SolarWinds is a software development company that focuses on network monitoring activities of IT infrastructures, and systems for businesses. It was founded in Tulsa Oklahoma by brothers, Donald and David Yonce in 1999. It now has offices all over USA and the world, with its headquarters in Austin, Texas, the United States of America.
Solarwinds has an estimated three thousand two hundred employees (2020), servicing three hundred thousand customers (December 2020) and has acquired a number of companies; some of which still operate with their original names – Papertrail, Loggly, and Pingdom. It was acquired and taken private by Silver Lake Partners and Thoma Bravo, LLC, two private equity technology investment firms. It would later go public again on October 19, 2018.
Here’s a list of rival products and companies that are competing with SolarWinds in the network monitoring industry.
#1 Microsoft System Center
- Founded: April 4, 1975
- Headquarters: One Microsoft Way, Redmond, Washington, US
Need to Know
Microsoft was founded by childhood friends, Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. This American international technology company is best known for its Microsoft operating systems, has a huge range of products, services, and industries; software development, computer hardware, social networking service, corporate venture capital, internet, cloud computing, and video games. It is considered one of the Big Fives in the information technology space in the United States of America; Google (Alphabet), Facebook (Meta), Amazon, and Apple are the other 4.
Microsoft was the 3rd U.S company traded publicly to hit 1 trillion dollars market capitalization, and has the third-highest global brand valuation (2020).
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#2 IBM
- Founded: June 16, 1911
- Headquarters: Armonk, New York, USA
Need to Know
IBM was founded by Charles Ranlett Flint on June 16, 1911, as Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York, United States of America. IBM is a global tech giant with about 345,900 employees (2020) in 171 countries and provides hardware, software, middleware, and hosting for B2C, B2B, B2B2C. It offers products and services in the following industries; automation, artificial intelligence, blockchain, computer hardware, robotics, software, cloud computing, consulting, and quantum computing.
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#3 Nagios
- Founded: March 1, 2002
- Headquarters: St Paul, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Need to Know
Nagios was founded by Ethan Galstad on March 1, 2002. Its current headquarters is located in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of America. Nagios offers alert and monitoring services for applications, servers, services, and switches. It alerts whenever the system its monitoring develops an error or goes down, then another alert when the issue has been resolved.
Nagios is free and also an open-source (repository) on cross-platform.
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#4 VMware
- Founded: February 10, 1998
- Headquarters: Palo Alto, California, USA
Need to Know
VMware is a cloud computing and virtualization firm that was founded in Palo Alto, California, the United States of America by Mendel Rosenbaum, Diane Green, Scott Devine, Ellen Wang, and Edouard Bugnion on the 10th of February 1998. It was the first company to become commercially successful for virtualizing the x86 architecture; and its current products include desktop software, cloud management software, server software, application management, networking and security, storage, etc.
It also produced VMware ESXi, a bare-metal hypervisor for server hardware without the need for an underlying or additional operating system; i.e. It works directly on the server hardware whether it has an OS installed on it or not.
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#5 Dynatrace
- Founded: February 2, 2005
- Headquarters: Waltham, Massachusetts, USA
Need to Know
Dynatrace was founded on February 2nd, 2005 by Bernd Greifeneder in Linz, Austria – current headquarter is in Waltham, Massachusetts, the United States of America. dynaTrace Software GmbH was acquired in 2011 by Compuware. It was later taken private by Thoma Bravo, a private equity firm, and renamed Dynatrace in 2014.
It uses a proprietary Artificial Intelligence called Davis on its intelligence platform to monitor and optimize application performance, user experience, development and security, and IT infrastructure, for government agencies and businesses worldwide. The platform provides observability for the full solution stack.
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#6 ThousandEyes
- Founded: 2010
- Headquarters: San Francisco, California, USA
Need to Know
ThousandEyes was founded in 2010 by Mohair Lad and Ricardo Oliveira; they had worked together on Internet Research Lab to visualize Autonomous System topologies as grad students at UCLA. It was founded in Mountain View, California and now has its headquarters in San Francisco, California, the United States of America. Cisco announced it would be acquiring the network intelligence company on May 29, 2020, and was completely acquired by August 2020.
ThousandEyes produces software that uses synthetic monitoring probes to monitor and analyze performances of local and wide area networks; network tomography, DNS monitoring, website monitoring for HTTP and HTTPS, SNMP device polling, VoIP monitoring, and route analytics.
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#7 Wireshark
- Founded: 1998
- Headquarters: Davis, California, USA
Need to Know
Wireshark was founded by Gerald Combs in 1998. It was formally called Ethereal and was changed to Wireshark due to trademark issues in 2006. It is an open-source packet analyzer that is free (repository) created for network troubleshooting, education, analysis, and software communications protocol development. It is a cross-platform software – Windows, macOS, Solaris, Linus, BSD, and other Unix-like operating systems; that also has a non-GUI (terminal base) version called TShark.
It is written in C and C++.
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#8 PRTG Network Monitor
- Founded: 2001
- Headquarters: Nuremberg, Germany
Need to Know
PRTG Network Monitor is an agentless monitoring network software by Paessler AG with headquarters in Nuremberg, Germany. Paessler was founded by Dirk Paessler on August 22, 2001, as Paessler GmbH (later changed to Paessler AG in 2005) in his living room. The software monitors data from servers, switches, routers, applications, and other devices. It comes with over 200 predefined sensors that acquire data from all monitored instances like processor, database information, response time, system status, etc.
It works on an AJAX-based web interface completely and can be used by non-technical staff for real-time troubleshooting and data exchange through its dashboard and user-defined reports.
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#9 Cacti
- Founded: 2001
- Headquarters: Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States.
Need to Know
Cacti project was started on September 2, 2001 by Ian Berry. He started it as a high school student working for an ISP, and still learning MySQL and PHP. His pitch for the free software “was to offer more ease of use than RRDtool and more flexibility than MRTG”.
By polling the network server, router or switch, Cacti can be used ip monitor network traffic on the devices. It presents these analyzed data in a graphical report, thus it is usually used by web hosting services for the frontend of their dedicated private and virtual servers.
It is open-source and a free software (respository).
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#10 Zabbix
- Founded: 2005
- Headquarters: Riga, Latvia.
Need to Know
Zabbix was founded in 2005 by Alexei Vladishev. Its headquarter is located in Riga, Latvia, while it has offices in the United States of America, Russia, Brazil, and Japan. Rabbix is a free open-source software released to the public under GPL (repository); its backend is in C while the frontend is in PHP.
The cross-platform software is a monitoring tool for a range of IT components – servers, cloud services, networks, virtual machines (VM) -, providing metrics for utilizations like disk space consumption, CPU load, etc.