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ITRS Geneos 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

ITRS Geneos
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
34th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (64th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (45th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of ITRS Geneos is 1.0%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
ITRS Geneos1.0%
Other97.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

DeepakR - PeerSpot reviewer
Site Reliability Engineer(Observability) at Sapiens
If one server fails, the agent will automatically be reinstalled
ITRS Geneos is a legacy system. It predicts or provides proactive measures once an issue is resolved. It doesn't offer any predictive capabilities or root cause analysis. They throw a lot of data if there's a 90% error. You need to check which process is consuming more CPU and determine the root cause for yourself. You need to troubleshoot it manually. This legacy system could introduce predictive analysis and root cause identification. They are reluctant to switch to newer solutions, which may require writing queries to fetch data. Manually logging into servers, checking CPU usage, identifying processes, and determining root causes is time-consuming. Once the root cause is identified, the issue can be resolved efficiently. The manual troubleshooting process is time-consuming. The content is not openly available in the market. If you search for it somewhere, it is not readily accessible. If you want to try it out, no trial version is available. Therefore, it will be challenging to learn. Loading ITRS is difficult, as you need to purchase it first. Secondly, only a few people are knowledgeable about ITRS in the market, making it challenging to find resources. Thirdly, the documentation must be well-documented, making finding content or training material hard. The UI also needs to be updated, which adds to the difficulty.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"For my application, Geneos is detecting and helping us avoid outages at least once a day."
"This solution has helped provide relief to existing Level 2 teams, allowing them to focus efforts on in-depth problem analysis."
"ITRS can define rules to alert when certain parameters that you monitor breach a threshold. Rules can be configured to fire recovery actions automatically to clear the alert"
"As a company looking to onboard, its capacity to monitor just about anything from Unix log files and processes to database memory, and even run queries and provide results, means it can be used as a one stop shop for all your monitoring needs if you understand how to utilise it to its fullest extent."
"One of the most valuable features of ITRS Geneos is the active time feature that helps with the trading applications that I support."
"ITRS Geneos is very well known in the financial services community as being the best platform to monitor real time data infrastructures and the application does what it says on the tin."
"It's a very effective and productive tool, and avoids any major incidents."
"One of the best aspects of Geneos is that it has a broad scope and can cover a lot of use cases. You can write your own scripts to monitor really specific things. And the rules that you can put in place can be quite complex for the alerts."
"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 solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes, everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution, it's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"If a company would really like insight into its database utilization or performance and why their servers are slow or why the database is not giving a proper response, this solution will help."
"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."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
 

Cons

"I would also like to see suggested guidelines to accomplish a monitoring task. The issue is that ITRS is so flexible that there is more than one way to complete a task, each with benefits and disadvantages."
"ITRS Geneos is not on the cloud at a time when everyone is moving to the cloud."
"The deployment method for upgrading is a bit tricky. It takes a little bit of manual effort."
"The main feature that needs work is the Dashboard designer. Currently we have to export metrics data in real-time into some other visualization tools in order to get better picture and have a bit more functional dashboard."
"Mobile phone integration is probably not as rich as it could be."
"t needs to have better middleware integration for things such as application and Microsft SQL servers."
"I would like to see ITRS integrate its setup editor with a SVN to check-in setup XML after major changes."
"​It needs to be easier to configure, especially with the JMX plugins.​"
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"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."
"The technical support is nothing special."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You will get the best price if you get a single global deal."
"The organization is not just purchasing a license for the product, but also managing services and professional services from ITRS. Another factor is if the implementation is going to be in production, non-production, or both."
"Based on feedback from colleagues and friends working in the financial sector, Geneos is relatively costly. Many companies have been switching from Geneos to Dynatrace, Sysdig, or other monitoring tools in the past two years because of the price."
"The market tools are on par with this solution, but if the solution included more features, then it would be well within the range for the cost."
"The pricing is fairly market-related. They have been very lenient because we have been working with them for so long. An example is that we're currently migrating some of our services to AWS, and they've given us a grace period for some of the things to help with the migration and not to grow additional costs while we are migrating, but it's still on par with the market."
"ITRS Geneos is not a cheap tool. It's a moderate price for the banking industry. The reason we are not able to add the ITRS monitoring tool for the non-banking industries, and non-finance industries, is that the pricing is too high."
"Its price is reasonable. It isn't too expensive, and it isn't too cheap, but it also depends on a company's volume and negotiation."
"Given our spend and the amount of service we have in it, the pricing is quite reasonable."
"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."
"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."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
68%
Computer Software Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
2%
Construction Company
2%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise39
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ITRS Geneos?
The pricing is high. Licensing fees might be around 500$ per server monthly.
What needs improvement with ITRS Geneos?
ITRS Geneos is a legacy system. It predicts or provides proactive measures once an issue is resolved. It doesn't offer any predictive capabilities or root cause analysis. They throw a lot of data i...
What is your primary use case for ITRS Geneos?
ITRS offers multiple products, including upgrades for synthetic monitoring and a SaaS platform. Geneos is used for infrastructure monitoring, covering KPIs such as CPU, memory, processes, network l...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

Geneos
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

ITRS Geneos is used by over 170 financial institutions, including JPMorgan, HSBC, RBS, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs. Clients range from investment banks to exchanges and brokers.
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about ITRS Geneos vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.