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Dare to Compare

Ease of use and lower cost are among the most commonly cited reasons organizations are choosing FireScope Dash over the competition, but that's just the beginning. Dash's rich feature set consistently exceeds the competition in every aspect, from monitoring capabilities, to event analysis, to reporting and visualization. In the comparison below, we've compared FireScope Dash on a feature-by-feature basis with the most popular network monitoring solutions on the market - Solarwinds NPM® and WhatsUp Gold®. Take a look and see how they compare.

Looking for an alternative to the Big-4? Then be sure to learn how FireScope Dash compares against the Big-4.

Don't take our word for it. Download a free trial of FireScope Dash and dare to compare against the competition in your own personal bake-off!

 

FireScope Dash

Solarwinds Orion NPM v10® *

WhatsUp Gold Premium® *
Pricing Flat-rate site licensing, manage up to 500 assets with Virtual Machine, or 1,000 assets with Appliance. NPM - Maximum number of interfaces, devices and logical volumes.
APM - Maximum number of monitors deployed		 Per managed asset pricing
Licensing Perpetual Perpetual Perpetual
Add-Ons APM / User Experience
Virtualization Management		 Netflow Traffic Analyzer
IP Address Manager
Application Performance Monitor
IP SLA Manager
Additional Web Server
Hot Standby Engine
SLX Polling Engine		 Flow Monitor
Flow Publisher
VoIP Monitor
WhatsConfigured
WhatsConnected
WhatsVirtual
Failover Manager
Installation and Deployment Delivered as a physical or virtual appliance with the complete software stack pre-installed, ready to go. Traditional software installation package, requires allocating a dedicated server, installing OS and solution dependencies including MS SQL Server, Internet Information Server, NetSNMP and more. Traditional software installation package, requires allocating a dedicated server, installing OS and solution dependencies.
Offered as a pre-installed Virtual Machine Included    
Offered in an appliance form factor Yes    
Requires server hardware and OS No Yes Yes
Software installation required No Yes Yes
Average time to configure first monitored assets Minutes Hours Hours
Average time needed for monthly maintenance Minutes Hours Hours
Capabilities Complete end-to-end monitoring capabilities, including cross-platform correlation. Basic availability and performance monitoring of individual assets. Basic availability and performance monitoring of individual assets.
Network Monitoring Included Included Included
Application Monitoring Included Partial or Limited Support - Optional Extra Partial or Limited Support
Service Management Included    
Log Consolidation Included Partial or Limited Support Partial or Limited Support
Security Event Monitoring Included Partial or Limited Support Partial or Limited Support
Performance Monitoring Included Partial or Limited Support Partial or Limited Support
Event Management Included Partial or Limited Support Partial or Limited Support
Cross-platform Event Correlation Included    
SLA Management Included    
SLA's based on business metrics Included    
Financial calculation of SLA violations Included    
Synthetic Transactions Included    
Trending and Correlation Included Partial or Limited Support  
Policy Management Included    
User Experience Monitoring Included    
Publish Events and Data Included    
Data Collection Methods Extensive menu of data collection methods enable monitoring of virtually any aspect of your infrastructure. Basic TCP, SNMP, WMI and Syslog data collection through pre-configured templates with limited customization options. Requires optional extras for Syslog and application monitoring. Basic TCP, SNMP, WMI and Syslog data collection. A Virtualization plugin is available for an additional fee.
SNMP v1, v2, v3 Included Included Included
Syslog Included Included Included
User Experience Monitoring (Synthetic Transactions) Included    
SMTP Included    
WMI / Perfmon Included Included Included
Direct Database Connection (Execute SQL Queries) Included    
Agents (Optional) Included    
Web Services Included    
JMX Included    
LDAP Connection (Query LDAP Directly) Included    
VMWare API Access Included   Partial or Limited Support
Enterprise Service Bus Included    
Custom Methods / SDK Included   Partial or Limited Support
Interface Features User customizable dashboards present data in real-time using AJAX, with all customization performed through intuitive web-based forms. One-size fits all dashboards with limited customization options. One-size fits all dashboards with limited customization options.
User customizable dashboards Included Partial or Limited Support  
Role-based security Included    
Real-time dashboards (AJAX, Web 2.0, Sparklines, etc.) Included Included Included
Application Interface Aggregation Included    
Community or shared content Included Included Included
LDAP Integration Included    
Analytics Dynamic report library with hundreds of reports ready for viewing, supplemented with a web-based report builder to create your own reports. Hundreds of reports, out of the box. Numerous baked in reports
Extensive report library Included Included Included
Web-based report builder Included    
Real-time reporting (AJAX-driven) Included    
Report Scheduling Included    
Export reports to multiple formats Included Partial or Limited Support Included
Quarterly or Yearly reports Included    
Financial impact reports Included    
Service-level reports Included    
Budgetary reports Included    
Scalability Dash can easily convert to its enterprise-grade big brother, FireScope Unify, to support multiple locations, failover and high volume environments. Monitoring with Unify is performed both on local instance as well as master appliance. Requires purchase of Enterprise Operations Console, which enables drill down to local instance of NPM. Requires purchase of WhatsUp Gold Distributed, in which monitoring performed locally with events pushed to Distributed instance.
Multi-Site Capable Yes, with license key upgrade to FireScope Unify Requires purchase of EOC Requires purchase of WhatsUp Gold Distributed
What is pushed to corporate master? All data and events from child appliances Events Events
Message queue utilized to ensure data integrity Included    
Fail over capability Included    
Maintenance and Support      
Expert support services Included Included Included
Email Access Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited
Phone Support Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited
IM/Chat Access Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited
Response time SLA 2-Hours 2-Hours 2-Hours
       

* - The information on this page was gathered using publicly available sources.

SolarWinds, SolarWinds.com, and Orion are registered trademarks of SolarWinds.

IPSwitch and WhatsUpGold are registered trademarks of IPSwitch.