I work in a space where we manage enterprise monitoring for server infrastructure. Hence, SAM is one the best modules that's capable of doing it.

As a part of base monitoring of server infrastructure, we look at server down, CPU threshold, memory threshold, and disk threshold. In some cases, they might look for hardware health monitoring, as well.

As part of extended monitoring, we monitor the applications and their performance that run on top of these servers. This is where SAM is effective. We create templates (applications) which would further have specific components (monitors).

As mentioned in my previous point, SAM has about 50 component monitors, which include file monitors, URL monitors, user experience monitors, Windows monitors, service monitors, process monitors, and script monitors.

We have the list of all business critical applications and servers in our environment and we have configured monitoring and alerting accordingly. This increases service availability, reduces downtime of devices or apps and, as a result, issues will not go unnoticed and there won't be any business impact or financial loss.

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. Based on the historical data, and with the help of ML algorithms, the device is smart enough to find out when to add a CPU to the device and when to reallocate those resources again. For example, if the utilization always goes up on a particular day in the week, the system knows from historical data that this is happening, and it automatically increases the threshold or schedules the threshold accordingly.

The customer's requirements are met with SolarWinds.

It helps with server monitoring and not only to monitor the physical servers, but it can also control the virtual environment. It has good monitoring in VM integration by VMware or Citrix.

SolarWinds is not just a monitoring tool, it can provide you with a capacity planning giving you complete a server inventory and helps you fulfill your commitment to the business. 

You will know your plan and what you will need in the next two years to achieve your capacity planning.

You are aware of what is happening in your servers, what their performance is, how the applications are behaving, and it helps you build your CMDB as well.

The best example would be that we can provide transparency to the infrastructure which is meaningful to developers, but even to business users. Our IT teams can work with developers using a common reference when reviewing issues or planning improvements.

• Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I was awarded Q3 employee of the quarter. I am the first NOC member to receive this award at Kforc).
• By replacing SCOM and several other monitoring tools and merging them into the Orion Suite, I reduced outages by 66% YOY.
• The NOC saw a dramatic reduction in our MTR (Mean Time to Resolution) thanks to the powerful dashboard and alerting options offered in the various SolarWinds tools.

• We are able to correlate application performance issues with bad SQL queries to the database.
• It allows us to identify missing indexes or bad vendor coding.
• It gets us to root cause quicker, especially in identifying whether or not it is something within our control.

It has allowed us to present various customer-specific views to many of the IT support teams.

VMAN recommendations have helped us manage the VMs to perform more efficiently. They note everything from storage to processor utilizations. This helps us, in the organization, to make informed decisions about whether or not we need to expand the infrastructure. This saves us time and money.

Usually, the Web/SSL based certificate expires for our UCS servers and we were unable to monitor them on timely manner. This feature from Solarwinds SAM helped us to monitor and alert whenever the SSL cert is going to expire on the server to avoid any downtime of the services running on the server specially on ADFS platform where we have Video conference,Webex, Office 365 and single sign-on services.

The way NPM determines the network nodes status gives you the trust that you will not receive fake alerts!!

SolarWinds allows network administrators to easily monitor the network by customizing the pages to see what exactly is needed. this is in addition to the deep statistics shown for nodes and interfaces like response TIME, packet LOSS, interfaces CRC, interfaces errors, as well as the rich graphs for all network elements.

For companies with multiple branch offices in different governments/countries, administrators can set their network nodes on the map provided by SolarWinds to easily monitor all locations at the same time.

Using the VNQM module, you can put a probe in each branch, configure all these probes with a couple of clicks, and easily monitor the response time between branches. You can also monitor internet connectivity for the branches themselves.

Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business. It is used for EA, capacity management, configuration management, asset management, and others.

Helps us be more proactive instead of reactive.

SAM has altered the way monitoring is being looked at - from just being able to monitor CPU, Mem, Disk and network utilization levels we have moved to the next levels of finding out process related issues, service related issues and specific application related issues to identify root cause of performance issues.

Monitoring is one tool that everybody needs in corporate IT. There is no perfect tool at all for me. We choose the Solarwinds based on the simplication of managing the tool itself. Dashboard, management console, reports and alerts are the basic things that needed in monitoring. Solarwinds give an easy way how to use the out of the box and customized it based on our needs