We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Prometheus based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Prometheus is the preferred choice over SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor due to its flexibility, integration capabilities, and affordability as an open-source solution. While SolarWinds has valuable monitoring capabilities, there is room for improvement in stability, ease of use, and pricing. Prometheus is highly valued for its fast data storage system, scraping mechanism, and ability to collect and compare logs from different resources.
"It lets me proactively identify and resolve system issues. This, in terms of, most of the time, really reduces downtime. Because when there are notifications on time when we engage it quickly on time, our downtime is highly reduced. So basically, Prometheus is for monitoring and alerting."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"It has lots of APIs and libraries to integrate with any kind of language."
"Prometheus is an open-source product that helps mold and improve it per our requirements. It is a lightweight solution that gives you many different metrics you can use in your application. The product offers complete granularity of your infrastructure. It integrates seamlessly with other tools like Grafana, which offers dashboard visibility. Prometheus is an extensively used product. I haven't seen any organization that is not using it."
"The product’s scalability is valuable."
"It is highly valuable as it serves as the foundation for our infrastructure monitoring tools."
"The most valuable feature is that we can receive information in different formats."
"The sky is the limit because the solution is a flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need to monitor applications."
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"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."
"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."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset."
"The product must improve its documentation."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"A slight alteration to the user interface should be made to increase efficiency and streamline the process. Currently, we are utilizing Prometheus to gather and compile metrics and then utilizing Grafana to display them in the form of a graph. However, I believe that Prometheus has the capability to handle both of these tasks on its own, with perhaps the addition of a supplementary plugin. By doing so, the need for utilizing two separate applications will be eliminated."
"They could provide efficient logs in terms of clarity and ease of access similar to Datadog’s paid version."
"There isn’t much clarity regarding the issues that happen at the server end. It is a push model and from the client’s point of view, it needs to look better and solve remote issues."
"The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience."
"Prometheus has a learning curve when setting it up. It definitely requires a little bit more hands-on than other solutions. It is an open source solution which means you do need to go through and read the literature that they have online for setting it up. The setup could be made easier."
"The simplicity of the query language could be improved. The current query language is not easy to work with."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
"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."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"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."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
Prometheus is ranked 9th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 32 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Prometheus is rated 8.4, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Prometheus writes "A very flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Prometheus is most compared with Azure Monitor, New Relic, Dynatrace, Sentry and Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver), whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Nagios XI and ServiceNow Discovery. See our Prometheus 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.
