Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 415 vetted SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-25 of 206)
We currently use Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor for monitoring and alerts for all our Servers. It is used primarily to help keeps us informed on the status of any of our servers. Such as space and capacity planning, uptime, CPU utilization, and allows to keep tabs on the many servers across our data center.
- It does a good job of letting us know when a server goes offline, or when it is rebooted.
- It warns us when we are getting low on disk space.
- It lets us know if a node on the network, such as a switch or other critical network device, is offline.
- It provides feedback in the case of an outage, letting us know time and the resources that were impacted by the outage.
- Most alerting tools are a challenge to get fine tuned, Solar winds is no exception to this.
- The GUI for managing the Alerts is pretty klunky and could use a face lift.
- The application monitor portion is a little more challenging to get setup. To the point that we don't use it very much.
October 31, 2019
Monitoring with Solarwinds SAM
Currently, we have different applications that need to be monitored using SNMP and windows WMI. We connect to the host/system to be monitored using the OS service(s), this keeps the monitoring footprint small. There are several groups that use this software and we continue to expand as others see the value. There are instances where the application is windows specific so integration is very simple to monitor. There are plenty of guides to help you implement the monitoring, so if you need to keep track of IIS or SQL, for example, someone has set it up and the tutorial/guide is very straight forward.
- It integrates with MS Windows, so you can keep track of services, processes or nic utilization/bandwidth.
- You can also view the history of a lot of the monitor you choose. It can be helpful to isolate an issue if it's happening at a regular interval.
- Linux and non-Windows OSs are supported using SNMP and even an agent if want to take advantage of other Solarwinds features.
- It plays nice with other software, so you won't have conflicts with monitoring. Always a plus if more than one team is looking at data on the host.
- Not much to say here. If you think of something, check the community. Not really a con, just like anything, do some research.
Currently, SolarWinds is being used in our IT department only. We use it mainly for granular alerts on our VM environment servers, both critical and non-critical. Its granularity is excellent, allowing me to administer my infrastructure in a very detailed and organized way. Works as it should, but one of the business problems I can see is that it is all module-based, but allowing different admins (such as system and network) to create their own alerts and topology of our infrastructure gives them ownership of their job descriptions.
- The granularity in its alerts and reporting gives me access to critical information, especially in compliance.
- Its LDAP integration with Active Directory really helps in keeping organized our "Master List" of network-connected devices.
- Once, when my Windows Server Update Service was unavailable, was able to implement patches through it.
- The GUI is very user intuitive.
- I would much like to see the modules sold in categorically grouped bundles, such as a networking bundle which would include all modules relating to the network.
- Would love to see an addition of an API or something like that to connect to VMware Vcenters.
- Found that if you acknowledge alerts, it makes it very difficult to remediate them inside of the program.
August 27, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
We use it in the IT department for maintenance and monitoring our environment. For maintenance, we use the information given to know which servers to go in and do some quick maintenance on to help ensure they are performing at peak efficiency. As for the monitoring, the alerts we have setup help us ensure things are running smoothly.
- The plugin and cohesiveness between Server & Application Monitor (SAM) and Database Performance Monitoring (DPA) greatly increase our DBA's time management.
- It allows us to easily drill down into an issue and helps us see the root cause of the issue. Whether it is hardware related or on the application/software related.
- It helps gives us very nice statistical information so we can see trends in multiple areas.
- Not really sure. We are very pleased with its functionality, and it is fairly easy and straight forward on its use.
August 21, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
We use it to monitor our hosts at the colo for the IT dept. We get alerts on issues such as CPU, memory, and response times. It's good for our applications and detecting issues with our sites. We can proactively fix problems and troubleshoot the things that keep breaking so that everything is stable.
- Monitoring
- Alerting
- Trending
- Machine learning
- Anomaly detection
- Proactive alerting
December 06, 2019
My SolarWinds Life
We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor our servers, switches, and routers. We need to be aware of resource usage, preventative maintenance issues, and quick reporting of failures. We also like to watch trends in usage and the application provides good tools for monitoring. Using the data allows us to plan accordingly for maintenance events and hardware upgrades.
- Monitors Windows IIS for responsiveness.
- Monitors SQL servers and gives us insight into what resources need to be modified.
- Monitors our applications on our LInux DHCP/DNS servers for responsiveness.
- Need a tie to firewall/security applications.
- More templates, easier template creation.
- More feedback when adding applications, hard to know what is failing when setting up.
August 07, 2019
A set of tools that you will WANT in your enviroment.
In our environment, we use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor across our organization to monitor servers and applications for various business units. These units are separate but under the corporate umbrella. The tool allows for a unified look at our segmented networks.
- Monitoring server performance and up-time.
- Diagnosing issues with applications.
- Tracking down issues with applications.
- Preventing outages, you know when an issue has occurred rapidly.
- Offer professional services for new installations.
- Offer training on the product, some companies would need training.
- Include Netpath/Netflow.
November 23, 2019
Solarwinds TO be or NOT to be.
We use SolarWinds to monitor critical Network connections and also DB on servers in conjunction with 'Relic' and wanted to use AppDynamics but we opted to expand our SolarWinds footprint. The product is used by the IT department to support our ever-expanding Network and the DB environment needs to support 90+ clinics that operate 6 days a week supporting our critical patient operations.
- It is relatively easy to install and operate which helps a lot when you have a small IT staff.
- It does not have a large compute/ram need, thus it is sitting in the background and does its job without getting noticed.
- It provides a solid overview of network performance. I would like to have more control over the reporting capabilities and get more graphical (like a show of the US map with our POPs, etc).
- The DB monitor recommendations are great the tool helps my DBA greatly.
- I like to have control over the reports for the network. For example, I like the show of the US map with our POPs.
- Ability to trend over time much like AppDynamics AI that knows on Mondays we had heavy usage thus it is normal and does not alarm us. SMART metrics that is.
November 22, 2019
SolarWinds for a more reliable infrastructure
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used explicitly by our IT staff, however, it's capabilities stretch to various departments. One of the key components allowed us to monitor our online banking environment and know exactly when an issue happened, and exactly what happened. We were able to monitor windows services and task schedules to provide real-time value and analytics to fix issues immediately.
- Consistent service monitoring.
- Schedule task execution status.
- Reliability!
- Set-up is cumbersome!
- The GUI for services is clunky.
- Sometimes downed services don't report.
November 19, 2019
Infrastructure at a glance with DB as a side note
We currently use SolarWinds to monitor our network infrastructure for 90+ clinics as well as our DB environments to ensure optimal data transmission takes place. At Peoplefinders.com I used the product, both to monitor the Network performance for our various websites for B2B and B2P operation, as well as to proactively respond to poorly performing sales figures, as there was a direct correlation between 'Website access speed' and 'Sales $.' Thus, the tool allowed us to eliminate the network as a possible root cause.
- It monitors many devices, which gives it flexibility.
- It has a solid graphics interface, and with some API use one can present graphical reports that are strong.
- It does not require much maintenance, and the upgrade path is relatively painless.
- I would like the ability to set trending 'capacity' thresholds. For example, I would like to know that someone is pushing 10Meg of data per min on the pipe for 3 minutes. I would like to get notifications on that.
We the application monitor to both keep track of and monitor the nodes on our network. It not only allows us to pinpoint areas of failure, but is a thorough system to documents IP addresses, MAC addresses, and SMTP devices such as networked cameras. The alert system in SolarWinds is probably the most useful tool - we have setup intricate monitors and alerts to correctly alert the right department at the right time. The versatility of the program allows us to monitor everything from servers, to switches, to specific processes running on VM's hundreds of miles away.
- Versatility: The program allows for monitoring of almost any system, simple or complex and allows for intricately programmed alerts based on each monitor.
- Ease of use: Type in the URL, and you are greeted with a fully customizable dashboard with any and all of the pertinent features to your workflow.
- Modular: The program itself is very powerful, but the ability to add or remove features based on need is exceptional compared to competitors.
- Help links & additional tool-tips. Having thorough and easy to understand instructions is the most important part of software this comprehensive and it would be great to include direct links to wiki pages.
- Monitor/Alert templates. The program could use more and simpler alerts and monitors.
November 14, 2019
One of the best APM tools!
We are using SolarWinds organization-wide. It's used for network alerts, space alerts, server up-down alerts, CPU and memory alerts, to generate reports, debug the issues, and monitor the server and application logs. It's a super useful monitoring tool, and it's very easy to use it.
- High quality Performance monitoring tool
- Centralized monitoring tool
- One of the best APM software in the market
- The costs are one of the factors, as there are so many.
- The GUI could be more user-friendly and improved for users.
November 12, 2019
SAM has eased monitoring headaches.
We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor our entire environment, from network equipment to servers and applications and storage.
- Very customizable so you only get what you are looking for.
- Works great out of box with the built in templates.
- User templates uploaded to Thwack allow you to find a solution to a monitoring problem without implementing it from scratch.
- Too integrated into the suite of products. Fields that are needed for network equipment must be filled out for servers and applications.
November 08, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a Solar WIN when it comes to monitoring!
We use Solarwinds to monitor our infrastructure and server environment. It allows us to track traffic and remove blocks in the system before the end-user realizes there were problems. Since our school district is one to one Chromebook and iPad district. Keeping the network up and running is crucial. Being able to monitor devices as applications and pull real-time data allows us to determine our future upgrade path.
- Real-time data reporting - During mandatory state testing periods, it allows us to keep servers load balanced and running under 50% load.
- Application monitoring - I have several UPS's deployed throughout our district. The application monitoring allows me to see runtimes, schedule battery replacements, monitoring of loads.
- Our database servers are crucial to our daily operations. By monitoring the databases, our DBA's can keep up with database programming to keep things from slowing down and build efficient reports that won't slow the system down.
- Better documentation. Documentation is in a true technical format. Some easier documentation would help the new people entering into monitoring engineering get their software instance up and running quicker.
November 04, 2019
SolarWinds are Warm and Strong
Currently, SolarWinds is being used by our IT engineering team to monitor switches, servers, and devices across our network. We monitor uptime and performance. We also utilize the alerting features to let us know if a server, switch, or switchport goes offline. Without this functionality, we would be blinded to the state of devices on our network.
- Better up-time of devices. SolarWinds does a great job of letting us know when a system goes offline. Either via a failed ping response or WMI query to the Windows-based server, or even SNMP to a network device.
- Service monitoring. We have used SolarWinds to monitor Windows services on various machines. It can alert us if the service fails and even restart that service if would like it to.
- Configuration change. SolarWinds help us deploy switching configuration changes. It also has an HTML based SSH console for switch management that is very convenient.
- The UI still need a large refresh. The system seems very slow at times.
- Editing a "node" property is slow and clunky. There are long wait times dues to entire pages refreshing.
- No PowerShell scripting support to control SolarWinds for mass changes.
November 04, 2019
SolarWinds SAM Review
We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor, alert and maintain applications across the company. It is only monitored by the IT department but sends alerts to other users as needed.
- Provides accurate reporting on server and application uptimes
- Presents data in an easy to read format, which can be customized to user's needs
- Easily customizable to monitor complex applications
- Can be complicated to learn, if you are managing multiple products
- Possibility for information overload and clutter without customization
July 10, 2019
Works well to see performance and generate alerts
We use SolarWinds SAM for monitor physical servers for part of our virtual environments and core network elements. We started to use SAM, because we needed to give visibility to the NOC about alerts and made them proactive to avoid a system failure. We create different alerts in order the notify when some abnormal behavior is happening so they can do the work of Tier1 without problem. After a couple of weeks using SAM we realized that we can exploit other functionalities like forecasting, reporting and application monitor. We actually use SolarWinds to create reports and reporting weekly the health of our infrastructure.
- Forecasting server behaviors
- Historical performance reports
- Correlation of historical data
- Easy implementation
- Go community support and online information available for users
- Reporting generation when you need to create from zero a report
- Forecasting server behvior is not to easy to set up
- Setting up alerts and baselines
Solarwinds is used by Vizient's IT ops department to monitor server and network endpoints for up/down status, drive space issues, services up/down, etc.
- Very easy to set-up.
- Very easy to administer.
- Not a steep learning curve to get to know the product.
- Creating custom alerts for multiple objects can be cumbersome.
- Adding a user account with a password to use for scanning purposes requires a lot of steps.
As the #1 VA Mortgage lender in the US, keeping our systems healthy and our finger to our systems' pulse is crucial. When we purchased SAM for our Orion systems, we (Information Technology) immediately put all its features to immediate use. IT monitors the whole company's server infrastructure using SAM by texting and email alerting on met thresholds of hard drive capacity, RAM usage over a certain time and applications/services that are non-responsive. This allows our Server admins to proactively address issues before it affects our customers and employees. We also monitor our Linux systems for IPTables service availability as well as other linux services. We watch I/O read/writes of certain applications to not only check its health but to spot abnormalities in its behavior. Not only our administrators are alerted but also our IT Security team, depending on the application.
IT is not the only department that has access to the SAM dashboards. Dashboards are built out for other departments to view the applications and systems they own so they fully utilize the ownership of their own systems. For example, the development teams setup up monitoring and alerting on component response time for troubleshooting and proactively addressing issues with their IIS/Tomcat environment.
- Alerting: Not only can you alert on apps/services/components/system resources, but SAM also addresses over-alerting if a system/application goes off-line by using a parent/child system relationship. If the parent system goes off-line and you have alerting setup on the components, SAM is smart enough to recognize the parent is down and not inundate you with all child resources that went off-line.
- Integration into the Orion product: SolarWinds does a great job integrating SAM into not only Orion but Orion's other products that monitor systems.
- The breadth of what can be monitored: SAM's extensive list of what it can monitor on top of adding whatever system/component that's not included in Orion's provided pre-made list of choices made it an easy sell to us.
- All the issues we had have been addressed by past SAM versions.
October 16, 2019
SAM holds true!
SolarWinds is used to monitor our production environment. The Application Monitors are used to monitor specific resources within the application.
- Alerts our team when a server or service is at a threshold, so we can respond accordingly.
- Allows us to monitor custom Windows services that our application uses.
- Adding a new application monitor to a server can sometimes be cumbersome. The flow can be improved.
- Can't think of any other cons.
September 30, 2019
Great product, very robust
As a global company, SolarWinds was helpful for monitoring all of our locations in real-time and sending notifications when problems occurred. This was especially helpful with regards to having IT staff working in different time zones and locations. Frequently, the team was notified of issues before they would have been apparent, giving us a head start on correcting the issue.
- Notifications
- Graphical representation
- Single location to view the status of our networks
- False positives being reported, especially with regards to internet lag.
- Configuration seemed difficult.
The SolarWinds Server is currently being used to troubleshoot and monitor low-level application and network traffic detail. It has helped us determine trends in performance and mysterious behavior not otherwise able to be easily determined until looking at network/packet traffic, especially between client/server and database communications. It is used primarily by our Enterprise Infrastructure/Data Center support team, and the Technology Officer.
- Provide raw TCP packet data.
- Trend a large amount of data captured.
- Provide some direction of potential source issues.
- Better organization of information.
- More visual representation of information.
- Easier setup of source/collection/monitor systems.
September 20, 2019
Great Product
We use it to monitor the health of servers, with correlation to NPM for a single record of truth. It has made reactive support tickets much closer to impact to minimize outage and SLA breaks.
- Coloration to NPM, net flow, etc. The single record of truth was a big win for us.
- It has great simplicity to run. We did not need a higher level engineer.
- Support from SolarWinds is always great.
- Tighter API driven metrics across the platform.
September 16, 2019
SolarWinds: The end all to be all.
We use SW to monitor all our of routers, switches, servers, and applications. We baseline our gear and actively alert on thresholds, CPU, memory, storage and bandwidth utilization. We have a large SQL environment and we purchased the SQL modules which provide us with eyes into our databases and their performance.
- Monitoring gives us the ability to view the servers in real-time.
- We also have the ability to look at the servers/applications historically.
- We haven't come across anything that is lacking.
August 23, 2019
Monitors, Alerts, Solves
Basically, it is used to monitor several servers. Mostly, we monitor disk size, backup files, health of ESX hosts, and SQL DB. It is used across the whole organization.
- Immediately alarms if the disk has not enough free space.
- The most powerful tool is that you can design your own monitor, depending for example on the existence of a file, its size, and its contents.
- Mainly, if the issue is resolved, SAM also alerts.
- Sometimes, changes in the equipment or on the server system cause issues, i.e. change of the FQDN of the server. Resolution is available but when there is a problem with SAM, the monitoring stops, so sometimes it causes more serious problems.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot issues faster. The vendor’s value proposition is that this solution prevents slow applications and downtime from impacting end-users and business services. Users can use this tool to pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack.
The vendor says SolarWinds SAM is affordable, easy to deploy, use and customize. Users can automatically discover their systems environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.
SAM is built on SolarWinds Orion® platform enabling native integration with Network Performance Monitor and other IT management software from SolarWinds.
Categories: IT Infrastructure Monitoring, System Monitoring, Application Performance Management (APM)
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Videos (2)
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Downloadables
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Integrations
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Competitors
WhatsUp Gold, Nagios Core, IBM Tivoli Monitoring, Microsoft System Center, DX Application Performance Management (formerly CA APM), SiteScope (formerly HP SiteScope), ManageEngine Applications Manager
Pricing
Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
Does not have featureFree or Freemium Version Available?No
Does not have featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?No
Entry-level set up fee?No
SAM pricing starts at $2,995.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Support Options
| Paid Version | |
|---|---|
| Phone | |
| Forum/Community | |
| FAQ/Knowledgebase | |
| Video Tutorials / Webinar |
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows |
| Mobile Application: | No |
| Supported Languages: | English |