SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. Tenable Security Center

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

[Tenable.sc (formerly SecurityCenter)] does very well for internal scanning for vulnerabilities, however it needs to be combined with Tenable.io in order to do cloud scanning.

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

• Vulnerability management from one place
• Maximum endpoint visibility
• Easy to set up and plan the structure
• Support desk quickly responses
• Well-prepared documentation
• Broad scanning type
• Supports various compliance standards
• User groups allows coordination between teams

• 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

• Centralized vulnerability management with sensors.
• Network health assessment and Incident response.
• For alerting or notification, it should also support the SMS gateway.

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

based on product capabilities and usage

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

On all of the occasions that I have had to reach out to Tenable for assistance, they have been extremely helpful and knowledgeable. Solutions and support are provided quickly, and they work on the issue until it is resolved.

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 decided to go with Tenable due to its robust reporting capabilities and competitive pricing vs its competitors. While all tools are very similar in regards to scanning capabilities we prefer Tenable SC's user interface. We also like the option to have both on-prem and cloud with theirs. Tenable io product as well.

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

• Create internal/operational efficiencies
• Improve compliance & risk management
• Cost management
• Solid vulnerability scanner
• Ease, of use, and capabilities when it comes to analyzing vulnerabilities is what makes this product stand out

Incentivized