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.
"The solution has good features."
"It integrates well with other solutions."
"The most valuable thing was that it had a good visualization tool."
"The dashboards are very easy to work with."
"This solution provides valuable insights into the health of our infrastructure in real time."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
"Great capacity planning and the solution has a great GUI."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"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."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"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."
"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."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"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."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"It would be helpful if they simplified the data source."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"The solution should include online support."
"It's difficult to see the trends on the graph when the range is too long."
"If there was an issue on one node, we couldn't drill down and see all the issues on other nodes."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
"The documentation or training provided by Grafana is limited compared to its competitors, like Splunk."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"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 →
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 21st 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.
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.
