interface, Kentik’s flow engine is designed for deep, exploratory analytics:
- Unsampled ingestion at line-rate (within license limits)
- Rich enrichment (BGP, GeoIP, cloud context, host metadata, threat feeds, and custom dimensions)
- A powerful, interactive query engine for answering “who/what/where/why” questions at speed
- Visualizations such as Sankey diagrams and traffic paths that make complex behavior understandable at a glance
Kentik also functions as a modern NMS:
- Device discovery and inventory
- Interface and health monitoring via SNMP and streaming telemetry
- Alerts and dashboards across network, cloud, and SaaS
Because flow and NMS are combined, network engineers can move from an interface alert to detailed traffic context (and vice versa) in a few clicks.
Modern SaaS Architecture and Streaming Telemetry
Kentik is delivered as a secure, multi-tenant SaaS platform:
- No servers or databases to deploy, patch, or scale
- Lightweight software agents or collectors forward data from your network
- The Kentik Data Engine stores and analyzes telemetry at cloud scale
- Streaming telemetry support allows higher-fidelity metrics than SNMP-only polling
For multi-region or global environments, this means new sites can be onboarded quickly without building additional Orion stacks.
AI-Driven Insights and Journeys
Kentik applies machine learning and AI to help operators:
- Detect anomalies in traffic and performance baselines
- Correlate symptoms across flow, devices, routing, and synthetics
- Surface likely causes with AI-generated explanations
- Interact via natural-language investigations (e.g., “Why did latency spike for this application in region X?”)
These capabilities make Kentik more than a data viewer; it functions as a network intelligence assistant embedded in your workflows.
Capacity, Cost, and Security Context
Beyond day-to-day monitoring, Kentik provides:
- Capacity and cost analytics tying interface utilization and traffic trends directly to transit, peering, and cloud bills
- DDoS detection and automation, using big-data analytics and threat-feed enrichment
- Views tailored for service providers, including subscriber, CDN/OTT, and interconnection analytics
For many organizations, this combination replaces multiple legacy tools (NPM, NTA, separate DDoS systems, homegrown capacity spreadsheets) with a single observability platform.
Kentik vs. SolarWinds NPM/NTA at a Glance
While details will vary by deployment, the high-level comparison for mid-to-large enterprises and service providers typically looks like this:
-
Architecture
- SolarWinds: Primarily on-premises, Windows + SQL Server; multi-server deployments; SaaS offering with reduced feature set.
- Kentik: Cloud-native SaaS; collectors only; big-data backend.
-
Data coverage
- SolarWinds: SNMP-centric device monitoring; NTA for basic flow; limited cloud telemetry.
- Kentik: Deep flow analytics, NMS metrics, routing, cloud telemetry, synthetics, and DDoS in one platform.
-
Analytics
- SolarWinds: Dashboards and reports; strong for traditional SNMP; basic “top talkers” for flow.
- Kentik: Interactive query engine, enriched flow, AI-driven anomaly detection and cause analysis.
-
Cloud and hybrid
- SolarWinds: Integrations for some cloud metrics; Orion model optimized for on-prem.
- Kentik: Native ingest for VPC/VNet flow logs and cloud context; internet/SaaS path visibility.
-
Operations and TCO
- SolarWinds: Customer-managed infrastructure and upgrades; modular licensing; additional polling engines may be required at scale.
- Kentik: SaaS subscription (e.g., per device + FPS), no hardware or DB to manage.
For teams asking “What’s a modern SolarWinds alternative that scales with our network and cloud strategy?”, Kentik is often evaluated as a primary candidate.
Other SolarWinds Competitors and Alternatives
Kentik is not the only option for organizations moving on from SolarWinds NPM. Below are capsule summaries of other common SolarWinds competitors and how they compare at a high level.
LogicMonitor
LogicMonitor (LM Envision) is a SaaS-based observability platform covering networks, servers, applications, and cloud services. It emphasizes auto-discovery, broad integration coverage, and AI-assisted anomaly detection and alert tuning.
LogicMonitor is a strong fit for organizations that want a single SaaS tool for overall infrastructure monitoring. Its network monitoring is robust, but its flow analytics and traffic intelligence are not as specialized or deep as Kentik’s, especially for service providers or large carriers.
Paessler PRTG Network Monitor
PRTG is an all-in-one monitoring tool built around a sensor-based licensing model. It is popular with small and mid-sized organizations because it is relatively easy to deploy, bundles many sensor types (SNMP, WMI, HTTP, etc.), and provides customizable dashboards and maps.
PRTG can function as a more approachable on-prem SolarWinds alternative for smaller environments. However, its sensor-based licensing and on-prem architecture can become complex and costly at very large scale, and its AI and big-data capabilities are more limited than Kentik’s.
Nagios / Nagios XI
Nagios is one of the original open-source monitoring systems, with a large ecosystem of plugins. Nagios XI provides a commercial distribution with a more polished UI. Both appeal to organizations that want full control and are comfortable building customized checks and integrations.
As a SolarWinds alternative, Nagios offers flexibility and low software cost, but requires significant engineering effort for configuration, scaling, and maintenance. It lacks out-of-the-box flow analytics and AI-driven insights; those typically require additional tools or custom work.
Progress WhatsUp Gold
WhatsUp Gold is a traditional, on-premises network monitoring tool with strong auto-discovery and interactive topology mapping. It provides availability and performance monitoring, optional traffic analysis, and log management in one GUI.
WhatsUp Gold is well-suited to mid-sized environments that want an integrated, map-centric view of their on-prem network. It is less focused on large-scale flow analytics, cloud telemetry, or AI-assisted workflows, and it does not match Kentik’s SaaS architecture or big-data approach.
ManageEngine OpManager
ManageEngine OpManager is an on-prem network monitoring and management suite covering routers, switches, firewalls, servers, and more. It offers multi-protocol discovery, detailed topology maps, and optional modules for flows and configuration management.
OpManager is often considered when teams want a cost-effective, traditional NMS that still runs inside their data center. Compared to Kentik, it remains more SNMP-centric and requires the customer to manage infrastructure and scaling. AI features and cloud-native telemetry support are more limited.
Zabbix
Zabbix is an open-source monitoring platform that can scale to large environments with careful tuning. It supports agent-based and agentless monitoring, SNMP, IPMI, and more, with templates providing reusable checks.
Zabbix is attractive for organizations with strong in-house expertise and a desire to avoid per-node license fees. As with Nagios, however, it is a framework, not a turnkey observability solution. Out-of-the-box flow analytics, cloud path visibility, and AI-driven insights are not its primary focus.
Cisco ThousandEyes
Cisco ThousandEyes focuses on digital experience and internet path monitoring. It uses globally distributed and enterprise-hosted agents to run synthetic tests and visualize paths across the internet and cloud providers, making it very strong for monitoring SaaS and external dependencies.
ThousandEyes is typically used alongside an NPM/NMS platform, not as a replacement. It does not handle traditional device monitoring or rich flow analytics in the way Kentik or SolarWinds NPM/NTA do. Instead, it excels at answering “what is happening on the internet and SaaS side?”
Catchpoint
Catchpoint is a digital experience monitoring platform concentrated on end-user performance, web applications, APIs, and DNS. It combines synthetic testing from a large global network of vantage points with real user monitoring.
Like ThousandEyes, Catchpoint complements rather than replaces an NPM platform. It is a strong option if your primary concern is application performance and user experience on the internet, but it does not provide the same depth of device-level or flow-level network observability as Kentik or SolarWinds.
Choosing the Right SolarWinds Alternative
If you are primarily looking to replace traditional device monitoring in a smaller environment, tools like PRTG, OpManager, WhatsUp Gold, or open-source frameworks such as Nagios or Zabbix can be viable SolarWinds alternatives.
If you need a modern observability platform for large, hybrid networks and service-provider-scale traffic, you will likely want:
- SaaS-based deployment
- Unified flow, NMS, cloud, and synthetics
- Big-data performance
- AI-assisted investigations
- Clear, predictable pricing
Kentik is designed specifically for those requirements. It provides a single, cloud-scale platform for network observability and intelligence, making it a strong candidate for enterprises and service providers seeking a modern SolarWinds NPM alternative that keeps pace with today’s networks.
