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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds AppOptics

    Score7.6 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds AppOptics (formerly Librato) is an IT infrastructure monitoring service and APM, based on technology acquired by SolarWinds with Librato in 2015 to expand its cloud monitoring portfolio.N/A

    VMware ESXi

    Score7.4 out of 10
    N/AA bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.N/A
    Pricing
    SolarWinds AppOpticsVMware ESXi
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds AppOpticsVMware ESXi
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds AppOpticsVMware ESXi
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    5 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    93 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    86 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    5 Answers
    99%
    Happy with the feature set
    94 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    99%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    91 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds AppOpticsVMware ESXi
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of SolarWinds AppOptics and VMware ESXi
    Feature
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    6.9
    30 Ratings
    13% below category average
    VMware ESXi
    -
    Ratings
    Application monitoring8.530 Ratings00 Ratings
    Database monitoring7.528 Ratings00 Ratings
    Threshold alerts6.526 Ratings00 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities4.612 Ratings00 Ratings
    Application performance management console7.226 Ratings00 Ratings
    Collaboration tools6.014 Ratings00 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications6.220 Ratings00 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding6.618 Ratings00 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring7.313 Ratings00 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring8.123 Ratings00 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting7.316 Ratings00 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery7.29 Ratings00 Ratings
    Server Virtualization
    Comparison of Server Virtualization features of SolarWinds AppOptics and VMware ESXi
    Feature
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    -
    Ratings
    VMware ESXi
    8.2
    128 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings8.0116 Ratings
    Management console00 Ratings9.0128 Ratings
    Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings8.0112 Ratings
    Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings8.0116 Ratings
    Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings8.0117 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds AppOpticsVMware ESXi
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox VE
    Score9.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Score7.7 out of 10
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.5 out of 10
    IBM PowerVM
    Score9.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds AppOpticsVMware ESXi
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (30 ratings)
    9.0
    (129 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (6 ratings)
    Usability
    9.6
    (2 ratings)
    9.0
    (6 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    10.0
    (55 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    -
    (0 ratings)
    5.1
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SolarWinds AppOpticsVMware ESXi
    Likelihood to Recommend
    SolarWinds
    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
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    VMware by Broadcom
    If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    SolarWinds
    • 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
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    • Resource management. The automatic load balancing works very well to ensure no host is taxed disproportionately compared to the others.
    • Templates and cloning. It is very easy to set up a template and spin up new servers based on a specific setup. This makes server management very streamlined.
    • VM management. The vSphere interface is very easy to use and navigate. Everything is responsive and it works when you need it to. The options are also robust while also being arranged in a straightforward manner.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    SolarWinds
    • 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
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    • VMware ESXi can improve on the UI that is installed on the bare metal machine. The menus can be hard to navigate when looking for simple configuration items.
    • VMware ESXi can improve on the stability of their overall hypervisor. There have been a few times we had to reinstall due to corruption of VMware ESXi.
    • I would like to see VMware ESXi do better at adding more standard free features in their consumer version of VMware ESXi. For example, having the ability to back up virtual machines is good practice and something that would be very nice if offered in their free version.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    SolarWinds
    We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    SolarWinds
    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
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    VMware by Broadcom
    The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    SolarWinds
    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
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    VMware by Broadcom
    I can't say enough good about VMware's support team. To an individual they take ownership of the case, provide thorough answers, and follow up regularly. On one occasion, a problem we experienced with NSX Endpoint was escalated to development for a permanent resolution after a workaround was found. In my experience, most companies would have tried to find a way to close a case like that instead of taking it all the way. Most importantly, when production is down and every second counts, they VMware teams understand that urgency and treat your issue as if it were the only one they had to deal with. You can't ask for better.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    SolarWinds
    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
    Read full review
    VMware by Broadcom
    As long as you're using Nutanix AOS on Nutanix hardware and are paying their software support fees, AOS is a valid competitor to VMware and can save money due to not needing a license and having their server management system built into the base host management system. If you aren't using Nutanix hardware, however, VMWare is in most cases the best way to go. I cannot comment on HyperV, but most IT people I know either use it because they have to (most) or they like it better (not many).
    Incentivized
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    Contract Terms and Pricing Model
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    it has been fair and easy to understand. I know VMware is looking at wanting to change from CPU to core pricing so we will see what that looks like when it happens.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    VMware by Broadcom
    We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    SolarWinds
    • 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
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    VMware by Broadcom
    • VMWare ESXi licensing is affordable for our business - and the licensing model is simplistic. Not like that of Microsoft with having to keep track of server licenses and CAL licenses for users.
    • VMWare ESXi also has hardware-monitoring built-in, so that further saves us money from having to be spent with another vendor.
    • As much as I hate the saying "a single pane of glass" does fit for this product. You can manage your servers, monitor hardware status, create and export backup snapshots, manage virtual NICs, connect to various storage devices. We're very happy with this product.
    Incentivized
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    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds AppOptics Screenshots

    Screenshot of AppOptics Home ScreenScreenshot of AppOptics DashboardScreenshot of AppOptics TracesScreenshot of AppOptics Trace Root CauseScreenshot of AppOptics InfrastructureScreenshot of Host Heat Map