Grafana vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Grafana Labs and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Grafana Labs is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.9, while SolarWinds is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.0. Grafana Labs holds a 2.6% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 88% of Grafana Labs users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Grafana

Read 50 Grafana reviews

14,292 Views
13,434 Comparison Views

88% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

7,596 Views
4,330 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Grafana

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Grafana are both competitive solutions in the monitoring sector. Grafana appears to have an edge with its advanced visualization features, while SolarWinds provides superior support and pricing options.

Features: SolarWinds provides comprehensive server and application monitoring with features like automatic application discovery and performance baseline tracking. AppInsight allows for detailed monitoring of SQL and Exchange. Customized dashboards offer diverse monitoring capabilities. Grafana offers extensive visualization capabilities, built-in analytics, customizable dashboards, and real-time monitoring with alert systems. Open-source flexibility allows for integration with numerous data sources.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds can improve its user interface for ease of use and reduce complexity for non-technical staff. Streamlining initial setup processes could enhance user experience. Expanding integration with third-party tools may provide better flexibility. Grafana could benefit from improved configurations for non-expert users and enhanced deployment support. Providing comprehensive customer support to handle complex configurations can be beneficial. Enhancing default dashboard templates for ease of start-up would provide users with immediate value.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds has a robust deployment model with strong integration capabilities and superior customer service support, ensuring a smooth transition. Grafana's open-source nature allows for cloud-based deployments offering flexibility, although it may require more configuration time for customized setups. Support may be limited without in-depth user knowledge of Grafana.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds, while demanding a higher initial cost, offers substantial ROI through its effective automation and robust monitoring features. Grafana provides a cost-effective alternative with its flexible pricing model, maximizing customization without incurring extensive costs. Businesses with tight budgets might find Grafana's pricing model appealing, while those seeking comprehensive support may lean towards SolarWinds.

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

Buyer's Guide

Grafana vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

August 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 908,877 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

Grafana

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

7th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

19th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (6th), Active Directory Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Grafana is 2.6%, down from 6.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.0%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Grafana	2.6%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.0%
Other	96.4%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Vitthal Gole

Devops Engineer at AIQOD

Proactive monitoring has transformed how our teams detect issues and resolve incidents faster

For improving Grafana, the alert configuration could be more intuitive for new users. Dashboard management becomes complex in large environments. So if we have multiple environments and we have to manage our dashboards for them, sometimes it becomes complicated to manage all the dashboards. The learning curve is steep for beginners. More built-in reporting and analytics features would be helpful. Documentation for advanced features could be more detailed. Role-based access management could be simpler to configure. Performance could be optimized for very large dashboards with high cardinality data sources. Grafana could improve its alert configuration workflow and make advanced dashboard management easier for new users. More built-in reporting features would also be beneficial. A simpler onboarding experience for first-time users and more built-in dashboard templates for common monitoring scenarios would be helpful. Grafana is a powerful monitoring platform, but it could improve dashboard organization in large environments, simplify alert management, provide more built-in reporting capabilities, enhance plugin compatibility during upgrades, and offer better AI-driven insights for fast root cause analysis. For example, if we are hitting a CPU metric of ninety to ninety-five percent or a system load of seventy to eighty percent, we have to act on that. But if Grafana suggests something on that metric, such as an AI suggestion, it would be more helpful. We could get an idea of how to solve that issue. For the Grafana dashboards, they could provide more built-in compliance and audit reporting, enhance AI recommendations with clearer explanations of why an issue was flagged, enhance accessibility and keyboard navigation, add more native integrations with emerging cloud and DevOps tools, and improve scalability for very large enterprise deployments. Grafana is a mature platform, but it could benefit from better dashboard version control, simpler environment migration, enhanced AI explanations, more built-in reporting, and improved performance for large-scale deployments with complex dashboards.

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

"Grafana has improved our analysis capability to solve an issue, increasing the co-working between IT services and business services."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the UI dashboard because we need to create a dashboard on Grafana to monitor our data."

"It integrates well with other solutions."

"It gives us the visibility we need. I like that when we add deployment markers or release markers, we know exactly when an issue arises. For instance, if there is an increased usage of CPU, we can link it directly to the deployment that might have caused the issue. It increases productivity and observability. We can now easily tell when a certain issue arises. It's way easier to debug because it can point you to certain things based on these markers, and we can debug easier."

"The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that."

"Grafana has helped our organization with observability and operational excellence."

"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."

"Grafana is great when it comes to capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."

More Grafana pros

"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."

"The recommendations are a life saver."

"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."

"The most valuable features of the solution are its real-time node monitoring and Help Desk's feedback."

"As I mentioned in one of the other points: "Simplicity at its best"."

"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."

"The OOTB (Out of the Box) implementation does have very good node specific pages and can provide a wealth of information."

"Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"Perhaps the display of the trigger limits should be more efficient because it's difficult to see that in a graph."

"It is limited on the reporting type supported, which is important for managerial-level officers who want reports that are either general or specific."

"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."

"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."

"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."

"I would like the ability to download my results into any format in order to share the information with my clients."

"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."

"The look and feel of the charting and graph capabilities in Grafana could improve. If they provided a storyboard type of feature as they have in other solutions, such as PowerBI. The multi-tenanted and stitch metrics features could improve."

More Grafana cons

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."

"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."

"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."

"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."

"We are looking into other solutions because it is just too expensive to keep scaling."

"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."

"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Grafana is free and open source."

"The solution is expensive."

"For me, Grafana is a cheap tool because I don't have to spend much time learning the product since it is a simple solution."

"I am using an open-source version"

"Since Grafana is an open-source solution, it is free of cost."

"My company uses the open-source version of Grafana, so it's free."

"I use the open source model so it is free."

"We are using the open-source license."

More Grafana pricing and cost advice

"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The product is expensive."

"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."

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

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.

See recommendations

908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

13%

University

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	10
Large Enterprise	27

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 Grafana?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is very reasonable and has excellent community support.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Grafana?

Currently, I do not think that any improvement is required, but there are multiple use cases.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Grafana?

My main use case for Grafana is to create and design dashboards based on the metrics provided by different exporters via Prometheus. We have different exporters, and we are creating different dashb...

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

Comparisons

Sentry vs Grafana

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk Observability Cloud vs Grafana

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Monitor vs Grafana

Compared 5% of the time

Elastic Observability vs Grafana

Compared 4% of the time

Dynatrace vs Grafana

Compared 4% of the time

More Grafana Competitors

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Prometheus-AI Platform vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 2% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Grafana

August 2026

Download Grafana product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

July 2026

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Grafana offers a customizable, user-friendly platform for robust data visualization and integration, enhancing real-time monitoring with extensive alerting and collaboration capabilities supported by an active open-source community.

Grafana stands out for its flexible dashboards and robust visualization options, integrating smoothly with tools like Prometheus. This open-source platform supports diverse environments, aiding in the visualization of IT infrastructure and business analytics. Its alerting system efficiently supports real-time monitoring. While it is praised for its community backing and cost-effectiveness, there is demand for better data aggregation, intuitive interfaces, and enhanced documentation compared to competitors such as Splunk. Simplification of configuration and the interface is sought, alongside improvements in machine learning and reporting features.

What are Grafana's most important features?

Customizable Dashboards: User-friendly, richly customizable dashboards for precise data presentation.
Visualization Capabilities: Strong support for visualizing complex datasets from multiple sources.
Integration Options: Extensive compatibility with data sources and tools like Prometheus.
Alerting System: Efficient real-time monitoring and issue identification.
Open-Source Nature: Supported by a vibrant community, offering a cost-effective solution.

What benefits or ROI should users seek in Grafana reviews?

Adaptability: Supports diverse environments and use cases.
Cost-Effectiveness: Offers valuable features at a competitive price.
Community Support: Backed by an active and vibrant open-source community.
Collaborative Platform: Seamless integration with various data tools refining monitoring and analytics efforts.

Grafana is implemented widely across industries for monitoring IT infrastructure and visualizing business analytics. Companies utilize it to analyze server performance or monitor Kubernetes environments and payment transactions. The platform integrates with AWS services and other data sources to ensure observability and system health tracking, focusing on performance metrics through customized dashboards and alerts. Organizations employ Grafana to bolster observability and optimize infrastructure through robust data insights.

Grafana Labs

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

Microsoft, Adobe, Optum, Sky, Nvidia, Roblox, Wells Fargo, BlackRock, Informatica, Maersk, Daimler Truck, SNCF, Atlassian, DHL, SAP, JPMorgan Chase, Cisco, Citi and many others.

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

Grafana vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

August 2026

Free Report: Grafana vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

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

DOWNLOAD NOW

908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Grafana vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.

See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.

We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.