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.
"What I like best about AppDynamics is that it's functional, particularly in APM in Java and .NET."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the live reporting on the current health\performance of our application"
"AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good."
"It is a stable solution."
"It's made it easier to collaborate across teams; be able to have the same data immediately in front of you just by sharing a URL."
"Transition tracing is the most valuable is pretty easy and useful, but the user experience piece is also good."
"It allows us to configure health rules so that we can, based on our own experience, determine when an application is behaving incorrectly."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"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."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"The QA and test environment need improvement."
"More native support for other hardware is needed because having to install various extensions and perform extra setup for different devices is really challenging, and not as easy or straightforward as it is in other products."
"Its resiliency can be improved. We're told that the best we can do with an on-prem solution is to have a hot standby that requires a manual switchover. So, it is a do-it-yourself Ikea model of maintaining data consistency between two servers, without having low balance or failover considerations for an on-prem solution."
"At this time, we don't have much visibility on the virtual environment, monitoring, and all other things. We have visibility only for database monitoring, and we have noticed performance impact when deploying database agents on the database server. We got to know this from AppDynamics support also that we should not deploy database agents from the database server. When agents are deployed on the same server and the database is monitored from there, we are not getting database server metrics. Therefore, we don't have those insights, and sometimes, we struggle because of that. They can improve this functionality so that we do not have a performance impact, and we can deploy anywhere. This would help us a lot. In terms of end-user monitoring, currently, it is not working for us because there are some complexities. It is a little complicated, and it takes a little bit of time to understand where you need to make changes. It would be very helpful if they can provide some template designs for end-user monitoring. When our servers are running on VMs, we don't get many insights from the VM side. I don't know whether it is possible to have visibility beyond the database, server, and application and whether there are some features where we can deploy AppDynamics on VMs as well. Such functionality would give us more control over storage, VM, OS, and database. It will also provide complete visibility of our hardware and software."
"The AppDynamics installation process needs to be more straightforward. Deploying the product is also tricky."
"The agent deployment could be simplified by, for example, adding a GUI."
"Regarding Search Guard functionality, there is room for improvement."
"AppDynamics lacks integration with cloud technology. It probably isn't a good fit for emerging enterprises because it's an on-premise solution, and many newer companies are moving to the cloud. AppDynamics' on-premise technology works reasonably well, but it doesn't have cloud features."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"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."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
AppDynamics is ranked 5th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 155 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 18th 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, Nagios XI and ServiceNow Discovery. See our AppDynamics vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
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