I always thought we should be able to perform all admin activities using the web portal. Over a period of time, SolarWinds has achieved this.

Most of the admin activities can be performed using SolarWinds web portal (such as advanced alerting, web reports, custom attribute editor, report schedulers, etc., which in the past were hosted on the SolarWinds server).

I also thought SolarWinds doesn't provide a service navigator map that would drill down from application layer to node level, with PerfStack in place. Most of these things have been addressed.

PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions.

SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. 

Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good.

It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle.

The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production. 

The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool. For APM, there are products like ThousandEyes or Dynatrace that help with end-to-end app monitoring. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the tool. My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring, but I want to leverage the functionalities of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to take care of such areas. If possible, we can do packet capturing via SolarWinds and application performance monitoring via the tool.

One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance. Instead of merely reporting on current events, the goal is to predict future issues and take proactive measures to address them.

It would be great if the product repolled things properly after we changed VMs. A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups.

SAM is missing code-level monitoring of applications and could be improved by adding detailed metrics in that area. SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved. In the future, I would like SolarWinds to add IoT functionalities.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring.

In a future release of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, they should add some additional features.

The biggest pain point is root cause analysis. It is difficult to analyze, assess, and warn my IT department about what will happen in the next five hours. It is also difficult to use AIOps to reduce ticket size. The product does not explain why a problem occurred. It does not tell me how to stop it from happening again.

If the same problem happens consistently, we face productivity loss. There are ITES issues. It affects the other applications. We manage about 145 applications across 1000 servers. If we get a two-second delay in one hop, it will affect us a lot. We cannot tailor the tool for every situation. We cannot re-engineer the ports to suit the infrastructure.

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.

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.

The product needs to reduce its price.

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.

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.  

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.

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.

• 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The custom reporting needs to be improved.

Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included. The supported list of applications is very limited. For example, it supports the Windows version of JD Edwards, but not the Linux version of the same solution. Since it is the same application running on a different platform, it should work.

The price of scaling this solution needs to be improved.

I would like to have better support for Linux, and not be as dependent on Windows Servers. Even for non-Windows applications, it uses a Windows Server.

We cater to all organizations in Nigeria. Most of the financial institutions in Nigeria are currently using this solution. Cellphone companies and telecommunication are also using it.

The beautiful thing about the solution is, the OEM listens to customer reviews. The updates come very frequently, and most of the feedback that customers give is integrated within the upgrade or the update. I think that whatever concerns were have already been treated by the OEM.

There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot.

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. 

I had a problem with the price for a client. It was hard to understand the infrastructure and how many devices and how much storage they could get. In the end, we found a different license model for them. 

They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features. 

I believe that SolarWinds should spend more effort in reporting. You can easily generate reports for technical engineers, but not such summarized reports that need to be sent to managers!

You can generate a lot of reports related to all modules either NPM , NCM , NTA or VQNM and we don’t have any problem in that.

The problem is that – compared to another vendors developing another H/Ws or S/Ws – you can’t generate such reports full of charts to summarize a kind technical info for managers.

To Elaborate more , looking for some products like McAfee , Fortigate , tenable … etc , you can find the reports in terms of tables and charts beside the tables and easily customize the charts type and location.

Once , I opened a case with our local vendor who contacted Solarwinds as well , asking about creating a report that includes something exactly like the below graphs to show to the management and they answered “No Avaialbility” !! also the below graphs are taken from our NTA module which should be added normally to a report!

Again , it’s a shame that you generate a PDF report from Solarwinds like the below, where headers appears in the report and text shown an clear text not a rich one!!! Simply the report is not generous although having a good technical info but to be seen by me not by managers .

Finally, I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic.

In terms of the integrations and correlations, there is a huge opportunity to merge all of these tools into one in terms of analytics. This is a missed opportunities in the SolarWinds site compared to other products out there. An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis. 

The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved. The performance, integration, and pricing could be better as well.

Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed.

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.

Mapping interactions between systems.

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.

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

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 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.