SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Reviews

Sometimes and easy button would be nice to simplify the views and data collected.

Sales calls are persistent for anyone who has any involvement, which is just plain annoying.

Difficult to get SAM going.

More knowledge base information.

Implementing a custom monitor can be cumbersome and frustrating.

Monitoring a lot of services can be taxing on your system.

Would like to see more SolarWinds approved templates available.

None really, I just use what it provides.

Alerting is broken for us. When we asked about it, we were told it is a bug and to upgrade our SolarWinds. It is a very huge upgrade. We didn't even get a workaround.

Support is sometimes very slow.

Ability to recommend specific remediation steps for addressing issues.

Better application flow visibility.

There is no real downside to using this product as they have many features.

Can become expensive due to the licensing costs.

Setup can take time.

Some settings are difficult to find if you don't spend a lot of time in the system.

There are a lot of templates which is good and bad, writing your own takes knowledge not all have.

Poor UI

Difficult to use beyond basic functions

The integration with other products could use a bit of polishing. It's not hard or impossible, just a bit clunky.

Implementation of the application monitors is a small challenge to learn, but once you have the hang of it, it is overall elegant.

GUI could be a bit more altered to indicate real potential issues.

It is kind of slow to start-up, especially the first time.

Can sometimes get almost too complicated.

Hard to configure and get results.

Alert configuration, you can do mostly everything, but you have to do it, tool does not do it.

Training/support seems not interested to deliver best practices, they just share high level over viewed data.

I would lean more towards the bugs repair for now.

The PMS connect error issue.

Apache server monitoring.

AWS cloud monitoring.

Having so many modules, can take some doing to understand what you need or want.

Additional mobile app/device monitoring.

Please provide integration via Cloudflare.

Extend trial periods for startups.

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.

It is not simple to navigate.

Improves memory and CPU use

Less time spent refreshing after solving problems

For the SQL part, I would like to see the option to kill a process from GUI.

Lower cost.

Please improve on centralizing the data.

If any new patches have been updated on server, let us know the system capabilities to hold the patch.

Dashboard has to be more crispy in data viewing.

I understand that our system is not highly available, but every 4 to 6 months SolarWinds fills up logs or ports or numerous other maladies that cause it to stop monitoring. Sometimes this causes a big enough issue that Monday morning the whole system is crashed. Several times it stopped polling devices without any outward signs. One time it stopped monitoring and wasn't discovered until we were trying to look at processor performance on one specific system and it showed that it had stopped recording data 4 days prior. The polling engines were up, but everything had just stopped polling. SolarWinds does not do any root cause analysis, but they do a lot of rebuilding components when systems fail. Sometimes that means a complete reinstall. I have used many ways to monitor the monitoring system so I can determine when it has quietly failed. The simplest, but somewhat effective way, has been to ask SW to send me an email every 4 hours. That requires me to check my email evenings and all weekend and after 4 months I have still missed a couple of outages.

Nearly every SolarWinds upgrade has created issues with stability and monitoring downtime. The first time I experienced the upgrade nightmare, it was completed by a SolarWinds engineer who was attempting to fix an issue. That was the time I learned to always take a VM snapshot before an upgrade was attempted. That first time could not be backed out and ended up causing problems for months. This upgrade problem must be true for many customers because the upgrade system has been changed a lot in the last three years. Support has been very responsive and usually can work through the problems. It is unfortunate that it consumes so much of my time for two to six weeks following an upgrade.

Our current Strategic Account Manager is useless. Instead of helping with a support issue that had been going on for 6 months, he suggested we pay for higher-level support for faster response times. Then no follow-up until he sent a form letter a month later asking if we have any current needs! To be fair we have had two other Account Managers that were responsive when we needed assistance. Those two moved on to other companies. It is especially significant to note that we only contact the Account Manager as a last resort and in three years that has only been about 2 or 3 times. The current one had only one request for assistance from me and of course, that will be the last time I reach out to him.

As with any company's support, SolarWinds has good and less than helpful support technicians. Several times I have had to request a different tech, or just close and open a new case when the tech provided answers like, just turn off that monitor on the SolarWinds application server instead of figuring out why it frequently alerts. There has also been resistance to escalating cases when progress has halted. On the other side of that is, there are several support technicians that know the products well and have had experience with many common issues. Those techs get things fixed quickly.

Under the hood, it's a variety of monitoring products that have been added over the years, and sometimes this shows. The integration is pretty good, but not perfect.

Adding additional custom SNMP pollers could be a lot easier.

Sometimes you still need to use individual programs on the server to add or configure monitoring, rather than all going through the front end.

Hard to see exactly what is monitored on each node.

Linux/Unix support is very limited. We have to set up custom agents and custom scripts to retrieve any usable data from our older systems, and each one needs to be customized to report back what we need. The effort that has gone into the Windows systems is amazing -- the Linux effort is very limited and has almost no automation ability.

Installation and configuration is very daunting. The upgrade processes have caused many outages and unexpected tickets to be opened for support. The upgrade/maintenance process needs to be cleaned up and updated.