SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. Splunk Enterprise

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.

Incentivized

Pros: Splunk is very well suited if you have multiple log sources of related data. All of them can be correlated and tasks can be automated based on the requirement. Other than alerts, Splunk can also run a specific script of your choice, based on some defined conditions. Cons: If you have a few logs but a large number of log sources, Splunk can be very expensive.

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• Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
• Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
• It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.

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• Real-time + Scheduled alerts - i-e you can set up alerts which are actively monitoring your logs
• Pretty good response time for search results. With our key/value logging, Splunk makes it blazing fast to query the data.
• Dashboards provide insights into historical data
• Love how Splunk indexes all of the data and provides keys to search on

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• At times some queries can run slowly if indices are not on a portion of the query you use.
• Setup time initially can be difficult if your logs aren't stored in common locations or in a common way to write the log.
• Ability to ingest logs from different locations without having to change code to put logs in a certain place (pro and con).
• Searches can be a bit more difficult to look through if your log isn't pulled in a manner that is easy to read through splunk.

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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.

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We are using Splunk extensively in our projects and we have recently upgraded to Splunk version 6.0 which is quite efficient and giving expected results. We keep track of updates and new features Splunk introduces periodically and try to introduce those features in our day to day activities for improvement in our reporting system and other tasks.

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.

Incentivized

You can literally throw in a single word into Splunk and it will pull back all instances of that word across all of your logs for the time span you select (provided you have permission to see that data). We have several users who have taken a few of the free courses from Splunk that are able to pull data out of it everyday with little help at all.

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The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.

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When properly setup and configured, Splunk is extremely reliable.

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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.

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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.

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Splunk maintains a well resourced support system that has been consistent since we purchased the product. They help out in a timely manner and provide expert level information as needed. We typically open cases online and communicate when possible via e-mail and are able to resolve most issues with that method.

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It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

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The online course was simple clear and described the main capabilities of the solution. There is also an initial module that can be done for free so anyone can familiarize themselves with the functionality of this solution. On the other hand, however, there could be more free online courses. Maybe even with a certificate, this would broaden the group of people who are familiar with the platform while increasing familiarity with the solution itself.

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

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Smooth without too many major issues.

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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.

I wanted to learn a new language that I can quickly master and implement. Splunk is easy, fun to use and best of all, it can be developed in hours not days or weeks. Splunk is fundamentally a programming language that is minimal but yet powerful enough to collect, analyze and visualize data.

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It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up

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Splunk can scale in to the petabyte per day range which of course is awesome

• 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.

Incentivized

• Overall very positive. It has provided visibility to what is going on within our network.
• One drawback is the time it takes to get up to speed with the application, but this is up to the user, and Splunk education is excellent.
• In my field, IT Security, there are few other friends to have in your back pocket better than Splunk. They are just that good.

Incentivized