Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
347
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 10.5%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.6%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems
There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
Subhajit Nag - PeerSpot reviewer
The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow
SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. 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. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It helps our organization identify potential problems by doing thorough analysis of systems which integrate with one another."
"Enables my performance engineer to recreate a problem and give the developers what's happening, where to go look, all the information they need to be able to find what the root cause is."
"The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. It's exactly what we need. The severity impact is based on the users, the availability, and the impact it has on your business."
"Reduced MTTR, thanks to smart problem detection and automated root cause analysis."
"Most importantly the back-end components. Most of the back-end components that the application connects to; nobody knows how our application interacts with, for example, the DataPower Gateway. But AppMon really provides that information for us. So finding the gaps is the key here."
"The most valuable feature the solution offers right now is the PurePath. When we see a web request, and something failing, we can drill down using PurePath."
"​We have drastically reduced the delay taken by the diagnostic phase. As we identify the root cause very rapidly, we can now focus on the solution and communication."
"The real-user monitoring is mostly used to gauge the difference in performance for multitenant applications, This is so we can discern if there are any local network or client-facing issues when we do a comparison between each customer. It is quite important for us to be able to identify a client-side issue, as opposed to a feature managed problem, because we're essentially providing managed services of business applications."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
 

Cons

"Every time we spin up an EC2 instance, we have to slap an agent on it and that is more work. So, if it could go agentless, that would be great."
"The mobile app provided by Dynatrace could be improved, especially the DCR mobile app because it does not have some of the basic functions, like push notifications or even customized reports."
"AppMon is lacking the AI that can be found in Dynatrace Managed."
"Add support for Ruby."
"We're thinking about moving to Dynatrace because AppMon is not scaling for us."
"I would like more flexible data export functions and APIs. The end user experience data is very useful to the solutions team to determine actual system usage and misuse. Flexible, easier data APIs would allow us to export the data more easily to other analytics platforms to enable this analysis as well as enable storage of this data for longer term analysis since DynaTrace only holds user data for 35 days."
"Make the Web UI more robust. Last time I used the web interface, it was still pretty crude."
"We'd like it to be more user-friendly, which, in our case, might be a big ask as we have a fairly complex environment."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"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."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."
"They could improve their price ranges, as there is no option for startups or testing."
"Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace is excellent."
"As compared to New Relic and other providers, it is more expensive, which is its biggest disadvantage. Its biggest advantage is its capability. It is more feature-rich."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"There is a license issue where if we increase the memory we have to up the licenses. I was unaware of that going in. I thought it was scalable without all the paperwork behind the scenes. ​​"
"The pricing is a little high, but still cheaper than competitors because Dynatrace at least has pay-as-you-go. Others do not. However, the pricing is confusing. I wish it was more simplified when trying to price out moving to a yearly contract."
"We found an issue within the first week of ownership that has been costing us more than the entire license cost."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
36%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
35%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Dynatrace vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.