Scalable network monitoring, priced per device

Monitoring costs should track the size of your network, not the volume of data flowing through it. NMIS and Open-AudIT deliver scalable network monitoring on a per-device licence: count the devices you monitor, and that is the price. Consumption-billed platforms work the other way. The more your network tells you, the more you pay.

NMIS has monitored production networks since 1998 and supports more than 10,000 device types. Open-AudIT's free Community Edition discovers and inventories your network with no device cap. Neither product meters your logs, your flows, or your page views.

The scaling problem: data grows faster than device count

Add a switch and you have added one device. The telemetry it produces is another matter. Flow records, syslog, SNMP traps, and configuration snapshots all multiply as you turn on deeper visibility, and they multiply again as traffic grows.

Per-device pricing stays flat as monitoring data grows; consumption pricing climbs with it.

A network can double its monitoring data in a year without adding a single rack. Under a consumption meter, that growth arrives as a bigger bill. Under a per-device licence, it arrives as better visibility at the same price.

This is the trap in consumption pricing. It charges you for the thing monitoring is supposed to encourage: knowing more about your network.

Per-device pricing vs consumption meters: what actually drives your bill

Per-device (or per-node) licensing has one variable. You pay for the devices you choose to monitor. Consumption models bill on usage meters instead: gigabytes of logs ingested, active-node watermarks, service instances, synthetic checks, page views. Each meter moves on its own, and most move upward.

Forecasting device count is easy. Forecasting how many gigabytes of syslog your network will produce in month eight of a three-year contract is not.

What consumption pricing looks like: SolarWinds Observability SaaS

SolarWinds Observability SaaS prices each module on its own meter, per its published pricing. Network and infrastructure monitoring starts at US$15.75 per node per month, with the node count set by the highest number of active devices in the previous day. Log ingestion is billed separately at US$5 per GB per month, and overage is allowed by default: anything above your plan is added to the bill at month end. Application monitoring is priced per service, database monitoring per instance, and real user monitoring per 100,000 page views.

Worked example at list prices: 1,000 monitored nodes start at US$15,750 a month (1,000 x US$15.75) before a single gigabyte of logs. Ingest 500 GB of syslog and flow data on top and that adds US$2,500 (500 x US$5). Double your log volume next year and the log line doubles with it, whether or not your network grew.

To be fair, SolarWinds also sells a self-hosted product on per-node subscriptions. The consumption comparison applies to its SaaS platform. All prices are vendor list prices, correct as at July 2026.

Lansweeper: per asset, but every IP address counts

Lansweeper prices per asset, which is closer to our model than to a consumption meter. The differences sit in what counts as an asset and what the licence buys you.

Lansweeper counts every discovered device with an IP address toward your plan, including monitors, printers, and IP phones. Plans are tiered, with the entry plan capped at 2,000 assets, and existing licences cannot be stacked to grow in small steps (see Lansweeper's pricing page). On a network with thousands of peripherals, the billable asset count can run well past the number of devices you actually manage.

Scope matters too. Lansweeper is a discovery and inventory product. It does not do fault or performance monitoring, so a like-for-like stack needs a second product alongside it. Open-AudIT covers discovery, inventory, and compliance auditing, and its Community Edition discovers with no asset cap. NMIS adds the monitoring layer, licensed the same per-device way.

How FirstWave pricing works across NMIS and Open-AudIT

FirstWave publishes three plans on its pricing page:

• Community. Free forever. Open-AudIT Community Edition with unlimited device discovery, inventory, and configuration tracking. Open source under AGPLv3. NMIS itself is open source too, in market since 1998.
• Professional. Per-node pricing. Adds compliance frameworks (NIST, ISO 27001, Essential Eight, CIS Controls), vulnerability detection, and automated reporting.
• Enterprise. Custom pricing that includes NMIS 9 and all opModules, multi-server architecture through opHA, and multi-tenancy for MSPs.

There is no meter behind any of these plans. No per-gigabyte log charge, no page-view counter, no overage line at month end. Richer telemetry from a licensed device costs nothing extra. That is the point of per-node licensing: the licence tracks the network, not the data.

Scaling to tens of thousands of devices without a pricing cliff

Predictable pricing only matters if the platform actually scales with it. NMIS handles fault, performance, and configuration monitoring across multi-vendor networks, and opHA coordinates multiple primary and poller servers into one logical platform with central visibility and automated failover. opHA Message Bus extends that to distributed deployments with event streaming and multi-tenant isolation across thousands of pollers.

For MSPs, the same architecture serves many customers from one platform, with per-device economics that are easy to pass through to your own pricing. Your cost per customer is a device count, not a guess about their data.

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