SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. Symantec IT Management Suite

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

The Symantec IT Management Suite is used throughout the company (global). It is efficient and reports via email any type of problem found, from threats to attacks. The update on the clients is carried out without being noticed. When the system is doing some sort of scan, older computers are slow. Other than that, I believe it is an ideal software for monitoring the entire infrastructure.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• End to end workstation imaging with a 45 minute average for OS, drivers and base software with only 1 technician touch to name the workstation.
• Application usage reporting on what software is being used and how much - broken down by site, department and user.
• 5% of managed workstations were patched.
• IT lifecycle reports were automated with live inventory feeds to enable purchase reports.

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

• Increased memory consumption
• Older machines can not support the program

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

I am bit biased after using Symantec ITSM for 10 plus years. However, I found its ability to wrap everything into one console for at a view enterprise health a powerful tool for my department and others. The ability to provide self healing of software packages to workstations was especially powerful. The ability to customize data connections to other tools and automate those inputs and outputs let us provide the business data to support enterprise decisions on Hardware and software usage.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

With the Blue Coat acquisition the question remains on how much support Symantec is going to give the ITSM suite. Its just not that sexy anymore to have to support a product that touches all the hardware anymore. A few of the really good support reps have gone the way of private which is very concerning.

Incentivized

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

Incentivized

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

Incentivized

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.

We evaluated Norton and Kaspersky, we chose Symantec to provide more options and more guarantees. In addition, we have used the tool for more than 10 years in the company (the time I am working). It has an interface with all monitoring data and statistics. A specific display of each piece of connected equipment in the network, making monitoring easy and, in case of a threat, it notifies us.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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

• Reduction of virus infections
• Greater clarity in the reports
• Monitoring the network and infra

Incentivized