Guides & how-tos
intermediate
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.