Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Nagios is best suited in an large organization where it is production 24/7, but in SME (small/medium enterprise) you have to pay a lot to the administrator. Instead use some graphical and easy to use tool like IDERA.

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.

• 3rd party integrations via open API.
• Extremely flexible and configurable long term storage of the very detailed performance information (years of per 1-5 min perf data numbers).
• Small Nagios XI footprint (very efficient MySQL DB and flat files for perf data), making it powerful tool for thousands of checks and hundreds of reports.
• Responsive support, willing to provide resolution outside the box and by various means possible.

• 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.

• The mobile interface is newly developed and needs more development. It should provide more options for the audit log and add more detail for the configuration rollback options.
• The scheduled report should be included in standard edition.
• Master Node is configurable on LINUX platform only. We had to hire a Linux administrator

• 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.

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 tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.

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.

Only because I never give out 10s. Nagios support goes above and beyond in helping with issues, workarounds, specific cases and requirements. Tracks customer implementation and history of the most important issues. Can’t complain (except that the team is small and quite probably overworked). Time to resolution could be much improved if only there were more folks to help around.

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.

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

Cost efficiency is the main reason which we opted [for] Nagios as we were previously using IDERA tool with comprehensive database monitoring solutions, but the slow performance we are getting while monitoring the instance of the database.

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

• Reduction of at least 10% of false alarms.
• Increased network traffic by 5%.

• 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.