SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.9 out of 10

Score

7.9 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Customizable Dashboard: Users appreciate the fully customizable dashboard in SolarWinds SAM, which allows them to tailor it to their specific requirements. This feature has been mentioned by several reviewers and enables users to easily access the information they need for effective monitoring.

Proactive Alerting: Reviewers have praised SAM's proactive alerting capabilities, with alerts being triggered for offline servers, low disk space, rebooted servers, and critical network device outages. This feature has been highly valued by users as it helps them stay on top of potential issues and address them promptly.

Reporting Capabilities: SAM's reporting capabilities have received positive feedback from users who find the detailed reports provided by the software helpful for meeting regulatory requirements and ensuring system stability and performance. The granularity in alerts and reporting has been mentioned by multiple reviewers as a valuable feature of SAM.

Reviews

281 Reviews

Solarwinds SAM perfect monitoring tool for Sysadmin

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 6, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) to monitor the performance and availability of our critical servers and applications. It provides centralized visibility into our environment and helps us proactively identify resource issues, service failures, and application performance problems before they impact users.<div>It helps avoid downtime and be proactive on issues ahead of user complaint.</div>

Pros

Application level health check
Smart alerting and tresholds
Automated Discovery & Dependency Mapping

Cons

Alert Noise & Threshold Management
Limited Cloud-Native Monitoring
Dashboards Can Be Difficult to Customize

Likelihood to Recommend

Users complained that “applications are slow,” but we couldn’t quickly tell whether it was: SQL IIS SAN or the VM host; with the built-in Solarwinds templates for: SQL Server IIS and Windows services; When the app slowed down, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor showed SQL tempdb latency spikes before IIS errors, we have concluded that the issue was backend storage, not the app code.

Younes Akrouch

Infrastructure Security Manager in Information Technology at Quadient (5001-10,000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Powerful Cost-Effective Monitoring with SolarWinds SAM.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 5, 2026

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is our primary monitoring platform for Windows and Linux servers, the applications they host, and key network connectivity, including remote IPsec tunnels, cloud virtual interfaces, and dedicated vendor connections. We depend on SAM’s proactive monitoring and alerting to identify outages or performance issues across our environment quickly.

Pros

Monitoring basic SQL Server functionality.
Monitoring Network connectivity.
Monitoring IIS Servers.
Ability to setup custom application monitors for monitoring non-standard applications.
Monitoring HTTPS web sites.
Monitoring DNS and Domain services.

Cons

Custom application monitors can be a little tricky to configure.
Logic in custom alerts can be a little hard to follow and figure out.
Inability to monitor certificates on custom applications or SQL Server.
Can be a little slow at times with on-prem SQL server.

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is an excellent tool for keeping tabs on all of your servers, network connections, and applications. It can be configured and customized with dashboards to help your team keep an eye on all of your critical resources and the status of your network. It can also be configured to alert you via email, text, or API hooks to on-call software to ensure your team is notified when something is not running correctly.

Verified User

Supervisor in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review

Rating: 3 out of 10

Incentivized

November 20, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use the SaaS SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor platform to monitor our networks and server applications. Running modules to manage different environments. Adjust the need of adding and removing custom parameters or other changes that are needed. Troubleshooting issues or scenarios to achieve desired results. Observing performances of servers we manage.

Pros

Changed licensing system from by service purchases
Good for static or simple environments
Pretty good PowerShell module
Decent monitoring interface

Cons

Customer service and sales reps experiences
Expensive compared to other options
The initial setup process took a while and much effort
Requires a pretty large footprint and not reliable
Difficult to add and remove, custom monitors, dashboards, and adjusting thresholds

Likelihood to Recommend

There are more budget friendly options that are also more reliable. It also has a massive footprint and initial setup is not user friendly. On top of that the difficultly to remove or add custom monitors, adjust thresholds, dashboards or other adjustments are the reasons why I rate the platform low.

Verified User

Consultant in Information Technology (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

11 years of experience

Big, but effective

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 14, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We monitor servers and network gear to track uptime, and to alert when certain resource metrics are reached on a system (e.g., low disk space). My team does not use configuration management abilities. We're also working to integrate SNMP monitoring of data center power gear and PDUs, in order to get away from the vendor's proprietary client and to have our monitoring more standardized.

Pros

Server uptime monitoring
SNMP monitoring
Reporting
Network device monitoring

Cons

The web interface reloads when certain options are chosen from pop-up menus, which interrupts quick page navigation.
Configuring custom SNMP alerting is onerous.
I wish custom reporting was easier to use.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Will Enestvedt

Unix Team Manager in Information Technology at Johnson & Wales University (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

SolarWinds is a useful resource for IT Management

Rating: 9 out of 10

June 15, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SolarWinds as our inventory management tool and it is an invaluable resource that allows us to keep track of all of the computers and the software installed on our computers. This helps us keep track of who has what device(s), when it was purchased, and if the user needs more room on their hard drive when it comes time to replace their computer.

Pros

Inventory management
Software management
Computer age and refresh scheduling

Cons

Would like a Linux agent
Would love to be able to see when a device was first added to the database

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have a large number of users and computers and need a reliable database that will aggregate all of the computers and users into a single database. This allows us to keep track of who has logged into a computer, and log where that computer is located. SolarWinds is a fantastic resource that lets us keep better track of all the devices we have. Even after the device is disposed of we still have a record that this device was once ours so if there is an inventory question we can confirm that the device was ours but it has been disposed of.

Connie Inman

Senior IT Technologist II & Desktop Support Supervisor at University of Tennessee (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 21, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is part of my company's monitoring toolset which enhances the overall value proposition of our SolarWinds Orion investment. Being a global company, we currently utilize four Orion instances across multiple data centers and public cloud providers. SAM is currently monitoring on-prem and public cloud Windows and Linux-based applications in addition to providing latency metrics for RDS endpoints in AWS. SAM provides historic metrics in addition to being part of an overall toolset to troubleshoot issues in real-time.

Pros

Realtime monitoring of common OS and application metrics.
Visibility of past performance issues for server application events/issues.
Fast, out-of-the-box setup.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

A company that has already invested in the SolarWinds ecosystem can drive additional value by adding Server & Application Monitor. Installing and configuring the additional functionality of SAM can prove to be a very worthwhile investment in most situations. Templates for canned software make the setup quick and efficient. Companies that leverage multi-tiered/in-house applications or require precise details of performance across an entire stack will want to look at solutions from other vendors.

Mike Hochstein

Senior Director, Infrastructure Architecture & Standards in Information Technology at Cision (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

10 years of experience

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is good tool to monitor your applications and make calls via APIs.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 6, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Little information about health and availability of applications. We need to better monitor our applications and handle applications in API format.

Pros

Handling API requests.
Monitoring SQL thresholds.
Monitoring DHCP pools.

Cons

Cover non-windows based applications.
API Poller doesn't provide friendly messages when getting issues to retrieve info.
Unable to edit Authorization Poller settings.

Likelihood to Recommend

A good tool to use as rest API and to create different reports and alerts based on API information.

Fabio Silva

Senior Network Engineer in Information Technology at Fexco (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Safe, robust and reliable.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 1, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The tool is used to monitor the entire technology infrastructure allied with other vendors. Here it is useful to identify outages, failures, and performance degradation, the scope of action involves the communication, servers, services, and business layers. Through this monitoring, alarms, reports, integration with ITIL-based tools, and other items such as e-mail, SMS, and messaging applications are generated.

Pros

Monitors windows and linux servers.
NETFLOW based data traffic.
Scripting and automating actions.
Integration with other tools.
Robust and well-distributed architecture.
Constant updates and specialized support center.
Training and educational content.

Cons

Capacity reports.
Modern interface.
Possibility to use other OS and DB as platform software, in addition to Windows and SQL Server.

Likelihood to Recommend

It can be used in medium and large companies, the capacity resources must be measured well to be able to guarantee that the monitoring health is satisfactory and well distributed, there are architectural scenarios with high availability and the monitoring schedule does not require many resources. There are several ready-made templates and a large amount of teaching material.

Rafael Santos

Monitoring Specialist in Information Technology at Fleetcor (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Server and Application Monitoring made easy

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I work at a University and we use SolarWinds Server Application Monitor to monitor about 250 servers. We monitor in-house servers (inclusive of physical, VMware and Hyper-V) and cloud-based Azure deployments.

Pros

Alerts- SolarWinds Server Application Monitor can send alerts based on high disk and CPU usage as well as Server up/down among other criteria
Monitor Azure Severs
Monitor Hyper-V
Monitor VMware
Monitor SQL instances

Cons

Alerts can be easier to create. I understand the need for complex alerting and appreciate that but there should also be a simple way to create basic alerts

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a great product for server and application monitoring. We would have bought the product just to monitor in-house servers and applications, but the bonus of being able to handle Azure cloud was a welcome bonus for us.

Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

8 years of experience

True Insight

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use SolarWinds Server Application Monitor to monitor my infrastructure as well as applications within that environment. It provides a thorough insight into the health and availability of my infrastructure through an easy-to-read and customizable dashboard. Without SolarWinds Server Application Monitor, it would feel like I'm trying to navigate through a wildfire without visibility. Receiving alerts to issues as they are happening is a lifesaver. We have critical processes that would otherwise go unmonitored without SolarWinds Server Application Monitor. We use it for our entire virtual environment.

Pros

Discovers servers in our environment
Monitors both servers and applications in our environment
Monitors hardware health

Cons

Allow more granular control of application templates
Provide suggestions based on trends
provide a dark theme option

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Server Application Monitor is well suited for any environment where you care about health and uptime. If you are at all concerned about your infrastructure, SolarWinds Sensor Application Monitor is your best friend. I have yet to work in an environment without SolarWinds Server Application Monitor and I can't imagine being successful at a company that doesn't have it.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

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