Enterprise network monitoring, decoded.
Vendor-neutral guides, how-tos and battle-tested configuration examples — SolarWinds SWQL, Splunk SPL, KQL, PromQL and more. Written for the engineers who actually run the NOC.
The query converter translates your existing queries to the equivalent in your new tool — SWQL → Datadog, SPL → PromQL and more — with an honest fidelity rating, not a false promise of 1:1.
Monitoring tools
SolarWinds Platform (Orion): Network Monitoring Overview
What SolarWinds Orion is, what NPM/NCM/NTA actually do, how SWQL fits in, and where it makes sense versus the alternatives.
SplunkSplunk: Log Management & SIEM Overview
How Splunk ingests, indexes and searches machine data, what SPL is, and how Enterprise, Cloud and the free tier differ.
Latest guides
LibreNMS vs SolarWinds: The Free Open-Source Alternative Compared
How LibreNMS stacks up against the SolarWinds Platform (Orion/NPM) on features, cost, scale and migration effort — and who each one actually suits.
advancedPrometheus + Grafana vs SolarWinds: The Cloud-Native Approach Compared
How a Prometheus + Grafana stack compares to the SolarWinds Platform (Orion/NPM) for network monitoring — scrape vs poll, snmp_exporter, gNMI streaming telemetry, cost and who it suits.
intermediateZabbix vs SolarWinds: The Open-Source Monitoring Workhorse Compared
How Zabbix compares to the SolarWinds Platform (Orion/NPM) on monitoring depth, templating, scaling via proxies, cost and the UX gap — and who each one suits.
beginnerSWQL vs SPL: When to Use Which Query Language
SolarWinds SWQL and Splunk SPL look similar but solve different problems. Here's how they differ and which to reach for.