PRTG Network Monitor is the flagship offering from German software company Paessler, for monitoring local and wide area networks (LANs & WANs), servers, websites, apps, and more.
$2,149
per year
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Score 8.1 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.
We removed What's Up Gold from our environment due to a number of difficulties we were encountering with it and it ended up a very unreliable source of information as it began to consistently create false positives and the primary support remediation we received was rebuilding …
PRTG was a consideration as it provides a expansive platform for any monitoring system. However, SAM is part of a larger Solarwinds environment that few companies can match for community and support. SAM's value keeps increasing with each other product purchased as the …
I've tried other monitoring systems before. Nagios and the free version of PRTG have been used in the past. Even had OpManager once. Spiceworks always got me close. I've worked at associations, non-profits, and for-profits. Everyone wants the most they can get for as little as …
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is way more user-friendly than PRTG. We can't get OpenView anymore, but we moved from that to SolarWinds at one point and never looked back. Prime really doesn't offer any application monitoring.
We use PRTG currently for SFLOW monitoring our network traffic. We previously use Spiceworks to monitor uptime before we purchase SolarWinds. We bought SolarWinds because it can monitor websites and applications. Spiceworks could not do that. Plus, SolarWinds has support, so …
For a large scale network, PRTG is not feasible and not effective. SolarWinds has a much more robust feature set and it is good for large scale environment.
In comparison to Spiceworks [Connectivity Dashboard,] SolarWinds [has] way [more] features and [an] easy-to-use system. ManageEngine [Application Control Plus] also provides a good look [at the] dashboard but needs a lot more enhancements when it comes to real-time monitoring. P…
PRGT Network Monitor seems to be very good, initially, but, in our experience, when we reached close to 100 devices, the system kept crashing and behaving erratic. Prometheus was missing many features and required some CLI scripting and the GUI was years behind SolarWinds. The …
I can safely say SolarWinds comes up on top versus the individual products we used in the past. SolarWinds was selected because of its ease of use, its visual layout which allows you to easily and quickly browse through the information its currently providing for a monitored …
The interface of the SolarWinds Application suites is familiar to us and is fairly intuitive. While there were some year two and year three cost savings associated with migrating to another platform, we decided that the monetary value would be lost in retraining and lack of …
SolarWinds is comparable to many of the network monitoring solutions above. They are doing similar things. SolarWinds has a great user community called THWACK. SolarWinds is an affordable solution no matter the size of the network. Their support is decent. They are more of a …
SAM's biggest advantage by far is EASY OF SETUP and USE. This is the one reason I went with SolarWinds...it blows the others away when it come to the simplicity. But it's simplicity paired with power.
In the past, when rolling out tools like Nagios, I feel like I needed to …
The integration with their other software including Alert Central provide for a common language between teams when discussing monitoring and everyone has access to the same tools and knows how to use them.
The ease of use and the GUI is way more interactive, I feel that I get more for my money. SolarWinds is a better product hands down, there's no match to the visibility SolarWinds provides.
The TCO for SolarWinds was more realistic for what we had to spend. We can't afford a lot of solutions and having one that is able to handle a lot well is useful.
integrates seamlessly with Windows servers via WMI and PowerShell, providing deep insights into resource usage, performance metrics, and system health. It's excellent at tracking CPU, memory, disk space, and event logs, enabling rapid troubleshooting and proactive maintenance. PRTG Network Monitor also effectively monitors Fortigate devices, providing detailed data on firewall health, traffic patterns, bandwidth utilization, VPN status, and security alerts. This visibility helps detect and resolve network security issues promptly.
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.
Licensing on a per entity basis can be cumbersome for devices which have a ton of monitoring points like network switches\routers. Each sensor may count against a license, which could be a lot of you were monitoring every TX\RX of an SFP for example
A better method to easily template\copy monitors across devices
The navigation in the web GUI could be a little more straightforward in terms of the hierarchy
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.
I would renew it because the platform has brought us many technical and economic benefits that make the cost-benefit ratio very good. Additionally, to do so does not require large investments in training, licensing or infrastructure, and at the administration level, extensive knowledge is not required to be able to bear it.
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.
The tool is very intuitive to use and it is Windows-based (everybody knows how to use Windows) so it's easy to get into. Every time is setup in a hierarchy so if you have a good initial hierarchy design, it will really reduce administrative effort down the road.
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 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.
PRTG does everything we need it to do and more. Ease of use, ease of management and maintenance and clarity of monitoring of hundreds of different types of device and service gives this a large advantage over other products on the market that I have tried. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who needs a network monitoring product in their environment and even to people who don't know they need a solution yet!
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's very important that de project's teams have different member of the TI. We have learned too late the importa of Security Analyst at the design architecture moment. We have to rebuild part of the implementation for made this big mistake.
PRTG offers more versatility in monitoring when compared to the other solutions we tested. The other solutions were also limited as far as customization options, which made them less adaptable to our networks. When compared to Auvik, for instance, we prefer PRTG as it offers immediate notifications through the desktop client - not limited to email notifications as with Auvik. We also appreciate the fact that PRTG can be self/on-prem hosted vs Auvik's cloud model. This makes for an easier deployment and less firewall adjustments to allow traffic to cloud-hosted solutions.
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.
The ability to analyze multiple pieces of information in one place, especially with historical data, has saved our IT department time and headaches. It would be so much more difficult to trace an issue without PRTG, just relying on event logs and an open task manager window.
The cost is not cheap, so it's an expense that hits the bottom line like everything else. Figure in hardware costs as well, ideally a server outside of your main environment.
I keep saying this, but the historical data piece is worth so much. There's really no good way to collect all of that information in one place without something like PRTG. And that definitely saves time and money in the long run.
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.
