SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

We use the product to monitor the server's health which does not include power supply, temperature, and other physical parameters alone but also performance parameters like CPU, memory, server network, etc. We also use it to monitor application health. 

I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues. 

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.

I have been working with the solution for five years. 

The solution is stable. 

The tool is scalable and I have customers who use it to monitor around 2000 servers. 

Some resolutions require catering to the unique environment of customers and can take time. Otherwise, the tool's support is pretty good. 

Neutral

The tool's installation is easy and can be completed in a couple of hours. You need to plan and figure out what exactly would you like to monitor. For example, when a customer has 2000 servers, then you would need to find the application groups and define them. If a customer has a large web server environment then you need to create dashboards for the web administrators. The tool is flexible and allows you to do it. 

The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money. 

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

SAM is an easy-to-deploy solution. You need to plan your monitoring strategy well because if you want to monitor a large number of servers, you need to plan and decide what exactly would you like to monitor. Because things can get pretty complicated, especially when it comes to application monitoring. The solution gives the flexibility to decide as to what you would like to do with their monitoring platform. You shouldn't go blind and say that I want to monitor everything.

We are only implementing the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor functionality for every application which is going through migration. The solution monitors the client's full infrastructure, such as prod, non-prod, and QA. If the server is provisioned, you will see it in this solution.

The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us.

I have been using SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for approximately two years.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is not stable. We have to maintain the platform and it goes down frequently. If we have plenty of resources the solution has problems managing the load.

The scalability of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is good. We can add multiple scalable engines but they have performance issues most of the time.

I have not contacted the support for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

The initial setup of the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is easy. The full process of deployment took approximately three to four months. The amount of time it takes depends on the environment.

I did the implementation of the solution.

My advice to those new to the solution is they should be aware of all the templates that they provide. The template is one of the powerful aspects of this tool, it consists of all the monitoring requirements that anyone can have.

I rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor a nine out of ten.

We use the product for application and server monitoring. We use it to get information on web services, databases, and other applications we need to maintain.

SolarWinds is a very good solution. Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us. Infrastructure dependency mapping gives us a view of the networks connected with the applications and processes.

The product needs to reduce its price.

I have been using the solution for six years.

I rate the stability an eight and a half out of ten.

I rate the scalability an eight and a half out of ten. Around seven employees are using the product in our organization. Our customers are enterprise businesses.

The support is very, very good. In case there's any problem, we can contact support.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten.

Deployment can take one to two weeks, depending on the customer’s requirements. We give customization documents to the customer and ask them questions about how they want to deploy and use the solution. Then, we request the customer for documents about the server and CPUs to deploy the solution. Before deploying the solution, we also confirm the features they want to install on the server.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the solution.

I am using the version that was released before the latest version. The solution can be put on-premise or on the cloud. The product is set up for a lot of things. The product can be used depending on our area of interest, be it network, server, or application. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

The primary use case of this solution is for centralized monitoring of the server performance to ensure that the servers have proactive monitoring, CPU utilization, memory, and performance across the monitoring. 

SolarWinds was suggested to our clients running a mid-size infrastructure, with budget constraints and can't afford IBM, Broadcom, or Microsoft.

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.

Our clients like the nice dashboard where they can see the active monitoring and includes performance, CPU usage, memory usage, and files. 

Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds.

When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed. It's slow. This is an issue that has been going on for a long time that hasn't been properly addressed by SolarWinds. In a bigger architecture, the portal is still slow. They will have to look into it and see how they can improve it because this is the biggest complaint the customers have.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to the reliability and the issue with the speed, especially the slowness with their browser-based solution.

This solution is stable but when the product has a lot of data in the databases, the speed is an issue.

The solution is scalable, but not for large infrastructures. I can recommend SolarWinds for a mid to large scale organization. I am not convinced that customers who have two to four thousand devices and two thousand servers can implement SolarWinds on such a large scale.

The technical support is good, it's above average.

Previously we implemented the CA UIM solution, CA Spectrum, and Microsoft Monitoring.

SolarWinds is much easier than any of them.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to implement, but when you implement it in a huge environment you will have some complexity. Also if you implement it in a single box, it can be complex.

If it is a mid-scale customer they can implement this solution on their own. They will need only two or three bars and a maximum of two servers are more than enough to implement.

If it's a small solution, you can implement it. It keeps the database separate. It's straightforward, it is not difficult.

Overall it is a very simple implementation.

The length of deployment depends on the infrastructure, the customer that I am referring to took a month and a half to implement most of the requirements. 

From a vendor's point of view when implementing this solution, SolarWinds will gives me paid access. 

From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors.

It is clearly a good return on investment for any customer when they implement SolarWinds.

The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license.

Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost.

When you compare SolarWinds to Broadcom, Broadcom has a simpler policy, you can install it and you don't have the complex licensing where you need a separate license for every little thing. 

Customers don't understand the complexity of the licensing when you need a separate license for the application and storage as an example. With SolarWinds, you have to pay for every feature.

Improvements come as we are moving forward. Requirements also change with time.

There were times when we used to be a complete physical infrastructure. Most of the customers have now moved to a virtual infrastructure.

The requirements are also changing. In the last ten years, what I have seen is that SolarWinds is improving its product as per the demand of the customer.

SolarWinds is easy to implement and it has most of the information the customer is looking for, and the dashboard has the wow factor.

I think that every IT team should have to courage to try to implement it by themselves because it is not difficult.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution with customers who would like to have insight into their application environments. These environments could be on-premise, hybrid, in clouds, it does not matter where it resides. They want to have deep insight into the performance and availability of applications, databases, networks, VMware, Hyper-V, etcetera. It doesn't matter what they want to look at because all infrastructure components can be monitored using SAM. This product can monitor about 150 infrastructure components by default.  

The most valuable feature of the product is the monitoring capability. Basic infrastructure monitoring is a good start for using the product. For example, I like Microsoft monitoring and various components like SharePoint and Active Directory, which can be very important. But also it is very useful for monitoring Microsoft SQL Server environments. That only covers the surface approach to monitoring applications and servers. You can also monitor the underlying infrastructure. For example, you can monitor hardware components such as the health of your servers so that you know if they are functioning optimally or if they have some type of performance issue or failure. You can go a step further to get deeper insight into specific components. But it is a very good thing to start with APM (Application Performance Management) and to get into monitoring the underlying infrastructure of your system so you are aware of its condition.  

These tools are made for evaluation and monitoring. They were developed some years ago and they are still evolving, and what I would like to see is that they are made cloud-ready as soon as possible. It would be good at this point to have it so you can run them and use them in the cloud. That is actually already possible, but I want to make sure that they continue to mature that type of development and enhance the product's capabilities.  

What can and will be added in upcoming releases is that the product will support a few more well-known database flavors like Oracle SQL server. I would like to see an extension of that capability to other database flavors including freeware environments like MySQL, Progress, and MariaDB. I know for a fact that they will be adding these capabilities in the future for sure, and that is a great step forward.  

 We have been using SolarWinds SAM (Server & Application Monitor) for six years.  

SolarWinds SAM is very stable. We are using it with hundreds or thousands of customers and there are no stability issues.  

The product is very scalable. No problem with that at all.  

The technical support is very good. We can access it 24/7 when we need to.  

The initial setup is very straightforward.  

Pricing is quite cheap. It starts at 2,440 euros. For that, you have the ability to monitor a couple of nodes. You also get one year of maintenance and support included in the price.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SolarWinds SAM as a ten in regards to the total cost of ownership and quality. But being more modest because there is room for improvement I will rate it a nine.  

I would highly recommend this solution to users.  

We are using it for the monitoring of servers and applications. Currently, we are using version 2020.2.5.

Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes.

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.

It has been close to six years now.

It is really stable. We're making use of a polling engine. When the customer site is experiencing some slowness of the console or the server, they'll know that they have overutilized the resources. So, we'll try to give them recommendations on what to do to make it better.

Its scalability is pretty good. There are a lot of users using SolarWinds. They are mostly financial institutions. We are trying to bring in more people to make use of the product. So, we try to do a comparison to what they have presently and how we can optimize for them.

It was pretty much straightforward. Anybody who doesn't understand the basics of SQL can make use of the backend, but you need to have a little bit of experience with SQL before you can use the frontend for the reports.

The deployment takes up to an hour. Normally, the installation part will take around 45 minutes to complete. When it comes to the configuration part, it takes time depending on the devices you want to onboard to SolarWinds.

I am a consultant, so I did the deployment. Its deployment and maintenance can be done by one person.

Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 so that they improve on the report.

Any customizable monitoring needed from process/service monitoring to performance counters, PowerShell and Per Scripts for reportable status or values, SQL based queries for status or values

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.

The overall valuable feature is the integration that exists. It really ties everything together to see the entire stack. Individually, the main focus of each component is the value.

• Being able to see your devices (NPM)
• Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)
• Seeing the components of virtual infrastructure (VMAN)
• Reviewing the storage behind it (SRM)
• Performance of web applications using synthetic playback (WPM)
• Being able to deep dive into DB activities to see blocks, deadlocks, and improve performance by tuning queries (DPA)

The nice thing about SolarWinds is that the company always looks to improve their products. Since they regularly update the software for stability and new features, it’s not easy to pinpoint items to improve unless they directly impact usability.

It’s difficult to find a feature or capability of SolarWinds that needs improvement as they are consistently looking to make the product better. Through the Thwack community, they get great feedback from customers for feature improvements as well as ideas to use the product better in ways beyond original intentions. The community is pretty innovative regards to using SolarWinds. My experience is that if a feature directly impacts my daily routine, then the product needs improvement. So far, any issues I’ve had in the past have been rectified by Support, added as feature to correct, or new enhancements that never allow me to face problems reports by others.

Stability was hardly an issue as long as we balanced what we were monitoring.

Scalability was an issue in the past. It wasn’t growing the environment, but rather it was maintaining it on upgrades. It used to take a long time since we have a large deployment.

Now that the lightweight scalability features exists, maintenance is not time consuming. Another issue was firewalls which is on our part due to “allow nothing, request everything” policy. No product out there will ever connect agnostically when it comes to firewalls.

Support knows what they are doing. Very rarely do I find the standard approach to issues to be “reboot and call back” type of action.

We had another solution for many years and it was functional but not insightful. We needed software that could level the playing field or better; to bring all the fields under one roof without having to build everything from scratch.

The initial setup was straightforward, but it’s very important to understand the amount of objects (CPU, memory, network interfaces, any monitored component) to monitor. You could easily overload the environment if you pull everything.

As mentioned about scaling, understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations.

We evaluated Nagios and Nimsoft at the time.

Nimsoft seemed similar to what we were previously using and didn’t want to repeat history.

With Nagios, we found it to be highly customizable, but requiring us to build out everything. We were at a stage where we didn’t know the possible heights of monitoring we could reach, but knew there was more than what we had.

SolarWinds fit the bill because it gave many possibilities in monitoring with a good amount of out of the box capabilities.

If you need a starting point, SolarWinds is a good start.

Be sure to know how many objects or element you plan to monitor to determine the licensing and the topology of your environment to help scale out your deployment. If you have those down, you’ll be able to up in running in no time

Additionally, a nice thing about SolarWinds is that the company always looks to improve their products. Since they regularly update the software for stability and new features, it’s not easy to pinpoint items for improvement. Through the Thwack community, they get great feedback from customers for feature improvements as well as ideas to use the product better in ways beyond original intentions. My experience is that if a feature directly impacts my daily routine, then the product needs improvement. So far, any issues I’ve had in the past have been rectified by Support, added as feature to correct, or new enhancements that never allow me to face problems reports by others.

• 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.

• Ease of installation and administration
• Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time.
• Powerful data collection from a wide range of different network devices.
• Devices not supported can be added each month via the MIB library update request.
• Robust reporting options and easy to use alerting features. NPM still has very complete alert logic available if one chooses. It takes fifteen minutes to build complex alerts that would take hours in other tools.
• Very active user community (THWACK) and outstanding peer information sharing.
• NetPath is spot on for what many NOC are lacking. CDR search is used daily. There is a huge value add for maintaining a healthy phone system for a company that is very much phone dependent.

• MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring. This is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking.
• Most focus seems to be on AWS cloud services. But some press has been released stating more Azure Cloud Service monitoring options in the near future.
• Without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, as well as many others available today.
• I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools.
• Our current need is focused on Office365, Exchange Web Services, MS Dynamics 365, and other Azure services.
• 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.
• More granular control of what components are enabled for the various AppInsight monitoring options (IIS, SQL, and Exchange currently).
• AppInsight is all or nothing with SolarWinds, and this isn’t the best option.

We encountered issues with stability in a few rare cases, due to being on older versions of the software. But this was self-inflicted in all cases.

For the most part, the Orion suite is very stable, dependable, and easy to manage.

Installs and upgrades are a bit time consuming, but this is expected with such a large platform.

Yes, there were issues with scalability. The polling engine can be a bit confusing as there are several conflicting statements regarding number of components, flows per second, Nodes, Volumes, and other variables that impact the polling engine performance.

In our case, the software stated we were at 65% of the available polling engine that was available. But we experienced monitors going into a hung state at random times.

This was finally determined by SolarWinds support to be due to the number of components we had active in SAM, even though SAM stated we were well below the acceptable number of components for our poller.

We added a second polling engine. (It is a super easy process to add additional polling engines.) SolarWinds has invested a great amount of time in the scalability expansion process, but the tool should reflect accurate info regarding the impact to the polling engine regardless of the source.

I ended up writing a custom SQL query to pull data points which gave us better polling data.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/10 on a good day. Since going to a Philippine support group, there has been a significant decrease in the skill set of the customer support.

Support used to be very results driven and it was not uncommon to have a person help you with whatever issue you had. That has changed in the past two years and support tends to be very quick to state “sorry that’s an unsupported feature and in several cases respond with “we can’t find the issue”.

Regardless of the issue being reported, you will be asked to run diagnostics and upload to their site. This is a time buying move as on several cases, as the logs were uploaded but not used in any way. (I asked where they found the info in the logs and was told it was an internal document that gave them the solution).

I avoid calling support for most issues unless I am at a total loss.

It’s important to note that this was not always the case. The real change seems to have occurred when SolarWinds went private again.

In years past, support used to be one of the HUGE factors that made SolarWinds such a great investment.

Support isn’t what it used to be and this is very disappointing. THWACK is a great resource and most answers can be found there with some searching and posting if needed.

But I should be able to get support from the help desk when I need it, not by manually searching and finding fixes myself.

My entire team avoids calling support at all costs. Sorry, but this is our experience. If I could still get version updates, but give up support, I would drop our annual maintenance in a second, without any hesitation.

We used the following solutions previously:

SCOM, BMC Patrol, HP CIM, What’s up Gold, NetScout, HP Openview, and several other home brewed monitoring tools.

SCOM is very powerful and an amazing tool. The issue is with administration and lack of real network monitoring. It is a monster and requires a very wide skill set to effectively administer.

Even with the skill set, it requires many staff hours for care and feeding. SCOM is cumbersome and very difficult to use.

SCOM is also strictly agent based, while SolarWinds gives you agent or agent-less options.

SCOM network monitoring is hot garbage on a summer day (IMHO).

MS included SNMP monitoring options, but SCOM can’t be used as a true network monitoring solution.

You must have a different tool for Network if using SCOM.

Orion, on the other hand, has it all if you invest in the modules.

SCOM will go much deeper into MS products, but it is not worth it for the amount of staff resources needed.

The setup was very easy. SolarWinds has invested a significant amount of effort into streamlining and improving the install process. It is one of the easiest tools out there to set up. SolarWinds nailed on this one.

Block the sales numbers and email address for all SolarWinds sales people at the engineer level J.

Every quarter close, year-end, or other significant time, there are emails sent to every person on our team who has access to our SolarWinds Support portal.

This is inappropriate and our leadership has asked SolarWinds to stop reaching out to engineers regarding “special pricing” or “super duper deal because it is end of the year”.

I get it, sales are sales, but this issue has been discussed several times on the THWACK forums and has become a running joke on the boards. It is harmless, but annoying.

On a more serious topic, I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up.

If you can make purchases with minimal turnaround time, you can do very well.

I would say the pricing of the SolarWinds products are more than competitive, even the list prices.

The ROI for SolarWinds products is unmatched in the industry.

I do annual vendor reviews as part of my role. Its not uncommon to find a tool that offers more functionality in one specific area than the SolarWinds suite. But when it comes to the pricing and across the board monitoring, no one touches SolarWinds. Money spent on SolarWinds products goes much further than with other vendors. This is an area where SolarWinds has left the competition behind.

Oh my gosh, we evaluated all of them. Like I said above, I do vendor reviews every year and the result is always the same.

No one offers the same level of functionality across so many different devices/services in a single tool at such a good price.

We may be buying a small license for Azure service monitoring until SolarWinds has a solution for sale.

Most recently, I reviewed Thousand Eyes, Exoprise, SCOM, Riverbed’s tools, Net Scout, and a half dozen others I don’t recall. All were interesting, but none were competitive price wise.

Before you install, join THACK and start talking to other users. The tool is very powerful and offers amazing monitoring options, if you have someone who knows what good monitoring should look like.

Take advantage of the various custom properties to refine monitors and you will have an amazing monitoring platform.

Install it, compare against others, and you will always find SolarWinds beats them for the ROI.

You must also factor in the savings from being able to train general IT staff how to support the tool.

It doesn’t matter how great a tool is, if you can’t find an admin to run it. Anyone can figure out SolarWinds if they have any sort of APM background. Many other tools can’t say this.