Amazon RDS Performance Insights vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

When you need to monitor your database at low level metrics such as query load or CPU usage at some point in time. You can also use it to understand which component is a heavy load on your DB. It is a great tool for routine monitoring of your DB and to help plan for capacity. I would not use it as an exclusive source for scaling your DB though since the is not long-term or very granular data to be able to run a thorough analysis on peaks of predictive analysis.

Incentivized

It is a well-suited software for monitoring and surveillance of your deployed nodes. The error-readability and filter options for filtering out logs and errors could be improved. But overall, it has a good UI design, is user-friendly, and is very easy to learn and access for new users.

Incentivized

• RDS Infrastructure Metrics
• RDS Logical Metrics
• Real time visualization of query load
• Identify Performance Bottlenecks
• Historical Performance Analysis of load

Incentivized

• Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
• Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
• It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.

Incentivized

• Easier way to identify to which service the query comes from
• Easier way to identify correlation between metrics
• More customization, right now it is too restricted
• The interval could be smaller between data points for peaks of usage

Incentivized

• Custom application monitors can be a little tricky to configure.
• Logic in custom alerts can be a little hard to follow and figure out.
• Inability to monitor certificates on custom applications or SQL Server.
• Can be a little slow at times with on-prem SQL server.

Incentivized

We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.

Incentivized

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.

Incentivized

The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.

Incentivized

The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.

Incentivized

I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.

Incentivized

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

Incentivized

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

Incentivized

Amazon RDS Performance Insights is a out of the box plug and use solution for AWS with a press of a button, whereas Prometheus would require a lot of configuration and deployment and the learning curve is slower, making it not so user friendly. Datadog on the other hand offers similar capabilities but at a much higher cost. With that in mind, Amazon RDS Performance Insights is the choice to integrate with your AWS services quickly and affordably.

Incentivized

Nagios requires far more manual work to configure than SolarWinds does, though that also encourages customization and perfect-fit solutions. Nagios also requires far, far fewer resources to run than SolarWinds: SolarWinds wants great gobs of memory and disk, while Nagios is refreshingly humble. Nagios starts working from the first minute, too, whereas SolarWinds needs lots of set-up time.

Incentivized

It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up

Incentivized

• Help Optimize Query and app performance
• Help better plan capacity for the DB
• Improved the company capacity on troubleshooting problems in DBs

Incentivized

• Ability to sunset multiple legacy monitoring platforms.
• A single pane of glass across global locations (Enterprise Operations Console) simplifies monitoring for junior staff.
• A single toolset allows staff from across the global environment to share knowledge and quickly set up/modify monitoring.

Incentivized