Amazon CloudWatch vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #24 with an average rating of 8.0, while SolarWinds is ranked #22 with an average rating of 8.0. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 0.9% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Amazon CloudWatch

Read 49 Amazon CloudWatch reviews

9,188 Views
4,686 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

9,577 Views
5,363 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Amazon CloudWatch

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Amazon CloudWatch and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon CloudWatch vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: November 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

November 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 920,769 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Amazon CloudWatch

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

24th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (19th), Cloud Monitoring Software (15th)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

22nd

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (7th), Active Directory Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Amazon CloudWatch is 0.9%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.0%, down from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.0%
Amazon CloudWatch	0.9%
Other	98.1%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Amandeep Pawar

Engineer Technology at Iris Software Technologies Private Limited

Monitoring microservices has improved and teams respond faster to production incidents

In my opinion, the best features Amazon CloudWatch offers are Metrics, Analytics, Logs, Alarms, Dashboards, and Log Insights, with standout features being real-time monitoring and centralized logging, proactive alerting, and fast troubleshooting. The dashboards in Amazon CloudWatch help with troubleshooting by allowing us to easily look into API latency and how much resource consumption is occurring. The CloudWatch dashboard provides real-time data and views of our application health while Log Insights lets us quickly search and analyze logs to identify root causes of production issues, making troubleshooting time efficient and monitoring much more streamlined. Amazon CloudWatch has positively impacted my organization by improving our ability to monitor production issues and easily find the root cause in the application. We can quickly fix issues at the point of occurrence, and real-time metrics for microservices provide centralized logging and automated alerts that enable fast incident detection, quicker troubleshooting, and better application reliability, ultimately reducing operational efforts by giving engineers a single platform for monitoring AWS resources and microservices. I have seen many positive outcomes in my organization, estimating that CloudWatch reduced troubleshooting time by around thirty to forty percent because engineers could correlate metrics and logging from a single platform. Early alerts also help us resolve many performance issues before they escalate into major incidents, contributing to improved service availability.

Read full review

NikhilKalwint

Technical Specialist at ServiceIO

Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility

From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"The technical support is fantastic; it's the best ever."

"The detection is the most valuable feature."

"It offers direct integrations with various storage providers, making it convenient to push logs from CloudWatch to these external platforms."

"What I found most valuable in Amazon CloudWatch is that it gives you detailed information, which I found helpful because it can even provide you with data for the past one minute, which is quite granular. That was what helped me most in terms of finding the root causes. Task automation is another valuable feature of Amazon CloudWatch."

"The alarms are one thing I love about AWS CloudWatch. It has alerts that notify us when resource use is approaching the limit."

"The product can be integrated with AWS very easily."

"It's a very simple logging system."

"Scheduling is a valuable feature."

More Amazon CloudWatch pros

"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."

"From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors."

"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."

"The solution has good alerts; notifications are sent via email to technicians, and you can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well, which is excellent."

"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."

"SolarWinds is one of the best products on the market and if they eventually support the IBM Mainframe then it will be perfect."

"If you are looking for a single pane of glass to monitor Windows products then SolarWinds is your product."

"We choose the Solarwinds based on the simplication of managing the tool itself."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"It is hard to configure; it is not a straightforward tool."

"Amazon CloudWatch charges extra for custom metrics, which is a significant disadvantage."

"What would make Amazon CloudWatch better is if it includes more on-site checks, particularly status checks on the CPU, network input/output, etc. It would also be helpful if there's built-in swap space, disk, and memory monitoring in Amazon CloudWatch because, at the moment, my team has to configure it manually through a shell script."

"Amazon CloudWatch needs improvement. The main thing is we have noticed missing logs."

"When connecting to Google Cloud, there is no visibility or traceability from Google Cloud into CloudWatch."

"It's not an advanced way of monitoring."

"The solution could benefit from a price decrease."

"The product's configuration has some challenges. The solution needs to be more user-friendly."

More Amazon CloudWatch cons

"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."

"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."

"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."

"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."

"Mapping interactions between systems."

"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."

"Scalability was an issue in the past."

"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product's cost is relatively inexpensive."

"The tool is not expensive."

"What's were using is the free service of Amazon CloudWatch, so they're not charging us. As for hidden fees, we're not aware of them because we're using what our clients provided us."

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable for detailed basic monitoring."

"The pricing can be considered reasonable, especially when already operating on a cloud platform."

"It is a free-of-charge service."

"Amazon CloudWatch has very cheap pricing, and it hardly costs my company $25-$30 a month for fifty systems, so it's pretty affordable."

"The price of Amazon CloudWatch is reasonable. When the rate of data collection is done the price will increase. The price is less than other solutions."

More Amazon CloudWatch pricing and cost advice

"The price is too high."

"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."

"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."

"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."

"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."

"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."

"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."

"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Outsourcing Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

13%

University

Financial Services Firm

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	26

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	21

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon CloudWatch?

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Amazon CloudWatch has been positive. It was very easy to set up because it is built into AWS and does not require separate licensing, bein...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon CloudWatch?

For improvements, I think Amazon CloudWatch could enhance certain areas, particularly regarding pricing structure. I wish to see simpler pricing, more intuitive dashboards, easier log queries for b...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Amazon CloudWatch?

My main use case for Amazon CloudWatch is the monitoring and analytics of the application servers. I basically use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor the microservices and AWS infrastructure, helping me ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...

See all answers

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Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 3% of the time

Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch

October 2026

Download Amazon CloudWatch product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

October 2026

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Amazon CloudWatch integrates seamlessly with AWS, providing real-time monitoring and alerting features. Its interface supports task automation, enhancing troubleshooting and analytics capabilities, while offering strong security and scalability at a cost-effective rate.

Amazon CloudWatch is an impactful platform for monitoring AWS resources and managing application performance. It simplifies infrastructure performance monitoring by providing comprehensive analytics capabilities, including application insights and event scheduling. Users appreciate CloudWatch for its detailed metrics, dashboards, and support in issuing alerts to detect anomalies. It efficiently tracks performance, optimizes resource utilization, and ensures service availability. CloudWatch is recognized for its robust alerting features and integration with other AWS services, further supporting its resource monitoring capabilities. However, there is room for improvement in dashboard customization, log streaming speed, and integration with non-AWS services. Enhancements in API integration, machine learning features, and support for third-party tools are also desired.

What features does Amazon CloudWatch offer?

Seamless Integration: Works effortlessly with AWS for cohesive service management.
Advanced Metrics: Provides detailed monitoring of CPU, memory, and more.
Real-time Monitoring: Offers up-to-the-minute alerts on infrastructure status.
Dashboards: User-friendly and informative for quick insights.
Automation: Supports task automation for efficient troubleshooting.

What benefits does Amazon CloudWatch provide?

Cost-effectiveness: Efficient resource monitoring without high costs.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing infrastructure needs.
Security: Strong protocols for safe monitoring activities.
Improved Performance: Enhances application insights and operational efficiency.
Operational Insights: Provides comprehensive logging and performance analysis.

Industries implementing Amazon CloudWatch often focus on optimizing IT infrastructure. Companies in sectors like finance and e-commerce rely on its monitoring and alerting capabilities to ensure service uptime and performance. The platform's automation and analytics features empower teams to proactively manage performance and detect potential issues promptly.

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provides comprehensive server, application, and infrastructure monitoring, focusing on integration, application dependency, and network insights through user-friendly interfaces and detailed dashboards.

With AppStack and AppInsight support, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor offers service management, detailed resource dashboards, and integration capabilities. It monitors hardware metrics and performance parameters, facilitating database and network insights for cloud and virtual environments. Robust alerting, predictive analytics, and capacity planning ensure efficient management of server health and application performance.

What are the key features?

Integration: Seamlessly connects with existing tools.
AppStack: Provides a holistic view of applications.
AppInsight: Supports widely-used applications.
SNMP Polling: Efficient network data collection.
Diagnostics: Real-time troubleshooting.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailored monitoring views.

What benefits should users expect?

Comprehensive Monitoring: Extends from servers to databases.
Transparent Control: Enhances visibility into performance metrics.
User-Friendly: Simplifies proactive monitoring with alerts.
Predictive Features: Supports capacity and trend planning.

Industries implement SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to enhance server utilization reporting, network configuration, and AV equipment performance tracking. They benefit from monitoring critical services across diverse deployment models, improving management efficiency and decision-making.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

AirAsia, Airbnb, Aircel, APUS, Avazu, Casa & Video, Futbol Club Barcelona (FCBarcelona), National Taiwan University, redBus

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

Amazon CloudWatch vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

November 2026

Free Report: Amazon CloudWatch vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon CloudWatch vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.

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