Top 10 SolarWinds Alternatives 2024

SolarWinds is a well-known player in the IT management space, offering a wide range of tools for monitoring infrastructure, networks, and applications. Their product suite includes AppOptics for application performance monitoring, Loggly and Papertrail for log management, and Pingdom for web performance and digital experience monitoring, to name a few. While SolarWinds provides extensive solutions, but it’s not the only option. In fact, several alternatives offer similar features, often combining them into a more unified and streamlined package.

Let’s explore the top 10 alternatives to SolarWinds that you might want to consider.

SolarWinds key features

SolarWinds has a diverse lineup of products catering to various aspects of IT management. Here are some of its standout features:

• Log management using cloud-based tools like Loggly and Papertrail
• Unified visibility for hybrid cloud environments with SolarWinds observability
• Syslog and SNMP management through Kiwi Syslog Server
• Performance monitoring for infrastructure and applications with AppOptics
• Enhanced security and compliance capabilities through its SIEM tool
• Remote IT support using Dameware remote tools
• Monitoring of VoIP call quality and WAN performance with the VoIP and network quality manager

SolarWinds pricing

SolarWinds’ pricing can be somewhat complex due to the various products offered under different categories. Here’s a general overview of their observability pricing:

• Application observability starts at $27.50 per instance, billed annually
• Network and infrastructure observability is priced at $12 per device
• Log observability starts at $5 per GB of log data
• Database observability costs $70 per instance
• Synthetic monitoring for uptime checks starts at $10
• Real user monitoring begins at $10 per 100,000 page views

This tiered pricing structure allows you to scale observability across applications, networks, logs, databases, and user experience.

Top 10 SolarWinds alternatives for 2024

Let's look at how the alternatives compare. The following is a quick comparison table highlighting the best alternatives to SolarWinds:

1. Better Stack

Better Stack is an all-in-one observability platform that offers full-stack monitoring and delivers insights across your entire application environment. Built on the ClickHouse database, Better Stack handles high-volume data effortlessly, offering SQL querying and an intuitive drag-and-drop builder. This makes it accessible for everyone, from beginners to experienced engineers, allowing easy analysis of logs and metrics.

Better Stack unifies log management and metrics with OpenTelemetry support, enabling you to correlate logs and metrics. This integration provides a comprehensive view of performance issues and speeds up troubleshooting. The OpenTelemetry-native design ensures compatibility with existing monitoring setups, allowing easy data ingestion from various sources.

Better Stack goes beyond typical monitoring, covering many use cases, including cron job checks, container monitoring, and email services like SMTP and IMAP. The platform performs pings every 30 seconds from multiple global locations with reliable uptime monitoring, delivering precise, real-time availability insights.

Incident management is a core strength of Better Stack. It offers quick, effective response features, such as sending notifications via phone calls, SMS, email, and Slack. It also adds contextual information, such as screenshots of website outages or detailed API errors, to help you swiftly diagnose the root cause.

Smart incident merging and AI-powered incident silencing further enhance efficiency by reducing noise and helping you focus on what truly matters. The platform also features customizable status pages, allowing you to keep your users informed with transparent updates.

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure and uptime monitoring
• Incident management
• Log and metrics management
• Alerts and notifications
• Observability dashboards
• Customizable status pages

➕ Pros

• Provides a unified, all-in-one solution for uptime monitoring, log management, metrics collection, and incident response, reducing the need for multiple tools
• Offers an intuitive interface with a quick setup process
• Includes essential features even in the free tier, such as log management, uptime monitoring, and status pages
• Allows extensive branding options, including custom domains and personalized status pages
• Supports both SQL-based queries and a drag-and-drop query builder
• Delivers real-time notifications via phone, SMS, email, and Slack, with AI-driven incident merging and post-mortem reports for efficient incident resolution

➖ Cons

• Lacks distributed tracing and error tracking at the moment, but these features are actively in development and expected soon

💲 Pricing

Better Stack offers flexible pricing designed to scale with your needs. The free plan covers essential tools like ten monitors, a status page, and email alerts, making it ideal for small projects or early-stage startups.

The pay-as-you-go plan starts at $29 per month and includes advanced features like transaction checks, private status pages, and real-time alerts via phone and SMS, ensuring you’re prepared for critical incidents.

Tailored plans are available for larger teams or enterprises, offering premium features such as SSO, SOC2 compliance, and dedicated support. Additionally, Better Stack provides pre-paid bundles with generous data retention and competitive rates, offering excellent value for teams looking to keep costs predictable.

Want more details? Check out our pricing page.

2. Datadog

Datadog is a comprehensive observability platform that provides a full view of your entire tech stack. It integrates infrastructure monitoring, application performance management (APM), and user experience tracking into one unified solution.

Datadog distributed tracing helps you follow service requests end-to-end, making it easy to pinpoint issues down to the exact line of code.With its synthetic monitoring and real user monitoring (RUM), Datadog provides a full picture of user experience, making detecting and resolving performance issues quickly easier.

In addition, Datadog has advanced network monitoring tools that offer detailed insights into traffic patterns and TCP retransmissions, helping you identify and address network bottlenecks. Datadog’s AI-powered insights and integrated security features take observability to the next level, moving beyond traditional performance monitoring. .

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure and application monitoring
• End-to-end distributed tracing
• Real user monitoring and synthetic testing
• Network traffic analysis
• Security monitoring

➕ Pros

• Provides an all-in-one platform with a wide range of monitoring tools
• Integrates seamlessly with over 800 third-party tools
• Offers real-time analytics with flexible alerting options
• Includes comprehensive security and compliance features
• User-friendly interface with powerful, customizable dashboards

➖ Cons

• Pricing can become expensive with high data ingestion and additional features

💲 Pricing

Datadog offers various pricing tiers tailored to different needs:

• Free tier: Includes basic monitoring for up to 5 hosts with limited metric retention
• Pro tier: Starts at $15 per host per month (billed annually), offering extensive integrations and advanced dashboard features
• Enterprise tier: Begins at $23 per host per month, with machine learning-based alerts and enhanced security features
• DevSecOps plans: Priced from $22 per host per month, with enterprise options starting at $34 per host, including comprehensive security and threat detection

3. Dynatrace

Dynatrace offers a modern, unified observability experience that surpasses traditional tools like SolarWinds. Dynatrace consolidates application monitoring, infrastructure insights, security, and automation into a single platform, giving you a comprehensive view of your entire tech stack without the hassle of managing multiple tools.

Dynatrace’s Smartscape feature dynamically maps your environment, providing a real-time view of how services and infrastructure components interact. With PurePath tracing, Dynatrace captures every transaction across your applications, delivering detailed insights into performance issues. .

For teams using hybrid or multi-cloud setups, Dynatrace’s cloud-native capabilities are a standout. It integrates seamlessly with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, offering visibility into serverless functions, containers, and Kubernetes clusters.

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Cloud monitoring
• Application performance monitoring
• Log management and analytics
• AI-driven anomaly detection

➕ Pros

• Combines multiple observability tools into a cohesive platform, unlike SolarWinds’ segmented approach
• Davis AI provides automated root cause analysis, reducing alert fatigue
• PurePath tracing offers in-depth transaction insights
• Smartscape dynamically maps dependencies across your entire environment
• Strong support for hybrid and multi-cloud environments

➖ Cons

• The interface and advanced features can be difficult to navigate

💲 Pricing

Dynatrace uses a pay-as-you-go pricing model, starting at $0.08 per hour for full-stack monitoring and $0.04 per hour for infrastructure monitoring. Additional features like log management and application security are billed separately, allowing you to customize the service based on your needs.

4. Elastic Cloud

Elastic Cloud is a solid alternative to SolarWinds, providing a modern approach to observability. Built on the Elastic Stack, Elastic Cloud combines log monitoring, metrics, traces, and universal profiling into a single, fully managed platform. This all-in-one solution offers greater usability and scalability compared to SolarWinds.

With native support for OpenTelemetry and integration with over 350 third-party services, Elastic Cloud gathers data across hybrid and cloud-native environments, simplifying the monitoring of complex infrastructures. Its advanced analytics, powered by Elasticsearch, enable fast searches, data correlation across your stack, and the discovery of hidden insights with ease.

Elastic Cloud’s proactive monitoring features, including real user monitoring and synthetic testing, help you catch performance issues before they affect users. The platform’s universal profiling feature provides system-wide visibility, from low-level kernel operations to high-level application code, enabling precise performance optimization. Elastic Cloud also scales effortlessly across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, offering a flexible deployment model tailored to your needs.

🌟 Key features

• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Universal profiling
• Log monitoring and analytics
• Application performance monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring

➕ Pros

• Comprehensive, all-in-one observability platform
• Highly scalable with flexible deployment options across major cloud providers
• Built on proven open-source technologies for transparency and flexibility
• Strong support for cloud-native environments and DevOps workflows
• Offers both managed service and self-hosted deployment options

➖ Cons

• Elastic Cloud can be resource-intensive

💲 Pricing

Elastic Cloud offers several pricing plans:

• Standard plan: $95 per month, including core Elastic Stack tools and basic security features
• Gold plan: $109 per month, with enhanced alerting and business-hours support
• Platinum plan: $125 per month, featuring machine learning and advanced security capabilities
• Enterprise plan: $175 per month, offering premium support and extended data storage

5. New Relic

New Relic is another alternative to SolarWinds that consolidates everything—APM, infrastructure monitoring, real user insights, and security monitoring—into one platform.

New Relic’s infrastructure monitoring covers all aspects of your system, from CPU and memory usage to detailed network analysis, ensuring that potential bottlenecks are quickly identified. Synthetic monitoring tests your applications before users encounter issues, while real user monitoring offers deep visibility into customer experiences on your website or app.

With built-in AI capabilities and robust logging features, New Relic can automatically detect anomalies and provide root cause analysis, saving time and reducing manual effort for IT teams.

🌟 Key features

• Application performance monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Log management
• Infrastructure monitoring
• AI-driven anomaly detection
• Security monitoring
• Mobile monitoring

➕ Pros

• All-in-one observability platform, unlike SolarWinds’ segmented approach
• Advanced AI features for anomaly detection and automated issue resolution
• Customizable dashboards and an intuitive query language (NRQL)
• Wide integration support with both cloud and on-premise tools
• Scalable pricing model suitable for small teams and large enterprises

➖ Cons

• New Relic’s pricing structure to be complicated and unpredictable

💲 Pricing

New Relic offers a free tier with 100 GB of data ingestion per month and one full-access user. Additional data is billed at $0.30 per GB. The pro and enterprise plans provide advanced features, enhanced support, and more user seats, with flexible pricing options based on your usage and data requirements.

6. IBM Instana Observability

IBM Instana Observability is an observability platform integrating infrastructure monitoring, application performance insights, and automated incident management into a single solution.

Instana’s all-in-one approach delivers real-time monitoring and automated root cause analysis across your entire stack. Its automation capabilities handle everything from instrumentation and dependency mapping to visualization, providing high-fidelity, 1-second granularity data for precise and proactive issue resolution.

The platform features AI-powered anomaly detection, automatic code-level profiling with zero performance overhead, and seamless integration with popular tools like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, and Grafana. With built-in log management and context-aware alerts, Instana provides full visibility into dynamic environments, helping you resolve issues quickly and optimize performance effortlessly.

🌟 Key features

• Real-time infrastructure monitoring
• Mobile and web app performance monitoring
• Cloud and container monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring

➕ Pros

• Offers a comprehensive observability solution without needing multiple separate tools
• Automated setup minimizes manual configuration, speeding up deployment
• AI-driven analysis delivers actionable recommendations for faster issue resolution
• Customizable dashboards for tailored monitoring views
• Seamlessly supports hybrid and multi-cloud environments

➖ Cons

• Can be challenging to learn

💲 Pricing

Instana’s pricing model is based on the number of managed virtual servers (MVSs). The essentials plan starts at $207 per month, offering core features like infrastructure discovery and tracing. For advanced capabilities such as AI-driven analysis and full-stack monitoring, the standard plan begins at $775 per month.

7. Splunk

Splunk is another compelling alternative to SolarWinds, offering a unified observability platform that combines monitoring, security, and analytics in one cohesive solution..

Splunk’s IT service intelligence (ITSI) and predictive analytics help detect potential issues before they affect your business operations. The network explorer feature offers a detailed view of network performance, simplifying troubleshooting and improving response times.

The platform’s incident management tools are built for quick action, sending actionable alerts and enabling rapid escalation when needed. In addition, Splunk’s customizable dashboards provide clear visualizations, making monitoring performance metrics easy and identifying trends across your infrastructure.

🌟 Key features

• Application performance monitoring
• Network Explorer
• Real user monitoring
• Synthetic uptime monitoring
• Log management
• IT service intelligence (ITSI)
• Predictive analytics
• Browser monitoring

➕ Pros

• Comprehensive observability platform without needing multiple separate tools
• AI-driven predictive analytics help prevent issues before they escalate
• Extensive customization options for dashboards and alerts

➖ Cons

• Splunk’s search language (SPL) and complex features can be challenging to learn

💲 Pricing

Splunk’s pricing model is flexible, starting at $15 per monthly host for infrastructure monitoring. Full end-to-end observability, including APM and real user monitoring, costs $75 per monthly host. Splunk APM is priced at $55 per host, while real user monitoring costs $14 per 10,000 sessions. Synthetic monitoring is available at $1 per 10,000 requests, and automated incident management costs $5 per user. This pricing flexibility allows you to tailor a plan that fits your needs, making Splunk a scalable option for growing enterprises.

8. ServiceNow’s Cloud Observability

ServiceNow’s Cloud Observability is a sleek, integrated platform tailored for today’s complex IT environments. Like the other tools, it combines real-time monitoring, advanced logging, distributed tracing, and strong security features into a user-friendly interface.

With support for OpenTelemetry, ServiceNow’s Cloud Observability allows you to monitor your entire tech stack without vendor lock-in. The platform’s unified query language (UQL) simplifies querying across logs, metrics, and traces, delivering deep insights and streamlining troubleshooting. Intelligent alerting reduces noise by correlating data points, helping you address issues proactively before they impact user experience.

ServiceNow also excels in security, offering automated threat detection and response capabilities that enhance system protection. Unified dashboards provide a clear, consolidated view of your entire infrastructure, making tracking performance easy and ensuring high availability.

🌟 Key features

• Distributed tracing
• Real user monitoring
• Security monitoring
• Infrastructure monitoring

➕ Pros

• Combines observability and security management in one platform
• OpenTelemetry support provides flexibility, avoiding vendor lock-in
• Unified dashboards simplify complex monitoring tasks
• Proactive threat detection enhances overall system security

➖ Cons

• Pricing can be hard to estimate, especially for dynamic workloads
• Steeper learning curve compared to more straightforward tools

💲 Pricing

ServiceNow’s Cloud Observability starts at $6 per month per CPU core, making it an affordable choice for businesses of any size. With scalable options and advanced features available in higher tiers, you can customize your plan to meet your specific observability and security requirements.

9. Coralogix

If you’re seeking a modern replacement for SolarWinds, Coralogix offers a streamlined observability platform that consolidates logs, metrics, traces, and security monitoring into one cohesive package. Unlike SolarWinds, Coralogix simplifies your workflow and reduces overhead by integrating everything into a single platform.

Coralogix provides advanced performance monitoring features, allowing you to identify service issues and bottlenecks instantly. Its AI-powered analytics deliver predictive insights, helping you address problems before they impact your users. Additionally, Coralogix includes automated security monitoring with compliance support for standards like GDPR and PCI DSS, ensuring your data stays protected.

🌟 Key features

• Application performance monitoring
• Synthetic monitoring
• Real user monitoring
• Alerting

➕ Pros

• Reduces complexity by offering a single observability tool
• Integrates easily with cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud
• AI-driven insights for faster root-cause analysis and incident response
• Cost-efficient data handling with first-pass analysis and TCO optimization

➖ Cons

• Initial learning curve for users transitioning from legacy systems

💲 Pricing

Coralogix’s usage-based pricing provides transparent rates: $1.15 per GB for frequent searches, $0.50 per GB for monitoring, and $0.17 per GB for compliance storage. Customized pricing plans are available for higher data volumes, and a free trial is offered to help you get started.

10. Logz.io

Logz.io combines log management, metrics, and distributed tracing into a user-friendly platform. It was built on open-source technologies like OpenSearch, Prometheus, and Jaeger. Logz.io offers a flexible and transparent solution that easily adapts to various observability needs.

Logz.io simplifies observability with an intuitive interface, making it easy to manage logs, monitor infrastructure, and trace microservices without complex configurations. The integration of Prometheus provides real-time performance insights, while Jaeger’s tracing capabilities quickly identify service bottlenecks. This unified approach eliminates the need for separate monitoring tools, streamlining your observability processes.

Logz.io features a robust library of over 300 integrations, covering cloud services like AWS and Azure as well as popular DevOps tools like Jenkins and Kubernetes. This extensive integration support allows Logz.io to fit seamlessly into your existing stack.

Logz.io also prioritizes compliance with tools that support GDPR and HIPAA standards, giving you peace of mind when handling sensitive data. Its data optimization features help control costs by filtering out unnecessary logs, providing an efficient and budget-friendly observability solution. For enterprises seeking a proactive and scalable alternative to SolarWinds, Logz.io offers distinct advantages.

🌟 Key features

• Infrastructure Monitoring
• Log Management
• Distributed Tracing
• Observability IQ

➕ Pros

• Comprehensive monitoring capabilities within a single platform
• Strong AI and machine learning features for proactive issue detection
• Seamless integration with cloud and on-premises services
• User-friendly dashboards and customizable views

➖ Cons

• Pricing may increase with high data ingestion volumes

💲 Pricing

Logz.io’s pricing is based on the volume of data ingested, starting at $0.90 per GB for log management. Custom plans for metrics and tracing services begin around $29 per month. A 14-day free trial is available, and enterprise packages offer advanced features with dedicated support tailored to larger organizations.

Final thoughts

Selecting a suitable alternative to SolarWinds depends on your specific monitoring needs, infrastructure, and budget. While SolarWinds offers a wide range of tools, many modern observability platforms provide streamlined, unified solutions with deeper insights and less complexity.

When evaluating these tools, consider your team’s expertise, infrastructure scale, and growth plans. Many platforms offer flexible pricing and free trials, making it easy to test their features.

Article by

Stanley Ulili

Stanley is a freelance web developer and researcher from Malawi. He loves learning new things and writing about them to understand and solidify concepts. He hopes that by sharing his experience, others can learn something from them too!

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