Apica vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

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.

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

• Auto alerts trigger if any issue is identified
• Graphical representation of the health of applications
• Good product support from the team

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

• 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.

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 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.

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

As per my experience while using it. Thanks!

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

Apica Synthetic is very effective while configuring the account setup for any of the database/UserID.

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

Easy for implementation in our Infrastructure, Easy for troubleshooting the issue and Easy to use as well.

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

Incentivized

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.

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

• 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.

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