SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

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.

• Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer.
• Windows service and event monitoring: It provides an in-depth server OS and application of health monitoring. It allows for automated workflow for the conditioned response to an alert.
• AppInsight for SQL: It provides centralized management and performance monitoring of 100+ SQL installations.

AppInsight needs to include more applications, the current list is very limited.

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.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues, scalability has been easy.

I would give the technical support team a 7/10 rating, i.e., slightly better than average.

Previously, we were using Big Brother. It is not as intuitive and support was lacking. Eventually, it reached EOL.

The setup was straightforward, customization requires time and resource investment.

SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in.

We didn't really evaluate other options. By this point, we were committed to the “one monitoring tool” policy. Our goal was to reduce the number of dashboards to as few as possible.

Don’t go with the “dive in and figure it out” approach. You’ll spend months, if not years, straightening SAM out. Take the planned approach; organize your servers and your IT services, identify what you want to monitor such as the Windows services, events, ports, SNMP traps, Syslog messages, etc and create your alerting rules. Understand your dependencies so that you can create your enterprise views and maps. Align the Orion Platform to be more than a monitoring tool. Use it for EA, capacity management, configuration management, asset management, and others.

Helps us be more proactive instead of reactive.

AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.

Mapping interactions between systems.

No issues.

No issues.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Good.

Microsoft System Center Operation Manager. Although SCOM was very powerful it was also very complex to setup.

Straightforward. After creating a service account that had proper permissions on the systems that were going to be monitored. The agent-less deployment was quick and very easy.

We are solution providers and this is one of the monitoring solutions that we implement for our customers.

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.

The most valuable feature is application monitoring. Already 1200 application monitoring templates exist with the Solarwinds SAM monitoring and the AppInsights for IIS, SQL, Exchange & AD. 

I am looking for more application insight-based widgets with the service. They currently have them for IIS, SQL, Exchange, and Active Directory.

I would like to see additional application support for non-Windows servers. This would give us more flexibility in terms of monitoring customer applications.

I have been working with the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for about five years.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for network monitoring.

The most valuable features of the solution are its real-time node monitoring and Help Desk's feedback.

It's a very powerful application that covers all areas.

It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable. It's a license based scalability, but it is scalable. 

I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast.

I didn't previously use another solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We have five to six administrators.

We had a consultant assist us with the implementation.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend the solution. It needs the proper sizing before implementation, and if you have done the proper sizing then you're all good.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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

Service monitoring - SAM (Solarwinds Application Monitoring) gives a very convenient way to manage the services of the server. It can monitor the service using WMI and SNMP. Tools give a wider choices to monitoring up to executable files currently running the server process. 

Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort. 

HTTP Monitor - Out of the box it can monitor the basic "get" command of the any website. 

Dashboard - It give a much detailed information of your services. Its very beneficial to easily decide for the capacity and resource management of the monitor node.

Any monitoring tools have downside and one I can say in Solarwinds it should improve to be fit the tool in enterprise grade level. The web console also tends to hang or crash. Also, the performance needs improvement.

Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance.

We primarily use the solution for network configuration and managing network performance.

There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager.

We don't need additional features. The network performance monitors and configuration monitors work well for our company. We also use different software for server monitoring. So far, the solution works well for us as-is.

Local technical support is okay. I would rate them seven out of ten. They're not bad, but they're not good either.

We didn't previously have another solution before implementing SolarWinds.

The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us.

I can't say what the exact pricing is, but I know it's not too expensive. 

We have about 1,000 users on the solution.