Aternity Digital Experience Management vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We are a services organization and we use Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals with our customers. It has allowed us to expand the footprint in the application management business with virtually all of our major accounts. We were able to expand and go into other applications that we weren't in or offering previously. Now, we have a new value proposition for our customer enhanced visibility, enhanced stability, and we can reduce our cost to them because our cost structure is reduced by using Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals.

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

• Root cause finding/remediation (it goes beyond analysis).
• Shows latency between applications and servers.
• Identifies long-running SQL queries, and puts the onus back on developers to clean up their SQL code.

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

• The tool demands High CPU resources to perform monitoring which reduces the overall performance and the user experience is sluggish
• Also a good amount of training is required to set up the different use cases and monitoring parameters which in return demands a dedicated resource to work on the tool

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

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

The support I give the highest rating because it is really amazing. Every time we triggered the tool support, we were very well served very quickly and efficiently. The problems were solved quickly and without stress. The staff helped us within minutes and had a lot of patience with us

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

There is a wide variety of APM solutions out there for companies to pick from. Riverbed AppInternals sits near the top of the stack certainly. We already deploy steelhead units across the estate with client licenses, that aided us in our decision to select AppInternals. We found the costs of AppDynamics and New Relic ( which we had trials for) both costly against AppInternals.

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

• This product has really wonderful features and one of the most valuable ones is the transaction searches into TTW.
• This will show you the operations that occurred under conditions that the user specifies, giving you the opportunity to drill down on the things that are more important and affecting system performance.
• Besides that, the capability of analyzing each individual transaction captured to a very low-level detail (method call/line of code). This ability empowers the testing teams to provide more visibility to developers on how they can improve.

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