AppsAnywhere vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

I have been monitoring the use of this app for the past year now and it has been incredibly useful in providing my team with easy access to the applications they need. It is well suited to organizations with a large variety of applications and users that need to access them from multiple devices. It has been very easy to deploy, manage and maintain, and I love the fact that users can easily find what they need without having to navigate complex menus. (search can still be abit better). Still a really good pick :)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Shows end users a full list of every application that is actually available to them
• Install a specialist application on any Windows machine on our network
• launch the application for use

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

• They should improve with the reconnection time after internet connection lost.
• They should improve with customer support team and quick reply.
• They should work on mobile devices and operating system also.
• When we launch AppsAnywhere it's take too much time to launch.

Incentivized

• 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.

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

Almost everyone you tell to use it to access a specialist application can find the software they need and install it. However, surprisingly many have difficulties finding AppsAnywhere under the start menu or on the task bar - it is not a icon or name they recognise, and they really want to lunch the target specialist software (Zbrush or whatever). Once you find it, many people ignore the search function which is probably the fastest method, and browse the long list alphabetically, because the standard filters do not help much. Favouriting is rarely used as it is too burdensome and not an issue for users when they are looking for the applicationt hey need.

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

The AppsAnywhere team is very quick in setting up things and also having everything in a single place. The bundle of the apps can be easily configured as the documentation is also very straightforward while setting up things and also having the team to work accordingly customize as per the needs

Incentivized

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.

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

• It has been incredibly easy to use, saving us time and money while also streamlining workflow processes.
• We where able to quickly launch new applications, allowing us to keep up with users needs.
• The reporting tools have also been very helpful in tracking usage and understanding how our users interact with our applications.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized