We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Grafana based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Grafana stands out due to its open-source nature, flexibility in integration, and visually appealing graphs. SolarWinds falls short in terms of stability, flexibility, ease of use, and pricing, although it offers valuable monitoring capabilities. Grafana's customer service and pricing are positively reviewed. Overall, Grafana is user-friendly and provides a positive return on investment, making it the preferred solution.
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"The dashboards are the most valuable features."
"The best thing about Grafana is the visualization. The colors and the ease of use make it very user-friendly."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"The initial setup is straightforward with just a few clicks on the solution's cloud."
"It is easy to change and move virtual servers."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"The solution must provide tutorials and guides."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"The solution should include online support."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"More dashboard is required, out-of-the-box, for OpenNMS."
"It can take a considerable amount of time to learn the graphs if a long duration is selected."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"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."
"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."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"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."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"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."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and Elastic Observability, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and SCOM. See our Grafana vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
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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.
