Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.
Read full review Pros 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 Read full review I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage. I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget. Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management. Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact. Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future
Read full review Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.
Read full review Usability 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
Read full review SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
Read full review Reliability and Availability We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.
Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Performance We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.
Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
Read full review Implementation Rating Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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. Read full review The operation began using
Nagios XI , after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.
Read full review Scalability Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.
Rob Bates Public & Private Cloud Senior Engineer
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware. VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined. VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds AppOptics Screenshots SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Screenshots