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.
"AppDynamics is easy to implement if you follow the documentation, and the documentation that they provide is good."
"It reduces the time to resolve issues and requires less manpower."
"From the performance management side, I like everything from business transaction work to tracking. On the database side, we can get a lot of insights from the database. On the server monitoring side, it helped us a lot to find out some of the issues on the VM side because VMs were creating a little trouble for us."
"This is a stable product and we definitely plan to continue using it in the future."
"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."
"The transaction snapshots let you find out where the application broke; it pinpoints where in the call stack, and then how long it took to resolve."
"AppDynamics is scalable."
"Despite dozens of deployments across hundreds of applications- we have yet to see a case where AD is negatively impacting application execution or functionality."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"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."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"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."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"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."
"There are many KPIs that are not available in AppDynamics."
"We would love to see support for more types of agents in the mainframe world."
"The UI could use a little help."
"AppDynamics is agent-based, so some customers are reluctant to install the agents in all their production environments. It would be helpful if they had an agentless version. It covers applications on the server, but the solution is weak on the network side. The agent is not deployed on the network components, so it cannot provide complete information about issues on the network layer."
"I’d like to see better out-of-the-box visual reporting so that we can roll this up to management."
"Their agents sometimes claim to be very lightweight, especially with databases, but they are very heavy. They can take up more compute than the actual work that we need to do."
"The cloud licensing needs to be improved. It's quite pricey."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"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."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"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."
"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 153 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 19th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 36 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.