ScienceLogic SL1 vs SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

What users are saying about

Score 8 out of 10

Based on 174 reviews and ratings

Score 8.3 out of 10

Based on 412 reviews and ratings

Feature Rating Comparison

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Application monitoring

Database monitoring

Threshold alerts

Predictive capabilities

Application performance management console

Collaboration tools

Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications

Application dependency mapping and thresholding

Virtualization monitoring

Server availability and performance monitoring

Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting

IT Asset Discovery

Pros

Graphing - Sciencelogic has highly configurable, high-quality graphs that make the display of mission-critical data very effective.
Customization - With a few exceptions, nearly everything in the system can be changed, modified, added or deleted to create your ideal monitoring environment.
"Power Packs" - The built-in packages provide a good level of out of the box functionality.

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Britton Starr

Senior Data Network Analyst

OneMainFinancial Services, 10,001+ employees

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The granularity in its alerts and reporting gives me access to critical information, especially in compliance.
Its LDAP integration with Active Directory really helps in keeping organized our "Master List" of network-connected devices.
Once, when my Windows Server Update Service was unavailable, was able to implement patches through it.
The GUI is very user intuitive.

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John-John Reyes Figueroa

System Administrator

Launch Federal Credit UnionBanking, 201-500 employees

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Cons

The point in time nature of the data points can be misleading. The data would be more valuable in some cases if the 5 minute polling interval was an average value of the previous 5 minutes, not point in time when the collection happens.
Container and Kubernetes monitoring is poor. Granted we are a few months behind of upgrades, so haven't been able to try out the latest versions.
Snippet development within the platform is terrible. There really needs to be a way to source snippets from Git repositories, so code can be versioned and tested outside of the platform.
Testing snippets outside of the platform can be challenging. We would really like to have some mock test framework we could pull into our testing suite so unit testing complex snippets is easier.

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David Louks

Cloud Architect

MattersightComputer Software, 201-500 employees

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Help links & additional tool-tips. Having thorough and easy to understand instructions is the most important part of software this comprehensive and it would be great to include direct links to wiki pages.
Monitor/Alert templates. The program could use more and simpler alerts and monitors.

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Callen Gilmartin

Network Services Specialist

Nevada LegislatureGovernment Administration, 201-500 employees

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Likelihood to Renew

ScienceLogic SL1 7.9

Based on 5 answers

We migrated away from our 20-year-old homegrown solution and have no back-tracking capability.
ScienceLogic is a Cisco Partner and we are supported in ensuring their success.
ScienceLogic is demonstrating new capabilities that we would not have been able to do on our own using our legacy system.
We understand the capabilities of competitors based on our bake-off selection where ScienceLogic won on capabilities and future near-term potential (expandability, platform growth). We know that those competitors are not really close to where we have been able to push ScienceLogic (as a partner).

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John "Frotz" Fa'atuai

SR. ENGINEER.IT ENGINEERING

Cisco SystemsComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 9.0

Based on 8 answers

Easy to use and they keep expanding on its functionality. We also have a good relationship with them. Rarely have issues or need to contact support.

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Ryhlen Schoeberl

System Administrator

Vast BroadbandTelecommunications, 201-500 employees

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Usability

ScienceLogic SL1 7.0

Based on 3 answers

The core functions are there.
The complexity is due to the complexity of the space.
The score is based on comfort (I no longer notice the legacy UI) and the promise that I see in the 8.12 Unified UI (a vast improvement).
It is also based on the fact that with 8.12, you can now do everything in the new UI but you still have the legacy UI as a fallback (which should now be unnecessary for new installations).
Further, the score is influenced by ScienceLogic being a Cisco Partner and while Cisco IT is a customer, we are also executing on internal expectations to make our partners successful by constructive (and sometimes pressured) criticism to better the platform.

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John "Frotz" Fa'atuai

SR. ENGINEER.IT ENGINEERING

Cisco SystemsComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 9.0

Based on 13 answers

What makes this product great is that it is easy to setup and configure. Many products are very time consuming to get setup and implement. This leads to a delay in their use, and slow adoption. Because of the ease of use of Solarwinds we have gotten a lot of use out of it.

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Ryan Andrus

Network Services Manager

Davis County GovernmentGovernment Administration, 501-1000 employees

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Reliability and Availability

ScienceLogic SL1 7.3

Based on 1 answer

For us, monitoring needs to degrade gracefully. That means that, by design, you allow your monitoring system to begin giving you less and less information until an ultimate failure point. Our motto is Last-Down / First-Up and our deployment architecture reflects specific design choices to minimize being part of someone else's failure-mode.ScienceLogic SL1 at 8.12 provides a wealth of monitoring data. This comes at a cost as you scale up.Can you consume the wealth of monitoring data?Can you consume the wealth of warnings and errors that being to get generated as you scale up?There are challenges, most of which are due to our deployment design choices and scale.We are working with ScienceLogic to introduce Priority as a first-class data element. We've added this as a Custom Attribute for all of our CIs. We use this to distinguish between the failure of a development host vs the failure of our production website.The score represents the known opportunity for improvement that we see on our joint roadmaps.

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John "Frotz" Fa'atuai

SR. ENGINEER.IT ENGINEERING

Cisco SystemsComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 5.5

Based on 1 answer

No answer on this topic is available.

Performance

ScienceLogic SL1 7.3

Based on 1 answer

Care should be taken when creating dashboards which present all of the collected data available to you.We have many routers at work.Almost all of them have 10K interfaces on each one.Creating dashboards which present many different views of many different, large routers can create undue database load. (We're actively discouraging their use as a long-running process because each dashboard widget gets its own database connection, not a shared database connection.) We will kill all long running queries in the database if they run longer than 30 minutes.The database schema design makes interesting trade-off decisions (optimizing for ease of write at the expense of complex / cross-device reads). The new GraphQL schema model looks promising, but we're still waiting for that to begin to appear in the SL1 core functionality.Given enough hardware and budget, you can go a long ways before you start pushing the boundaries of the platform architecture.Being conservative in what you monitor for the vast majority of your CIs allows you to retain compute capacity for dashboards, runbook engines and the like.Having large routers or vCenters will require an upscaling of your data collector sizings just to complete the Device Component Map data collection.

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John "Frotz" Fa'atuai

SR. ENGINEER.IT ENGINEERING

Cisco SystemsComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 5.5

Based on 1 answer

No answer on this topic is available.

Support

ScienceLogic SL1 6.1

Based on 4 answers

In some cases and depending on the support representative support is good, but in general, it requires customer management of the case vs. vendor management of the cases....like pulling teeth... time-consuming, etc, etc. Also want to comment that this applies to the Technical Support Group and the PSO Group at ScienceLogic. Support appears to be degrading over the past few years vs getting better and I suspect this is a result of structural changes in support group e.g. off-shoring/subcontract support. The roll-out of a new case management system and self-support tool made obtaining support much more difficult.

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Verified User

Former Employee in Information Technology

E-Learning Company, 1001-5000 employees

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 8.9

Based on 10 answers

We talk to a initial person and they may not be specialized in what we are trying to resolve. They then have to call back or have someone call back after that person is free from working on another issue with another customer.

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Erron Walter

Systems Operations Specialist

Venable LLPLaw Practice, 501-1000 employees

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In-Person Training

ScienceLogic SL1 9.1

Based on 1 answer

On the Cisco IT side (students), we had a number of teams who were provided the deep developer training.
Of those students, the customized training provided a complete, 5 day training which enabled the Cisco IT platform team to successfully deploy and mitigate user-experience issues for the vast majority of our end-users, including some of the teams who attended the developer training.

The knowledge kept pace with the class and sped up / slowed down (within the time constraints) as needed throughout the course.

This was developer to developer training and for those students who were developers the training worked well. For those who were just coders it probably worked less well as some of the topics still do not apply (a function of our course outline specification based on our knowing nothing).

Due to problems in sequencing we did the developer course BEFORE the admin course and realized that our requested ORDER was wrong.

The onsite admin course was much better received and led to deeper understanding of the developer course held a few weeks prior.

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John "Frotz" Fa'atuai

SR. ENGINEER.IT ENGINEERING

Cisco SystemsComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Ask the community to sound off

Implementation

ScienceLogic SL1 7.0

Based on 3 answers

Know your use case.
Know which inherent use case ScienceLogic approaches you with. (They still have a long history of Managed Service Provider that influences their thinking and they are learning to be self-aware and thoughtful about you rather than your deployment being just a templated deploy that they've done many times before.)

They are making progress, but your clear and persistent insistence on deployment according to your use case will help minimize problems.

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John "Frotz" Fa'atuai

SR. ENGINEER.IT ENGINEERING

Cisco SystemsComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 6.4

Based on 2 answers

No answer on this topic is available.

Alternatives Considered

ScienceLogic supports multiple vendor devices and it supports integration to multiple other applications. It gives the privilege to pull up the data from its database for customized reports. Automatically pulling up the device list from the CMDB helps in keeping the list of monitoring devices updated. Template feature to monitor the specific group of devices is very convenient to use.

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Aditya Dev

Network Engineer

CiscoComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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The tool does what it says, and gives you great insight into your environment. Out of all the SolarWinds products that I have used over the years, my top two are SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor and N-Able. Depending on your business needs, either will do the job, but it depends on your use case. For me, I like to work remote, be able to diagnose issues quickly, and fix issues from anywhere that I have an internet connection.

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Daniel Stinson

Sr Systems Architect

Central Florida Expressway AuthorityInformation Technology and Services, 201-500 employees

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Scalability

ScienceLogic SL1 7.3

Based on 1 answer

Our deployment model is vastly different from product expectations.Our global / internal monitoring foot print is 8 production stacks in dual data centers with 50% collection capacity allocated to each data center with minimal numbers of collection groups.General Collection is our default collection group.Special Collection is for monitoring our ASA and other hardware that cannot be polled by a large number of IP addresses, so this collection group is usually 2 collectors).Because most of our stacks are in different physical data centers, we cannot use the provided HA solution. We have to use the DR solution (DRBD + CNAMEs).We routinely test power in our data centers (yearly).Because we have to use DR, we have a hand-touch to flip nodes and change the DNS CNAME half of the times when there is an outage (by design). When the outage is planned, we do this ahead of the outage so that we don't care that the Secondary has dropped away from the Primary.Hopefully, we'll be able to find a way to meet our constraints and improve our resiliency and reduce our hand-touch in future releases. For now, this works for us and our complexity. (I hear that the HA option is sweet. I just can't consume that.)

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John "Frotz" Fa'atuai

SR. ENGINEER.IT ENGINEERING

Cisco SystemsComputer Networking, 10,001+ employees

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 7.3

Based on 1 answer

No answer on this topic is available.

Return on Investment

ScienceLogic allowed our Managed Service to implement Incident automation for the first time ever, which greatly increased our ability to accurately catch and triage issues.
As a diagnostic tool, it allows our Engineers to quickly verify their current status and identify trends, which increased our efficiency and effectiveness.
Increased the capabilities of our CMDB immensely, and allows our Solution Architects to quickly identify clients that may be in need of additional services.
Provided an avenue for additional lines of business, such as Monitoring as a Service (MaaS).

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Tim Reaves

Director of Managed Services

Fidelus TechnologiesInformation Technology and Services, 51-200 employees

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One of the biggest areas of ROI is for our DBA, with the combination of SAM and DPA we have been able to streamline the maintenance and troubleshooting of applications. On several instances, it has taken us probably less than 5 minutes to tell supervisors where the issue lies when something is not working.
The second area that it helps is helping us see trends on our servers to know if we need to address specific areas of growth to ensure continued productivity and smooth operations.
Initially this was not part of our "initial" purchase with SolarWinds, however, now it is definitely one of the core SolarWinds modules that are used on a daily basis to assist in monitoring our network.

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Nate Nettrouer

Senior Help Desk Technician

New York BlowerMechanical or Industrial Engineering, 501-1000 employees

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Screenshots

See All (6) ScienceLogic SL1 Screenshots

See All (8) SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots

Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

Yes

Entry-level set up fee?

Required

ScienceLogic SL1 Editions & Modules

Edition

SL1 Infrastructure Health	$0¹
SL1 Application Health	$0²
SL1 Service Health	$0³
SL1 Incident Automation	$0³

per device
per node
per device

Additional Pricing Details

—

General

Free Trial

Yes

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Editions & Modules

—

Additional Pricing Details

SAM pricing starts at $2,995.

Rating Summary

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

ScienceLogic SL1

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Likelihood to Recommend