SolarWinds AppOptics vs. SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset

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.

Incentivized

I have found the toolset especially useful for scanning subnets to discover devices, and for setting up temporary real-time monitors when we are troubleshooting or setting up new connections. The most useful aspect has been the ability to apply the tools to help troubleshoot and pinpoint intermittent issues. More general tools like Orion often do not have the granularity to detect issues like intermittent packet loss which are especially impactful to applications like Voice. The toolset gives us another level of capability to dig into issues.

Incentivized

• Request tracing with code profiling.
• Automated alerting on latency and response codes for each API.
• Low resource overhead while collecting data from our application servers.
• Highly performant dashboard that enables us to make progress rapidly.
• Very resilient. We have not seen a downtime in their service in the entire year that we have used them.
• Identify database and cache requests that are taking longer than expected

Incentivized

• Various monitoring
• Stores history
• Suggests indices
• Helps to find the SQL query text
• Helps to see what machines/users the bad queries are coming from
• Shows current blocking session

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The unifying component that is intended to be the initial interface to the tools seems clunky. I prefer to start the tools individually rather than using it.
• The port scanner could use some improvements to make it easier to use.

Incentivized

We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Very easy to use and intuitive. Just be careful with the WAN Killer...it does what it says.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Our organization uses it regularly. It is reliable, and we keep finding new uses for it

Incentivized

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.
• Alerts can be sent on different channels.

Incentivized

I haven't compared any tools similar to SolarWinds Engineer's Toolset. This might be because I'm pretty biased when it comes to monitoring, and reporting solutions. I've found that SolarWinds provides the biggest bang for the buck in my opinion. I'm sure there are other solutions on the market that compete, but I haven't tried any of them because I've been very satisfied with SolarWinds.

Incentivized

• Application monitoring troubleshooting became more accurate. Accurate results save more man-hours of manual troubleshooting.
• As Realtime monitoring and alerts provide more flexibility, downtime can be minimized and Accurate Root causes can be provided.
• Dashboards can be useful for making future strategy based on trends.
• Installation and integration is easy.

Incentivized

• Spend less time downloading free buggy tools
• All the tools in one spot, so you don't have to look around for tools
• Get to the solution sooner

Incentivized