AppDynamics vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AppDynamics
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
AppDynamics is an APM and Mobile APM program, with application mapping and predictive capabilities. These capacities enable automated remediation and code-level diagnostics in real time. It can be deployed on-premise or as a SaaS.N/A
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
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.N/A
Pricing
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details—SAM pricing starts at $2,995.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Considered Both Products
AppDynamics
Chose AppDynamics
AppDymanics and Solarwinds was a good products at application and website monitoring. For SQL monitoring AppDymanics was the superior product is it found several queries that were slowing down the server while Solarwinds could not find any issues. The version of Nagios that we …
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We selected SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor over AppDynamics because SolarWinds product suited our needs better. We needed better infrastructure monitoring and internal application monitoring brought from other vendors. If we wanted to monitor an application that was …
Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is able to provide 90% of the functionality my business requires. SolarWinds is able to scale out functionality by purchasing additional modules to meet the individual needs of its customers. While this functionality provides …
Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds is cost-effective, we have a great solution provider that helps us with tool integrations and maintenance, the integration capability and extensive documentation also help a lot in the ability to use it in various monitoring models and scripts.
Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Solarwinds Server and Application monitor is my first choice of tools preferred for server and application infrastructure monitoring because of the following reasons -
1. Single product to offer on-prem, hosted, cloud monitoring
2. Single Product to offer Server, Database and …
Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Nagios and Rancid are used internally by a company that was acquired last year. They're a big open source group.

Other groups also use HostMonitor, Big Brother, and a couple of home grown tools that don't really stack up. Those groups don't want to change the way they do …
Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds stacks up better than most due to its available ecosystem of tools. As they align, consolidate and integrate, the full value will be realized.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
AppDynamics
8.4
59 Ratings
10% above category average
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
8.7
276 Ratings
13% above category average
Application monitoring9.359 Ratings9.0266 Ratings
Database monitoring7.758 Ratings8.5230 Ratings
Threshold alerts9.058 Ratings9.0271 Ratings
Predictive capabilities7.757 Ratings8.2215 Ratings
Application performance management console8.857 Ratings8.2239 Ratings
Collaboration tools7.947 Ratings7.8148 Ratings
Server availability and performance monitoring8.430 Ratings9.8269 Ratings
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting8.729 Ratings9.1250 Ratings
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings8.0256 Ratings
Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings8.7216 Ratings
Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings9.0234 Ratings
IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings9.0199 Ratings
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User Ratings
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(59 ratings)
8.9
(278 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.1
(2 ratings)
8.9
(10 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.6
(29 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(6 ratings)
9.0
(21 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(3 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
1.0
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(2 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.9
(3 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(2 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
4.5
(2 ratings)
User Testimonials
AppDynamicsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Likelihood to Recommend
Cisco
Platforms for software as a service (SaaS) frequently cater to a large number of users with a variety of needs and usage patterns. Because AppDynamics offers multi-tenant monitoring capabilities to track performance across various customer environments, it is a good choice for SaaS platform monitoring. SaaS providers can maximize resource utilization, proactively detect and resolve performance issues, and provide a dependable and consistent user experience for their clients with AppDynamics.
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SolarWinds
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.
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Pros
Cisco
  • AppDynamics delves deeply into traceability and profiling at the code level. By identifying and refactoring any hidden performance hogs in our code, we can directly observe the performance improvements.
  • AppDynamics provides real-time dashboards and in-depth insights into each layer of the application stack, lifting the curtain on performance.
  • AppDynamics gives us the ability to proactively detect and resolve performance issues. We are able to keep things running smoothly for our users and stop outages.
  • We can monitor stability and performance prior to, during, and following releases with AppDynamics, which helps to minimize regression risks and facilitate smooth rollouts.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • 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.
Read full review
Cons
Cisco
  • Improving the clarity and comprehensiveness of the documentation could benefit users. Clearer documentation ensures that users can make the most of all the functionalities
  • Leverages AI and machine learning for intelligent insights, aiding in issue identification and prediction.
  • Competitive, with AI-driven features becoming increasingly common in APM solutions.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • 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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Cisco
its working for us, we are familiar and comfortable with the tool and its proven valuable/indispensable in helping evaluate our code.
Read full review
SolarWinds
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.
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Usability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
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.
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Reliability and Availability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.
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Performance
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
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.
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Support Rating
Cisco
AppDynamics has its own community site that includes forums and a knowledge base. On the forums, you can converse with other members of the community and ask technical questions as you have them. Though this forum isn’t filled with people there are active members for you to gain some valuable insights.
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SolarWinds
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.
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Online Training
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
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Implementation Rating
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
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Alternatives Considered
Cisco
It is distinguished from these programs because the platform provides visualizations of application processes, showing the interplay between various parts and services. Understanding the architecture of complicated apps and finding their weak spots is greatly aided by this.
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SolarWinds
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.
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Scalability
Cisco
No answers on this topic
SolarWinds
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
Read full review
Return on Investment
Cisco
  • AppDynamics has played a pivotal role in optimizing our applications for a seamless user experience. The proactive monitoring and quick issue resolution have translated into improved user satisfaction and increased retention rates.
  • The initial cost and effort associated with implementing AppDynamics might be considered a negative impact, particularly for organizations with budget constraints. However, the long-term benefits have justified this initial investment.
Read full review
SolarWinds
  • 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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots

Screenshot of Multi-vendor application performance monitoringScreenshot of Multi-vendor server monitoringScreenshot of Application dependency mapping with AppStackâ„¢ dashboardScreenshot of Microsoft Exchange performance monitoring with AppInsightâ„¢ templateScreenshot of Microsoft IIS performance monitoring with AppInsightâ„¢ templateScreenshot of Server hardware health monitoring