Likelihood to Recommend As I use this for only my area, it is very well suited to what I need it to do. Apica Synthetic monitors two different web applications in a time interval that is easily customizable for uptime and latency. These are critical indicators for a cloud-based point-of-sale system. We need solid uptime and limited latency across the enterprise.
Read full review For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
Read full review Pros Auto alerts trigger if any issue is identified Graphical representation of the health of applications Good product support from the team Read full review 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. Read full review Cons It's very clunky. Infrastructure is large and very difficult to upgrade. SaaS and On-premise versions are different. There is an LDAP integration but users can only be assigned to one group (i.e. department). If you are in 2 departments, you need 2 separate logins. Update: they now offer federated logins It filled a gap in monitoring for us, but we're looking to move on. Read full review Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions. Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count. More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product. Mike Hochstein Senior Director, Infrastructure Architecture & Standards
Read full review Likelihood to Renew We trust the results that Apica Synthetic has achieved. Real-time alerting is critical to our clients and with limited resources, we can't handle many false positives; Apica Synthetic is the only solution that provides both of those features.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Usability As per my experience while using it. Thanks!
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating Apica Synthetic is very effective while configuring the account setup for any of the database/UserID.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Online Training It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
Read full review Implementation Rating Easy for implementation in our Infrastructure, Easy for troubleshooting the issue and Easy to use as well.
Read full review Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
Read full review Alternatives Considered We were using different monitoring tools for different requirements (e.g.,Nagios and
Checkmk for infrastructure issues) and we were in need of a tool for service and API monitoring for which we were using ThousandEye. But alerts were 60-70% valid irrespective of conditions like network issues. But Apica Synthetic's alert mechanism is a perfect fit for our department. It helped us to reduce unnecessary/false alerts and a number of wrong tickets.
Read full review It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
Connie Inman Senior IT Technologist II & Desktop Support Supervisor
Read full review Scalability 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
Read full review Return on Investment My department is not charged for Apica Synthetic so no ROI, but from a customer service perspective, we can react to an outage and repair it faster than our customers can report the outage. Our vendor's own monitoring tools are not as accurate nor as timely as ours. They rely on us telling them, from Apica Synthetic, that they have an issue. Read full review Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time. We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots