Alluvio Aternity vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 29, 2023

We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Alluvio Aternity based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor's setup can be time-consuming and difficult, while Alluvio Aternity's setup is simple and user-friendly with minimal configuration required. Upgrades for SolarWinds can be problematic, whereas maintenance for Alluvio is almost non-existent.
  • Features: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provides comprehensive monitoring for various aspects of a system, such as processes and infrastructure dependencies, while Alluvio Aternity focuses on providing useful data on machine health and performance, including user experience scores and desktop application usage patterns.
  • Pricing: SolarWinds charges based on the number of devices and modules. Reviews are mixed on Aternity's pricing, with some finding it reasonable for the value and others finding it expensive and challenging to sell in certain markets. Both require yearly licensing, but Aternity has a minimum number of agents required for deployment, while SolarWinds has no additional costs.
  • Service and Support: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor has received varied feedback regarding their customer service. Some customers have been satisfied with their experiences, while others have had negative experiences due to long wait times and lack of initial knowledge. On the other hand, Alluvio Aternity's support team is known to be highly competent and responsive, with local support available. However, more technical queries may require assistance from overseas.
  • ROI: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor has been noted for its ability to enhance performance, decrease downtime, and boost productivity, resulting in a favorable return on investment. On the other hand, Alluvio Aternity's ROI is challenging to quantify since it is not employed for revenue generation.

Comparison Results: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a more comprehensive monitoring tool than Alluvio Aternity, offering infrastructure dependency mapping and network devices' performance monitoring. While Alluvio Aternity provides valuable machine health and performance data, it lacks code-level monitoring and software-defined network monitoring capability. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the preferred solution.

To learn more, read our detailed Alluvio Aternity vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: May 2024).
772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We've looked at the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use the solution. We have used that to see how we are trending and it gives us some insight into areas that we might need to focus more on. That's helpful.""It is a tool that helps me check users' computers really quickly without having a help desk administrator logging in and doing analysis. Anyone who has access to Aternity, including our support team, can log onto Aternity and do a quick, basic analysis.""The ability to monitor crash and health event issues at a user level""The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it.""Other features we use heavily are the WiFi analyzer, the Skype for Business analyzer, and the troubleshooting functionalities. We also use the Device Health quite religiously here for troubleshooting devices that are unhealthy, when we're talking about things like high CPU or memory consumption, or file system problems within the users' workstations.""While it also provides desktop metrics, the main thing we use it for is monitoring our applications.""Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems.""DEM-Q (Digital Experience Management Quadrant) is very useful. This is where they stand out with their dashboard, because it gives us a picture of how our company is doing compared to the other businesses out there."

More Alluvio Aternity Pros →

"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 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.""SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market.""I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool.""This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure.""The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities.""Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time.""Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pros →

Cons
"The solution is available at a higher price than other solutions.""Some of the dashboarding and reporting on the analytics side could be improved. I think they realize it. Obviously, some of the desktop monitoring metrics always can be improved.""Reliability: Issues interfering with the deployment and use of the product has made its use reduced in scope.""Being able to add custom monitoring to dashboards would be nice. Right now, if you want to monitor the value of a registry key on your systems, to get that added into the dashboard you have to reach out to Aternity so they can start looking for that value. It would be interesting if that were more of a self-serve function.""To monitor these transactions, you need to look at it, analyze it and capture it. It requires a little bit of work, but in an environment like ours, you need it to be easier.""For me, the biggest problem is the price. It is not so much about how much it costs. It is about Aternity only giving you 12 months upfront. So, you got to purchase it for 12 months. A lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. They are all OPEX rather than CAPEX. It would be a lot better for our customers if there was an option available for OPEX so that it is billed on a monthly basis than a yearly basis. They've got only Windows agents. They don't actually have mobile agents. It would be a lot better if they could also integrate Android and iOS because then we can start pulling steps and performance management out of users' mobile devices. That's the biggest addition I would suggest at the moment. A lot of our customers have desktops as well as tablets or mobile devices. We should be able to monitor that stuff as well.""Right now, the user information being displayed by Aternity is received from AD. Ideally, we would like to see integration with other sources for user information, like other databases, so we are not limited to AD.""We are waiting for the GA release of their agent. I hope they can do better when they release their endpoint agents. Right now, we are not able to measure some applications, core applications, because it's relying on a specific version of the agent and that agent has not come out yet and there's no ETA. I would like to see them speed up time to market when they release agents."

More Alluvio Aternity Cons →

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included.""The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool.""I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial.""When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed.""An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis.""Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL.""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.""Mapping interactions between systems."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses."
  • "It’s a little on the costly side, but if you license intelligently, accounting for your various hosts connecting in through VDI or terminal servers, you can make it well worth your money."
  • "If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
  • "Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all"."
  • "In my opinion they are asking a lot for their SaaS solution, but I also know that that's the direction they're going... The current, on-prem solution is probably a fair price."
  • "The pricing for the users and agents is reasonable compared to other solutions and vendors."
  • "Regarding cost, compared to other solutions, Aternity is pretty low. It's definitely lower-cost than others that we looked at, like Nexthink."
  • "The pricing is fair."
  • More Alluvio Aternity Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
  • "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."
  • "Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
  • "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."
  • "Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
  • "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."
  • "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 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."
  • More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with… more »
    Top Answer:The dashboard is very effective.
    Top Answer:The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
    Top Answer:The price is too high. The tool is overpriced. We don't need all the features. The product must minimize the features and reduce the price. It all comes down to pricing. The customers find it pretty… more »
    Top Answer:The biggest pain point is root cause analysis. It is difficult to analyze, assess, and warn my IT department about what will happen in the next five hours. It is also difficult to use AIOps to reduce… more »
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    Also Known As
    Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
    SolarWinds SAM
    Learn More
    Overview

    Alluvio Aternity full-spectrum Digital Experience Management provides insight into the business impact of customer and employee digital experience by capturing and storing technical telemetry at scale from employee devices, every type of business application, and your cloud-native application service.

    It also helps you resolve issues quickly by showing you response time breakdown between client device, network, and application back ends. Aternity provides AI-powered visibility into the end user experience of every cloud, SaaS, thick client, or enterprise mobile app, whether it runs on a virtual, physical, or mobile device.

    Aternity Features

    Aternity has many valuable features, including:

    • Automatic discovery of every application in your enterprise portfolio, including SaaS and Shadow IT apps.
    • Click to render - measuring users' interactions with applications in the context of a business process.
    • Change validation - validating the impact of any type of device, application, or infrastructure change on end user experience.
    • Self-healing - automated remediation actions to recover from the most commonly expected user experience issues.
    • Anomaly detection - proactive notification of end-user issues
    • Transaction tracing of distributed applications - including cloud-native apps, via OpenTelemetry
    • Application troubleshooting - identify the cause of application issues

    Aternity Benefits

    Some of the biggest advantages the Aternity offers include:

    • Resolve problems quickly: With Aternity, you can monitor client-side latency, analyze the health and key metrics of the end user’s device, and correlate app performance to the virtual systems they are running on.
    • Reduce virtualization sprawl: Aternity helps you eliminate under-utilized resources with its ability to correlate the inventory of virtual desktop infrastructure to actual usage.
    • Experience level agreement (XLA): Aternity’s XLA feature can help your organization prove quality of service. Specifically, the XLA validates that business activity performance across all applications meets expectations by geography, department, and data center.
    • Mitigate IT transformation risk: Aternity helps you achieve success of both strategic and tactical IT initiatives.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Aternity users.

    PeerSpot user Ryan P., Head of Cyber Security Engineering & Oversight at a media company, says, "The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it."

    An Endpoint Administration Manager at a financial services firm mentions, “It gives you the ability to filter the comparison by geography, industry, or company size.” He also adds, “We have absolutely seen ROI. It's really given us a very high level of visibility that we've just not ever had.”

    A Regional Network Manager at a recruiting/HR firm comments, "Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application."

    A Sr. IT Manager at a manufacturing company states, "The most valuable feature is the application performance troubleshooting because Aternity is able to provide the performance from the end-user perspective. It doesn't just give the standard application logon time, etc., rather it's also able to measure the performance inside the application, the performance of specific transactions in the application, and break it down into three elements: the client time, the network time, and the server time. This gives us a lot of insights into what we need to focus on to improve the performance of an application."

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

    Sample Customers
    Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
    Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm37%
    Healthcare Company13%
    Legal Firm10%
    Government7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm24%
    Government10%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm20%
    Construction Company13%
    Energy/Utilities Company7%
    Recruiting/Hr Firm7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization41%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Government7%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business3%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise86%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise75%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise49%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise48%
    Large Enterprise40%
    Buyer's Guide
    Alluvio Aternity vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio Aternity vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    772,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Alluvio Aternity is ranked 20th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 37 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 17th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Alluvio Aternity is rated 8.4, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Alluvio Aternity writes "Not only helped us know which devices to refresh, but helped us determine if a refresh was even necessary, with factual data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Alluvio Aternity is most compared with Dynatrace, Nexthink, SysTrack, AppDynamics and Azure Monitor, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and Nagios XI. See our Alluvio Aternity 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.