sip-exporter vs SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager

sip-exporter is a free, open-source Linux and self-hosted eBPF sensor for SIP and correlated RTP monitoring. It exposes Prometheus metrics at /metrics, including SIP traffic, active sessions, RFC 6076 performance, voice quality, RTP, RTCP, fraud, and diagnostic measures. RTP analysis covers jitter, packet loss, packet-delay variation, and E-model MOS; RTCP sender and receiver statistics include loss, jitter, and round-trip time linked by SSRC. Documented fraud indicators include registration scans, INVITE bursts, account takeover after a registration country change, and False Answer Supervision. A Grafana dashboard has 11 sections, with Prometheus alert examples and Alertmanager examples for Slack, PagerDuty, and email. Metrics are documented for Prometheus, VictoriaMetrics, Grafana Cloud, and compatible scrapers. Deployment uses a single container that must run privileged with host networking. Capture is limited to IPv4/UDP SIP and related RTP/RTCP, and the sensor must see signaling and media on the same call path.

SolarWinds VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM) is a self-hosted tool for monitoring VoIP calls and WAN performance. It tracks jitter, latency, packet loss, round-trip time, and mean opinion score, with synthetic call tests and SIP trunk monitoring. Call detail and management records help locate affected calls, inspect paths, review quality metrics, and identify common error codes. Real-time alerts trigger when user-defined quality or network thresholds are exceeded. VNQM monitors Cisco IP SLA and Juniper RPM operations between source and target devices with current and historical QoS metrics. Supported call managers include Cisco Unified Communications Manager, Cisco CallManager Express, and Avaya Communication and Media Server. It runs on the SolarWinds Platform with web and Windows access. The listed plan including VNQM costs $8 per month; VNQM does not support over six million calls monthly.