SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

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 current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts.

I have been using the product for six years. 

The tool is stable. 

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is scalable. My company has 25 users. If you have more than 25 users, then you need to purchase an enterprise console. 

The level of support provided by SolarWinds is contingent on the type of support plan chosen. The rating would be around seven to eight out of ten for premium support with response times of one to one and a half hours. However, given the faster response times, if a client opts for extended or premium support, the rating can go as high as nine out of ten.

The tool's initial deployment is easy. You can easily use the product with a day's training. 

On the customer portal, two types of training videos are available for users. One type includes pre-recorded videos providing a detailed overview of the platform's features. These videos are divided into three to four parts, each lasting around three to four hours. Users can invest their time in these sessions to understand the system's functions. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

• 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.

• AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters.
• AppInsight for Exchange: Presents the array of processes and the 66+ databases that make up our Exchange service in-house, in a single view. This allows us to analyze and isolate problems quickly. We have seen problems occur with a single database, a small collection of users, that we were able to correct before all the users on that mailbox server went down.
• Active Directory Templates: Allows us to be aware of issues or failures of any of the complex components providing our Microsoft Windows Active Directory services throughout our enterprise.

SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes.

One of the components of the AppInsight for SQL is monitoring of table statistics. A data element within in that set is table indexes. There are certain tables in our databases that we expect to have a high level of fragmentation all the time. It is just the nature of the applications.

However, there are many tables where we would want to know if the indexes become an issue because they adversely impact performance. My comment related to an ability to ignore certain tables within a database but not the whole database.

This way, the status of the database or any of the applications upstream would not be impacted by these specific tables.

We have not had issues with this version.

So far, we have been able to scale up to monitor everything we want without any issues. If we needed to poll more frequently, we would need to add additional polling engines.

In addition, the use of agents that can be deployed on local servers helps to offload processing from the primary poller.

The times when I have needed technical support, they have been responsive and able to resolve my issues.

I use the THWACK community a lot to resolve issues without the need for technical support.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup was very straightforward. Upgrades are getting easier over the eight years that we have been using the products.

Having used various other vendors for monitoring over my career, the SolarWinds products give outstanding value for the price. They satisfied our needs for the mid-sized to large organization we have.

When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go.

I didn’t evaluate other options. I had previous experience and my boss was willing to go with my advice without having to do a comparison.

• Spend the time to examine the recurring issues in your infrastructure. Are there one or two things that come up repeatedly?
• Determine what data would help avoid the problem.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, policies, and procedures that collect and make use of that data.
• It’s about shifting the work from responding to your customer’s problems to correcting systems and conditions before your customers even notice.

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

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.

It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window. Much of this has to be rebuilt for every individual monitor outside of the product, since you can’t build a schedule and assign monitors or notification periods to that schedule.

SMNP trap receiver/alerting needs to be built into the alerting engine. Having two places to build and manage alerts is not efficient and not all alerting tools are available in the trap manager. It also needs a data warehouse capability for long-term reporting and looking back in time, especially with some of the new functionality in the latest release.

We did have problems with large numbers of PowerShell and WMI monitors.

There has been at least one unstable upgrade in the past, but then, that happens to pretty much any product out there.

We had scalability problems with the large number of PowerShell and WMI monitors.

Level 1 is level 1. For many, that is sufficient. Having a number of experienced engineers on my team, when we need support we need level 2 or above and sometimes, it takes a bit to get things bumped up. Many of the level 1 guys don’t read all the info you provide and you end up wasting time pointing out that you already provided this information.

The previous solution was too expensive and limited; they dropped support.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, although there are a few gotchas that are not well documented.

Ror small shops and for those new to monitoring it is simple to set up and implement. The OOTB (Out of the Box) implementation does have very good node specific pages and can provide a wealth of information.This is the key.The OOTB it provides is more than other tools in a usable format.

But simple WMI monitors using both canned and user built provide more comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities…This is based on experiences implementing other solutions in very dynamic large environments. It has had improvements in the unix/linux world but still remains primarily windows centric.

Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal.

It had been decided upon before I was employed here; I just got to implement it.

Go onto THWACK (the SolarWinds user community). You will find training, help, and advice from many who have been there before. It is one of the premier user communities that many out there need to emulate!

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.

The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value.

The trends help me when I am looking at how my VMs are performing. There are times when we need more performance out of certain VMs. With trends and capacity planning, you can really focus on the items and help get a better picture of how you can move things around to streamline your infrastructure.

For example, with the VMAN recommendations, it immediately show you a graphical view, single click drill down to the actual recommendations, which allow you to read more. Almost a single pane of glass approach to your Virtual infrastructure. From recommendations we can see things like the space utilization on a datastore has reach a critical threshold. With detailed explanation of the issue you can quickly go in and almost effortlessly make corrections you need. Some are more labor intensive however you still know what you need to do. VMAN also details the CPU utilizations on a particular VM which has been both lower, and offering to save you resources automatically or higher, offering to increase your resources automatically by simply accepting the recommendation. The VMAN tool then will apply the suggested changes to the VM for you with usually little interaction from the end user / administrator required. This allows us as a small IT department to operated more efficiently and react to situations before they become larger issues.

The recommendations are a life saver. They have valuable, daily information regarding your VM network. I don’t always follow the recommendations, but when I do, it’s usually automated. There is no other interaction needed from me. It’s like having another employee.

The diagnostics simply helps me make sure that I am meeting my required KPIs.

I would like it to be fully integrated into Orion. Although there are many pieces that are integrated and make it a very good application for managing and monitoring your VM environment, I would like to see more of it in Orion. I would like to not have to switch between sites for information.

I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial.

We create NOC views in Orion. Adding many of the VMAN dashboard items to it would be great added value.

I had some stability issues. I lost my environment, but with the help of SolarWinds support, I was able to get back to a stable platform. I was able to install the upgrade to VMAN to bring me up to v7.

The appliance for VMware would lock up and I was unable to shut it down properly. If I didn’t reboot, I could not see the VMAN admin console. I had to shut it down through VMware, thereby corrupting the appliance.

SolarWinds was not sure why this happened, but after several days, we were better than before. There was not a hiccup since.

We didn’t encounter any scalability issues for our infrastructure. We only have a 50 VM license and we are currently using 27 of them. We are not one of the larger enterprise environments. The speed and stability has been great.

Since 2012, we only had one major issue, and that is pretty good. If Windows were that reliable, what a world we would live in.

At times it’s been difficult to get through to technical support. However, in the past twelve months, they have reformed their ways and it’s been fantastic.

I have used SolarWinds with three different companies in the past seventeen years and they have never failed to help me. Sometimes it takes some time, but they always get you going.

Of course we used other products, and we still do. One product cannot do everything you want it to do, at least with what you can afford.

Sometimes it’s better to run a tiered approach, such as with security, so all your eggs are not in one basket, so to speak.

However, mostly everything else we use is freeware or open source. SolarWinds is the only fully paid product we currently own.

I found the setup really very easy, if you are familiar with deploying '.ova' files. The setup was a snap, and the setup wizard really walks you through everything.

Their documentation is very detailed and if you need support, you can use their technical support and THWACK, which is world class and ahead of its time.

I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products. But in the case of VMAN, I have exactly what I need and room to grow. That being said, you are not going to find a better solution on the market for the price.

We were only using tools from VMware and we didn’t look at other options. Knowing SolarWinds from using Orion and other applications they sell, I wanted to have my monitoring software to be as integrated as possible. We looked no further.

DO IT!!! You will not regret it. This product is so helpful, out-of-the-box. Even for larger environments, you have a very short roll-out timeline, fantastic benefits, and results.

The solution is used more or less for the servers for the network including monitoring the logs and all of those tasks.

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.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now.

The pricing of the solution should be adjusted.

We've been using the solution for two years now.

The solution has been working quite well. We haven't seen any problems so far. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The product has good stability.

We haven't seen any restrictions on scaling. If a company needs to scale with this solution, they can do so.

We have yet to contact technical support. Most of the time the troubleshooting is done online, and therefore we haven't had the necessity to go through them yet. This is due to the fact that the department is not at that big of a scale yet, and therefore we've just set it up and started using it. We haven't found the need to contact technical support yet.

The solution isn't complex to set up. It's pretty straightforward.

The deployment takes about a week. It doesn't take too long.

We have one person, more or less, that's handling the solution and can handle maintenance as required. 

The cost should be a bit less. It's high right now, or higher than it should be.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

For small, small businesses, this solution will be good. However, if you want to go more complex, I would advise you to potentially explore other options.

So far, I would rate the solution at an eight on a scale from one to ten. We are still exploring its capabilities. It's still pretty new to us. 

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.

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.

I have been working with the solution for five years. We upgraded to the latest version a month ago.

I would rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten. The tool is more or less stable. We encountered stability issues when there were too many sites or devices to monitor.

The solution is scalable and you can add more devices. My company has 20 users for the solution.

I am happy to work with the technical support team. They are extremely good.

Positive

I have used AvantGard before. AvantGard’s pricing and reporting features are its advantages.

The solution’s deployment is more or less easy. SolarWinds provides a step-by-step procedure for the tool’s installation.

The solution is overpriced in terms of application management.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. This product is good as a server-side monitoring tool.

We primarily use the solution for Microsoft Exchange. We use it as a monitoring tool to query and monitor databases. Using the solution we are able to see what service is running or what services are not. It allows us to get a complete picture of the SIEM.

We find that the most valuable aspect of the solution is its configuration capabilities. It's quite simple. Users can configure Linux or Windows very easily.

The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause.

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.

The technical support is slow to respond. They need to act on tickets faster.

We have been using the solution for approximately three or four months. It hasn't been that long.

We've found the solution to be very stable. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches or crashes. It's been very good.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

We don't have users per se on the solution, as it's only meant to monitor. We have seven people on our team, and any one of us can use the solution to check and monitor everything as needed.

We use it on a daily basis.

We've been in touch with technical support in the past to help us deal with the customization of reports, which is quite difficult on the platform.

Their support is, at times, difficult because of the time zone. For example, if we raise a ticket now, we won't get a response for seven hours. The delay isn't great for us.

We previously used ManageEngine. It was not giving us what we needed, which is why we switched. With SolarWinds, we can even get great performance and good monitoring from MongoDB through SQL. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We found it rather easy.

In terms of setup, traditionally, to configure any single node, it takes about five to ten minutes.

In order to maintain the solution, a company would need at least two people: one to monitor performance and another to monitor the application itself.

I was able to handle the entire implementation myself after going through and reading the documentation. I didn't need the outside assistance of an integrator or consultant.

I don't have any information on pricing, as that is handled by our procurement team.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I believe it is version 12.5.

If a company would really like insight into its database utilization or performance and why their servers are slow or why the database is not giving a proper response, this solution will help. It's perfect for revealing bottlenecks. You will have more visibility once you will install it in your environment. The solution will no doubt help other companies resolve issues very quickly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting

As per my view, Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL. Currently, it can be achieve through script writing but that is tedious and tough task to do due to scarcity of script writer experts.

None

None

Customer Service:

Very good.

Technical Support:

Very good.