Panda Systems Management vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Panda Systems Management is well suited for small to medium sized organizations looking for a tool to centralize asset management not only physical but also assist with rapid deployment of patches, applications, etc. It proves also to be very beneficial as permits (to and extent) to do troubleshooting without interfering or interrupting end users.

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

• Remote access. It's as good as any other on the market. It also allows for RDP connections which is a nice feature.
• Inventory management. We get some great insight from the reports we can run.
• Quick Jobs. If there's an app or service you use, there may be a quick job to install and update it remotely.

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

• Licensing. With the possibility of monthly splitting
• Integration with firewalls even outside the corporate network

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

We rate and recommend Panda Systems Management not only because it is a very effective and very cost effective solution that pays itself for us (ROI) extremely fast, but also due to all reason described previously and possibly a few more I'm sure we missed here. I do have to says tech support for this solution sometimes leave a bit to be desired.

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

Panda is a bit of a greatest hits between some of these other things. I feel like GoToAssist has a stronger remote support option, but Panda is more convenient. Kaseya has a ton of features, but from an ease of use standpoint, Panda seems stronger. Spiceworks has a fine inventory system but it lacks features. I added Azure as well since we are a 365 shop and Azure supplies a lot of the same visibility that Panda does. However it is a completely different animal, and it's way easier to hop into Panda and get what you need than get waaay more data than necessary from Azure/Azure AD/ATP.

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

• It has facilitated us in the management of controls on the various clients, reducing the cost of human resources
• Thanks to the alerts, in case of intrusion, it is possible to intervene promptly

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