Gartner Report 2016: A Review of SolarWinds Network Performance Management & Diagnosis

The latest Gartner Report on Network Performance Management and Diagnosis have been published with the Austin based vendor’s tools included, I have been working with SolarWinds® Network Performance Monitor (NPM) since 2002 so for me this report threw up some interesting points.

Some background; Gartner each year performs research, analyse the results with a view to creating what is very easy to utilize ‘Magic Quadrant’, which is a 4 box display showing in essence two analysis determinations; Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. The idea is that the better a company is able to deliver functionality and the completeness of that functionality plots the company at a coordinate where the higher up and farthest right says to the observer that they are the best at what they do.

There used to be a well-known expression that “no one could be fired for choosing IBM”, such was the reputation and proliferation of IBM PC’s in the early days of corporate computing. This may still be the case, but I would suggest that this has been replaced by the axiom that “no one could be fired for choosing a top-right Magic Quadrant solution”. Such is the importance placed on these reports that as soon as they are published you will see every company appearing in the top right quadrant shouting from the rooftops, and so they should.

Gartner is doing the research on network monitoring for the CTO’s and telling them, this is the product you should be including in your monitoring tools review, hey some anecdotal discussions with people would suggest decision have been made purely on a strong listing.

SolarWinds Ahead In The Ability To Execute

However if you look at the chart, you will see that for network performance monitoring SolarWinds is well ahead of everyone in the category for ability to execute, in fact, they are higher up the scale than you will see across many other categories, but apparently the Completeness of Vision just about makes it a quarter way across. “How can this be” was my immediate thought. Well firstly, the analysis is based on the Gartner criteria, which if your solution and product do not fully conform to will be penalised.

Therefore, if you look at the other monitoring application entries in the category you will see that packet capture-based solutions score well for completeness of vision. As SolarWinds has limited functionality in this area it has probably been penalised quite hard.

One final thing to point out, one of the Cautions is “SolarWinds has no outside sales team and offers no professional services. This creates limitations for enterprises requiring nonstandard or complex implementations.” This is where we come in, as a focused SolarWinds consultancy; Celebrating 10 years as a partner we have seen the shift from the SolarWinds engineers toolset to now over 27 products.

Note: Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.