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.
$1,750
perpetual license
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Score 8.3 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.
If there are a number of different protocols and devices to monitor PRTG is really an all in one solution. There are network specific solutions, telephony solutions, server solutions, etc - but this tool can do anything. Even if you don't use this tool as your main "monitoring solutions" every IT professional should have access to this tool for at least troubleshooting purposes. If you are looking for something specific built for a task you may be able to find [a] more direct and easy tool to use that would be easier and quicker to setup as customization is not needed.
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.
Very, very configurable. You can create all kinds of monitors for all kinds of things. Plus it has loads of suggestions out of the box. It can get complicated but monitoring is complicated. Pretty decent interface and good support - active community.
I really liked how easy it was to add alerts by SMS. So easy to setup.
I like their sizing models (for purchase). We're actually small enough that we are free. But it's not free as in stripped down - it's free because we don't use many "sensors" and don't honestly have the need.
The probe service can be quite resource-intensive. This can cause false-positive readings from some sensors sometimes.
The software gets updated very regularly. Whilst this is usually a good thing to fix bugs etc, it does meantime downtime of the monitoring quite often while they are installed.
The ability to create Maps from Libraries. Very specific issue but a lot of people have been asking for it for years and it is still not available.
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.
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.
I am giving this a 6 simply because I have never had to contact support. The online documentation is adequate for most things, and the user-maintained knowledgebase is excellent. The few times I have run into issues that were not easily resolvable with intuitive UI, I was able to find the answers that I needed either in the PRTG-provided documentation, the knowledgebase, or with a quick online web search.
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.
I have deployed and tested three products for evaluation I found [PRTG Network Monitor] very easy to deploy, the deployment literally took not more than one hour including basic configuration and network discovery. After deployment few configuration changes and creation of maps, reports and little tweaking is required. [Then] it would go through its process of recommendation that took some time to complete, while [on] other hand other software's took lot of time to install and configure. And features were also missing, which resulted in decision in favor of [PRTG Network Monitor].
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.
