We performed a comparison between Elastic Observability 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: Elastic Observability is the preferred solution as it offers more advanced features, such as machine learning and custom development, as well as better visualization and metrics. Although there is a steep learning curve, customer service and support have been positive. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor has room for improvement in terms of stability, flexibility, ease of use, performance, integration, and pricing. The product is considered expensive, and the report feature is difficult to use.
"The Elastic User Interface framework lets us do custom development when needed. You need to have some Javascript knowledge. We need that knowledge to develop new custom tests."
"It has always been a stable solution."
"Elastic APM has plenty of features, such as the Elastic server for Kibana and many additional plugins. It's a comprehensive tool when used as a logging platform."
"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."
"Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning over a month from multiple data sources can be completed within seconds."
"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"Its diverse set of features available on the cloud is of significant importance."
"It is a powerful tool that allows users to collect and transform logs as needed, enabling flexible visualization and analysis."
"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."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"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."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
"The auto-discovery isn't nearly as good. That's a big portion of it. When you drop the agent onto the JVM and you're trying to figure things out, having to go through and manually do all that is cumbersome."
"Elastic Observability is reactive rather than proactive. It should act as an ITSM tool and be able to create tickets and alerts on Jira."
"The solution needs to use more AI. Once the product onboards AI, users would more effectively be able to track endpoints for specific messages."
"If we had some pre-defined templates for observability that we could start using right away after deploying it – instead of having to build or to change some of the dashboards – that would be helpful."
"Elastic Observability’s price could be improved."
"The solution would be better if it was capable of more automation, especially in a monitoring capacity or for the response to abnormalities."
"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"The tool's scalability involves a more complex implementation process. It requires careful calculations to determine the number of nodes needed, the specifications of each node, and the configuration of hot, warm, and cold zones for data storage. Additionally, managing log retention policies adds further complexity. The solution's pricing also needs to be cheaper."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"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."
"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."
"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 →
Elastic Observability is ranked 7th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 22 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Elastic Observability is rated 7.8, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Elastic Observability writes "The user interface framework lets us do custom development when needed. ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Elastic Observability is most compared with Dynatrace, New Relic, AppDynamics, Azure Monitor and Sentry, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and Nagios XI. See our Elastic Observability 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.
