We performed a comparison between AppDynamics and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: With a wider range of features including alerting for issues, release management capabilities, and business insights, AppDynamics is scalable, stable, and easy to use. It offers the ability to monitor applications of different technologies and manage log files, whereas SolarWinds lacks code-level monitoring of applications and software-defined network monitoring capability. AppDynamics also has better customer support and an optimized dashboard, although it is more expensive.
"The most valuable feature is having our services being available and healthy."
"Autodiscovery of application topology, based on real user traffic."
"The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application"
"I find troubleshooting is quicker because we can drill down into the end points and see which endpoints are getting critical. Visibility-wise, the micro details are easy to find."
"AppDynamics is scalable."
"This solution not only provides answers but also provides sensor data. This allows us to quickly resolve issues that developers may take a long time to solve."
"I like how the AppDynamics dashboard portrays the information flows. When a task is executed, various flows between different applications and databases happen in the background. The dashboard is intuitive and helps visualize the connections, the directions of the flow, and the information related to these specific sessions."
"AppDynamics has a very broad range of supported technologies, and it's user-friendly. It looks nice, and it's easy to sell the solution to the stakeholders when we can visualize how the website is working. For example, where we have any problems through visual analytics."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"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."
"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 most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"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."
"The initial setup could be easier."
"The cloud licensing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey."
"AppDynamics' modules and hardware resources are very high."
"AppDynamics should improve its ability to track all the transactions."
"AppDynamics could benefit from greater integration with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning."
"The documentation and training material have room for improvement."
"They need to improve the consolidation of agents for the agent's installation process."
"Installation and configuration can be very tough. An average user without specialized knowledge can't do this. You need to have DevOps and QA teams handle it. During installation, a lot of customers get stuck trying to track the database or the API part, and they have to contact customer support."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"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."
"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."
"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 153 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 21st in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. AppDynamics is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AppDynamics writes "Very good real-time monitoring capabilities, deep problem diagnosis, and transaction mapping". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". AppDynamics is most compared with Dynatrace, Elastic Observability, Datadog, Splunk Enterprise Security and Azure Monitor, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, Prometheus, ServiceNow Discovery and Nagios XI. See our AppDynamics 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.
