Kansas based Power Admin offers PA Server Monitor, an IT infrastructure monitoring option.
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SolarWinds AppOptics
Score 8.2 out of 10
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SolarWinds AppOptics (formerly Librato) is an IT infrastructure monitoring service and APM, based on technology acquired by SolarWinds with Librato in 2015 to expand its cloud monitoring portfolio.
AppOptics is good for small to medium-sized organizations with less than 150 servers or less than 40 services to monitor. It performs well for this use case where people need to get an overview of application performance, and 95%ile data is okay. Somewhere every data point and every record is critical; it should be avoided.
It does have bulk settings tools to set up bulk settings for multiple devices, but to me it could be a bit easier to use. However, I ran into a snag and reached out to support and they are great.
The only thing that I would add is the possibility to display every single query our servers receive to eventually analyze them and query through them. We could also generate nice visualizations from that. Right now I believe we can only see averages.
As far a usability is concerned for AppOptics, it is just as matter of few minutes away even if you start from scratch, as all you need to do is register on the site and you will get the URL and password. And after this all you have to do is follow the instruction, as per the configuration wizard (tool tip) within the console for various technology such as SQL, IIS, .NET
Solarwinds AppOptics is rated as 9 out of 10 and the reason is there are still few areas where AppOptics needs to improve such as Service Now Integration, GCP Cloud Support, Better Dashboard visualization for application transactions flow. Other than these feature everything is there in AppOptics and that's a reason given 9 points out of 10.
We tried some open source solutions. But, they were much more difficult to set up and maintain. PA is easy to use "out of the box". We looked at other paid solutions also, but they were cost prohibitive, since we are a small institution.
What we found positive in AppOptics from others is:
Easy to install and manage.
Various stack support.
Point to point deep-dive metrics and correlation.
Metrics like DB connection, query analysis, latency in API calls, and other connections, response codes for various APIs, etc are the key ones in our case, which AppOptics provides efficiently.
It has decreased our critical services downtime, because we are able to VPN in and fix issues as soon as Power Admin alerts us of an issue. ROI has been excellent.
It allows us to catch issues before they become critical by alerting us on errors that show up in our Event Logs.
