NETSCOUT TruView vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Netscout’s TruView monitoring system gives your IT department the perfect view of your network landscape. With the pulse hardware app, you can perform VoIP or HTTP network monitoring tests from specific remote locations and it will populate the analysis results into your console. This will give you perspective on how your sites are performing and detect any out of Service Level Agreement (SLA) performance even before users report it.

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

• The app monitoring gives you the details to set different filters and do a quick identification of the root cause of the problem.
• Remarkable ability to store details of performance to analyze baselining, run advance troubleshooting, error detection and catalog by trends.
• The ability to sync with a device/interface whether is physical or virtual gives me the standpoint to set analysis upon network traffic across LAN or WAN and also get the insight of Cloud segments, setting the triggers to find out where the behavior changes to non-production traffic.

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

• Product features are sometimes overwhelming if the IT team is not used to this technology. For a small and mid-size company, the number of settings and work that is needed to implement the solution could be a long and exhausting process.
• A "lite" version of Visual TruView could help a lot to small sized environments looking to develop the solution.
• I would like to add some mitigation tools for simple/common problems that could be easily managed by a monitoring tool like Netscout TruView.

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 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

As mentioned before, our deployment success depended on their expertise. Recommendations and overall response from their support engineers was out of this world. We, as supporters ourselves, are very critical in regards to the response times and knowledge of support services representatives. Often they just want to resolve your ticket not caring about the result, or focus only on the performance review we could give them. That's a standard behavior in most overseas support centers. The TruView engineers and management cared about us, our needs, and how they delivered the help we needed.

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

Visual TruView is a solid competitor with solutions such as SolarWinds NPM, Nagios, PRTG, or SolarWinds NTA. Why we chose TruView was because it goes straight to what we were looking for, no hidden modules or subscriptions to secondaries licensing terms, to get the results that we were expecting. TruView takes it to another level.

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

• Tool consolidation, an amazing GUI that shows the most from the very beginning helping the IT Teams to set their own dashboards according to their needs.
• When they meant one price tag, that's it! You won't get a headache after the purchase process is done.
• Better be ready to set the scales your organization requires because if you miss something in the design you could get an application size that overrides your initial budget.

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