Spot by NetApp, now including CloudCheckr, helps companies to run their cloud investments. The Spot product suite uses machine learning and analytics to automate and optimize cloud infrastructure, to ensure that workloads and applications always have the best possible infrastructure that is available, scalable and available at the lowest possible cost. Spot’s technology provides insights into cloud costs, recommendations for how to optimize utilization and costs, and automation to implement…
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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Score 8.3 out of 10
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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
CloudCheckr is fantastic for those that are purely in the Cloud as it provides everything you need under one roof for a comprehensive configuration and usage monitoring tool. It has SysLog capabilities though so you can farm out the alerts into a SIEM or other log management system, so hybrid environments could also benefit from its use.
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.
Detailed Best Practices. It's important to align your cloud to industry best practices for security and cost—it just performs better if it's used the way it's meant to be used. AWS is very flexible, and that's great when you have special requirements, but you've got to at least know when you're using something in a non-standard way so you can think through the implications.
Cost Reduction. Some recommendations are almost impossible to make at least for our setup, but many, many others are easy. We only have to log into CloudCheckr every few months and make a few changes for it to more than pay for itself.
Right-Sizing. This is related to the other points, but for some reason is separate from their cost module. The metrics it's able to pull only tell half the story, so it's good to verify it's sizing recommendations before making changes. But it does show you what instances to focus on first, and even if you choose a slightly different size to move it to, it does clearly indicate it's current size isn't appropriate. And this works both ways, if the size is too big, you can save some cash by making it smaller, but if it's too small, you want to be sure to scale up before you run into performance problems.
CloudCheckr features have a tendency to break without warning. Functionality in place for months could suddenly stop working.
CloudCheckr support often delays work on support tickets for fixing broken application functionality.
The CloudCheckr platform and documentation website often crash or experience performance degradation.
CloudCheckr cost reporting is often impacted by faulty code or broken report functionality. This can contribute to a low level of confidence in CloudCheckr's ability to deliver accurate cost reporting.
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.
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.
Overall, CloudCheckr covers all our AWS monitoring needs and great integration through SysLog into our SIEM to capture alerts for investigation. The reports are great and allow for an easy daily review. Small improvements could be made to the interface and better filtering in places would be good. Great product and the price is fair.
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.
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.
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.
There are a few products out there that'll do an aspect or two of what CloudCheckr does, but I honestly couldn't find anything nearly as comprehensive as CloudCheckr.
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.
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.
