SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

The initial setup was relatively easy.

We didn't go into very much depth, as in application monitoring and services monitoring, but I believe it can do both.

The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved. The performance, integration, and pricing could be better as well.

We used it for about four years. It's a cloud solution.

The stability needs to be improved.

The initial setup is relatively easy. Because it's a cloud solution, we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor.

We had a yearly license, and the pricing could be improved.

We looked into Zabbix and decided to switch to it.

I would not recommend SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and would rate it at six on a scale from one to ten.

The solution is used more or less for the servers for the network including monitoring the logs and all of those tasks.

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 initial setup is pretty straightforward.

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 pricing of the solution should be adjusted.

We've been using the solution for two years now.

The solution has been working quite well. We haven't seen any problems so far. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The product has good stability.

We haven't seen any restrictions on scaling. If a company needs to scale with this solution, they can do so.

We have yet to contact technical support. Most of the time the troubleshooting is done online, and therefore we haven't had the necessity to go through them yet. This is due to the fact that the department is not at that big of a scale yet, and therefore we've just set it up and started using it. We haven't found the need to contact technical support yet.

The solution isn't complex to set up. It's pretty straightforward.

The deployment takes about a week. It doesn't take too long.

We have one person, more or less, that's handling the solution and can handle maintenance as required. 

The cost should be a bit less. It's high right now, or higher than it should be.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

For small, small businesses, this solution will be good. However, if you want to go more complex, I would advise you to potentially explore other options.

So far, I would rate the solution at an eight on a scale from one to ten. We are still exploring its capabilities. It's still pretty new to us. 

It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services. 

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. 

I have been using this solution for a few years. We installed it on a customer site when we first got the contract. We haven't done any upgrades.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. We have set up a lot of things, like 300 VMs and 10 to 15 different monitors. So, we are talking about a small number of monitors and a lot of VMs. It's kind of a big one.

I am not sure. I'm not the person who tries to troubleshoot it. I don't think we needed much support. Only once there was a corruption in some kind of database, and a colleague of mine asked about how to solve it. Otherwise, we didn't need any technical support from them.

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. 

A customer is trying to move some of the VMs to Azure. It is the latest trend, and people are moving from on-premises VMs to cloud-based VMs.

Azure Monitor seems to be more powerful on the log analytics and the application level side, but it is less powerful on the systems side, for example, listening port or service.

It's a decent solution for on-premises servers.

I would rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor an eight out of ten. It needs application-level monitoring and performance output. 

We are solution providers and this is one of the monitoring solutions that we implement for our customers.

SAM has altered the way monitoring is being looked at - from just being able to monitor CPU, Mem, Disk and network utilization levels we have moved to the next levels of finding out process related issues, service related issues and specific application related issues to identify root cause of performance issues.

The most valuable feature is application monitoring. Already 1200 application monitoring templates exist with the Solarwinds SAM monitoring and the AppInsights for IIS, SQL, Exchange & AD. 

I am looking for more application insight-based widgets with the service. They currently have them for IIS, SQL, Exchange, and Active Directory.

I would like to see additional application support for non-Windows servers. This would give us more flexibility in terms of monitoring customer applications.

I have been working with the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for about five years.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We are a distributor and solution provider, and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. It is used for monitoring the performance of applications and infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager.

It is a very powerful tool for database administration and management.

The support for Active Directory is good.

Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed.

I have been working with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for two years.

This is a stable product.

It is absolutely scalable. We have worked on projects of different sizes for companies operating on local, national, and international levels. The smaller deployments include perhaps 10 network devices, 20 servers, and two network storage devices. We have done several medium-sized deployments with between 100 and 500 servers, including two data centers. 

The technical support is nothing special. The service is available on a 24/7 basis, which is good enough for my market.

I have worked with similar solutions including Zabbix, HPE Performance Manager, and Microsoft System Center Manager. I have good opinions of HPE and SolarWinds.

This solution is simple to deploy. I do not need more than two or three hours to complete it.

I spend perhaps 30 minutes customizing it, making technical changes for the customer's environment and infrastructure. This can be done once we have all of the information that we need concerning the IT processes.

I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product.

There are several tools included in this solution including AppStack (Application Stack Management), PerfStack (Performance Analysis), and NetPath (Network Path Analysis).

This is an open platform so if there is something that it does not support then you can write your own scripts. You have the ability to include metrics from different systems, which is very good.

In summary, I like this product and I recommend it. SolarWinds is one of the best products on the market and if they eventually support the IBM Mainframe then it will be perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for Microsoft Exchange. We use it as a monitoring tool to query and monitor databases. Using the solution we are able to see what service is running or what services are not. It allows us to get a complete picture of the SIEM.

We find that the most valuable aspect of the solution is its configuration capabilities. It's quite simple. Users can configure Linux or Windows very easily.

The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause.

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.

The technical support is slow to respond. They need to act on tickets faster.

We have been using the solution for approximately three or four months. It hasn't been that long.

We've found the solution to be very stable. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches or crashes. It's been very good.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

We don't have users per se on the solution, as it's only meant to monitor. We have seven people on our team, and any one of us can use the solution to check and monitor everything as needed.

We use it on a daily basis.

We've been in touch with technical support in the past to help us deal with the customization of reports, which is quite difficult on the platform.

Their support is, at times, difficult because of the time zone. For example, if we raise a ticket now, we won't get a response for seven hours. The delay isn't great for us.

We previously used ManageEngine. It was not giving us what we needed, which is why we switched. With SolarWinds, we can even get great performance and good monitoring from MongoDB through SQL. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We found it rather easy.

In terms of setup, traditionally, to configure any single node, it takes about five to ten minutes.

In order to maintain the solution, a company would need at least two people: one to monitor performance and another to monitor the application itself.

I was able to handle the entire implementation myself after going through and reading the documentation. I didn't need the outside assistance of an integrator or consultant.

I don't have any information on pricing, as that is handled by our procurement team.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I believe it is version 12.5.

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. It's perfect for revealing bottlenecks. You will have more visibility once you will install it in your environment. The solution will no doubt help other companies resolve issues very quickly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution with customers who would like to have insight into their application environments. These environments could be on-premise, hybrid, in clouds, it does not matter where it resides. They want to have deep insight into the performance and availability of applications, databases, networks, VMware, Hyper-V, etcetera. It doesn't matter what they want to look at because all infrastructure components can be monitored using SAM. This product can monitor about 150 infrastructure components by default.  

The most valuable feature of the product is the monitoring capability. Basic infrastructure monitoring is a good start for using the product. For example, I like Microsoft monitoring and various components like SharePoint and Active Directory, which can be very important. But also it is very useful for monitoring Microsoft SQL Server environments. That only covers the surface approach to monitoring applications and servers. You can also monitor the underlying infrastructure. For example, you can monitor hardware components such as the health of your servers so that you know if they are functioning optimally or if they have some type of performance issue or failure. You can go a step further to get deeper insight into specific components. But it is a very good thing to start with APM (Application Performance Management) and to get into monitoring the underlying infrastructure of your system so you are aware of its condition.  

These tools are made for evaluation and monitoring. They were developed some years ago and they are still evolving, and what I would like to see is that they are made cloud-ready as soon as possible. It would be good at this point to have it so you can run them and use them in the cloud. That is actually already possible, but I want to make sure that they continue to mature that type of development and enhance the product's capabilities.  

What can and will be added in upcoming releases is that the product will support a few more well-known database flavors like Oracle SQL server. I would like to see an extension of that capability to other database flavors including freeware environments like MySQL, Progress, and MariaDB. I know for a fact that they will be adding these capabilities in the future for sure, and that is a great step forward.  

 We have been using SolarWinds SAM (Server & Application Monitor) for six years.  

SolarWinds SAM is very stable. We are using it with hundreds or thousands of customers and there are no stability issues.  

The product is very scalable. No problem with that at all.  

The technical support is very good. We can access it 24/7 when we need to.  

The initial setup is very straightforward.  

Pricing is quite cheap. It starts at 2,440 euros. For that, you have the ability to monitor a couple of nodes. You also get one year of maintenance and support included in the price.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SolarWinds SAM as a ten in regards to the total cost of ownership and quality. But being more modest because there is room for improvement I will rate it a nine.  

I would highly recommend this solution to users.  

The primary use case of this solution is for centralized monitoring of the server performance to ensure that the servers have proactive monitoring, CPU utilization, memory, and performance across the monitoring. 

SolarWinds was suggested to our clients running a mid-size infrastructure, with budget constraints and can't afford IBM, Broadcom, or Microsoft.

The customer's requirements are met with SolarWinds.

It helps with server monitoring and not only to monitor the physical servers, but it can also control the virtual environment. It has good monitoring in VM integration by VMware or Citrix.

SolarWinds is not just a monitoring tool, it can provide you with a capacity planning giving you complete a server inventory and helps you fulfill your commitment to the business. 

You will know your plan and what you will need in the next two years to achieve your capacity planning.

You are aware of what is happening in your servers, what their performance is, how the applications are behaving, and it helps you build your CMDB as well.

Our clients like the nice dashboard where they can see the active monitoring and includes performance, CPU usage, memory usage, and files. 

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.

When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed. It's slow. This is an issue that has been going on for a long time that hasn't been properly addressed by SolarWinds. In a bigger architecture, the portal is still slow. They will have to look into it and see how they can improve it because this is the biggest complaint the customers have.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to the reliability and the issue with the speed, especially the slowness with their browser-based solution.

This solution is stable but when the product has a lot of data in the databases, the speed is an issue.

The solution is scalable, but not for large infrastructures. I can recommend SolarWinds for a mid to large scale organization. I am not convinced that customers who have two to four thousand devices and two thousand servers can implement SolarWinds on such a large scale.

The technical support is good, it's above average.

Previously we implemented the CA UIM solution, CA Spectrum, and Microsoft Monitoring.

SolarWinds is much easier than any of them.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to implement, but when you implement it in a huge environment you will have some complexity. Also if you implement it in a single box, it can be complex.

If it is a mid-scale customer they can implement this solution on their own. They will need only two or three bars and a maximum of two servers are more than enough to implement.

If it's a small solution, you can implement it. It keeps the database separate. It's straightforward, it is not difficult.

Overall it is a very simple implementation.

The length of deployment depends on the infrastructure, the customer that I am referring to took a month and a half to implement most of the requirements. 

From a vendor's point of view when implementing this solution, SolarWinds will gives me paid access. 

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.

It is clearly a good return on investment for any customer when they implement SolarWinds.

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.

When you compare SolarWinds to Broadcom, Broadcom has a simpler policy, you can install it and you don't have the complex licensing where you need a separate license for every little thing. 

Customers don't understand the complexity of the licensing when you need a separate license for the application and storage as an example. With SolarWinds, you have to pay for every feature.

Improvements come as we are moving forward. Requirements also change with time.

There were times when we used to be a complete physical infrastructure. Most of the customers have now moved to a virtual infrastructure.

The requirements are also changing. In the last ten years, what I have seen is that SolarWinds is improving its product as per the demand of the customer.

SolarWinds is easy to implement and it has most of the information the customer is looking for, and the dashboard has the wow factor.

I think that every IT team should have to courage to try to implement it by themselves because it is not difficult.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for network monitoring.

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

It's a very powerful application that covers all areas.

It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable. It's a license based scalability, but it is scalable. 

I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast.

I didn't previously use another solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We have five to six administrators.

We had a consultant assist us with the implementation.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend the solution. It needs the proper sizing before implementation, and if you have done the proper sizing then you're all good.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are a solution integrator, and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We also supply this as a service.

The primary use case for this solution is application monitoring, in an on-premises deployment model.

The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature.

The custom reporting needs to be improved.

Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included. The supported list of applications is very limited. For example, it supports the Windows version of JD Edwards, but not the Linux version of the same solution. Since it is the same application running on a different platform, it should work.

The price of scaling this solution needs to be improved.

I would like to have better support for Linux, and not be as dependent on Windows Servers. Even for non-Windows applications, it uses a Windows Server.

This solution is quite stable.

It is expensive to scale this solution, simply because of the cost of the polling engine. You can purchase unlimited IPs, but the price of an additional polling engine is $20,000 USD. That is quite a lot. We are looking into other solutions because it is just too expensive to keep scaling.

We have approximately eighty users and four hundred servers.

There is no in-country support for this solution. There are local numbers available but the call quality isn't great. I would rate technical support a five out of ten.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

The deployment took four weeks.

We provide the consultants for integrating this solution.

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 high price of this solution has us looking into other solutions, rather than scale.

If you are looking for a single pane of glass to monitor Windows products then SolarWinds is your product. However, it is not best of breed. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.