TrustRadius Insights
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a versatile tool that has been widely used across various industries and departments for …
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Overview
What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
Recent Reviews
Awards
Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards
Popular Features
- Server availability and performance monitoring (269)9.898%
- Application monitoring (266)9.090%
- Threshold alerts (271)8.989%
- Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications (256)7.979%
Pricing
N/A
Unavailable
What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.solarwinds.com/products/pric…
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
17 people also want pricing
Alternatives Pricing
What is Azure Monitor?
Microsoft's Azure Monitor is designed to analyze and optimize the performance of web applications and infrastructure, including virtual machines (VMs), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Storage, and databases. Monitor Linux and Windows VMs and their health and dependencies—all on a single map.
What is SolarWinds Pingdom?
SolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.
Features
Return to navigation
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
What is 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.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Features
- Supported: Single Web interface to monitor multi-vendor applications and server infrastructure.
- Supported: Out-of-the-box monitoring templates for 200+ enterprise applications.
- Supported: Easily extend monitoring to virtually any custom or home-grown applications.
- Supported: Gain contextual visibility of relationships and dependencies between applications and physical and virtual servers.
- Supported: Monitor server hardware health, perform capacity forecasting, and manage asset inventory. Remediate server issues remotely with built-in management actions.
- Supported: Monitor VMware and Hyper-V environments to identify problems impacting application performance.
- Supported: Centrally manage IT asset inventory and keep track of server hardware and software information.
- Supported: Leverage the wealth of built-in alerts and reports, and easily customize them as needed.
- Supported: SAM is an agentless monitoring software. Optional agent installation extends monitoring to the cloud.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Videos
An introduction to and a brief overview of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
In this video, the TrustRadius team is going to take a look at Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor, a powerful tool that can help you monitor your systems and identify issues early. We'll explore the overview, user sentiment, pricing, top features, and use-case, and help...
Show More Watch SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Training Videos
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Integrations
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Competitors
- Progress WhatsUp Gold
- Nagios Core
- Tivoli Monitoring (legacy)
- Microsoft System Center
- DX Application Performance Management (formerly CA APM)
- SiteScope (formerly HP SiteScope)
- ManageEngine Applications Manager
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Languages | English |
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
Progress WhatsUp Gold, Nagios Core, and Tivoli Monitoring (legacy) are common alternatives for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor.
Reviewers rate Server availability and performance monitoring highest, with a score of 9.8.
The most common users of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(649)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a versatile tool that has been widely used across various industries and departments for monitoring and managing servers, applications, and network infrastructure. Users rely on the software to ensure that critical systems are up and running smoothly. With its ability to monitor servers, applications, and network nodes, customers appreciate the comprehensive insights it provides into their IT environments.
One of the key use cases of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is its role in proactive monitoring and alerting. Users have praised the software's capability to detect issues such as CPU utilization, memory usage, response time, and low disk space. By setting up corresponding alerts, users can address potential problems before they impact end-users. This proactive approach helps prevent system failures and ensures optimal performance.
Another important use case of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is its ability to provide detailed insights into server metrics and application performance. Users can monitor various elements such as CPU, memory, and disk usage on servers, as well as track the health of applications like Exchange, SQL, IIS, and SharePoint. The software's integration with other products in the SolarWinds Orion family enhances network management capabilities, allowing for a unified view of segmented networks.
Additionally, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is valued for its flexibility in monitoring different types of systems and services. It supports Windows, Linux, Unix, and AIX servers both on-premises and in the cloud. Users have leveraged the software to monitor services, processes, URLs, IP addresses, MAC addresses, SMTP devices like networked cameras, and even Linux services such as IPTables. This broad range of monitoring capabilities makes it a valuable tool for organizations with diverse IT infrastructures.
Overall, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor has proven to be instrumental in maintaining system stability by providing real-time alerts for potential issues and facilitating efficient troubleshooting. Its ease of use and customization options allow different departments and administrators to tailor monitoring and alerts to their specific needs. The software's comprehensive insights, proactive monitoring, and wide range of supported systems make it a valuable asset for organizations looking to ensure optimal performance and availability of their IT infrastructure.
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.
Confusing User Interface: Users have expressed frustration with the user interface of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, stating that it is confusing and difficult to navigate. Some users feel that there is a steep learning curve and find it overwhelming, especially for first-time users.
Lack of Comprehensive Documentation: Several users have criticized the documentation provided for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, stating that it is spotty and lacking in examples. They believe that more comprehensive and detailed documentation would greatly aid in understanding and troubleshooting the software.
Poor Customer Support: There have been complaints about the customer support provided by SolarWinds. Multiple users have reported that customer support has worsened over time, causing frustration due to delays in reaching the correct support team and resolving issues in a timely manner.
Users have recommended several key actions for users considering SolarWinds based on their experiences. These include:
- Recommending utilizing the software for internal use, specifically for monitoring servers and applications.
- Suggesting taking advantage of the free trial to test the software before making a purchase decision.
- Advising researching and planning before implementation to ensure the software is suitable for one's needs.
- Encouraging careful design of the environment, especially when using the software in different locations.
- Recommending purchasing a license that matches the number of components needed for monitoring.
- Urging cautiousness when it comes to support and potential glitches with the software.
- Suggesting working with a detail-oriented engineer for proper setup and configuration.
- Promoting interaction with the user community site to learn from others' experiences and share knowledge.
- Emphasizing the need to understand the licensing model before signing up and selecting appropriate licensing based on the number of nodes to be monitored.
- Suggesting exploring other SolarWinds offerings and using them in conjunction with this software.
While users find SolarWinds to be a valuable tool, they also mention that it may not be suitable for beginners due to its learning curve. Overall, it is recommended to carefully consider setup, pricing, and requirements before implementing SolarWinds.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(101-125 of 278)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
November 09, 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.
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.
November 05, 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
November 04, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
We've used SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor since 2014. It was the first project I proposed. I explained to the chief financial officer that visibility was the key to understanding your IT infrastructure. Once you have visibility of your IT infrastructure, you can prevent problems from happening, reduce your resolution time, pinpoint the root cause of problems and plan for capacity management. We configured timely alerts to update us on certain incidents and issues; if the problem persisted, somebody needed to take action on it. When critical incidents happened, we needed to do a postmortem and report the findings accordingly. The remediation action needed to be carried out based on the findings from SolarWinds. Lastly, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor can perform capacity management, which aids in planning for expansion.
- Monitor application services up and down
- Monitor storage capacity
- Monitor network connectivity
- Provide Active Directory Audit monitoring
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.
October 22, 2019
Meet SAM
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor provides server and application health visibility to our IT team.
- Basic website monitoring
- Windows OS
- Powershell script monitoring
- SSL cert expiration count down
- Ability to better organize groups of systems/applications
- Trending to identify outage patters (i.e. down every day at 7 PM), sort of a recommendation capability. "SAM suggestion: investigate dalw007 which goes is frequently down at 7 AM"
- AWS integration!
October 18, 2019
Electric Coop and SolarWinds
We are using SAM to monitor system services, primarily, in our environment and automate their restart when necessary. By using the software in this way, we are able to proactively address issues across all parts of our organization. As an electric utility, up time is not a goal. It is a necessity, and SAM helps us accomplish that.
- Discovers services through the wizards.
- Tracks specific application utilizations to help us pinpoint problem areas and memory leaks.
- It allows us to group like applications for easy to deploy templates.
- Native integration with Active Directory and Exchange for health monitoring.
- The drill-down menus could be more intuitive.
- Links to relevant application information. For example, lsass.exe is a Windows process but unless you're experienced, it could look like malware. Providing a link to KB or known applications could be helpful.
- More verbose explanations of criteria when setting up alerts. For example, the Active Directory monitor notifies based on specific events that occur. It could be helpful if more detail could be provided on that specific event to keep users from having to look in two or three different places for information.
October 18, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
Used to monitor network equipment.
- Good monitoring.
- Good alerting.
- Good interaction with other products.
- Upgrade policy.
- Resources required to run SolarWinds.
- Response of customer support.
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.
SAM is used for the Network, Application, Development and Server teams.
- Flexibility for alerting setup.
- Control of thresholds.
- Templates for many applications.
- .NET and O/S updates can kill SAM on the 2016 Server. I'm dealing with a case right now with support—the September 2019 updates have broken a small environment.
- Disks need GB/MB threshold alerting. % Percentage disk alerts are too inflexible for large TB/PTB volumes.
- AppInsight templates are too inflexible, there are many threads about this on Thwack, the Solarwinds User support forum. AppInsight templates cannot be copied. Many PowerShell based components are not editable, this leads to a lot of management hassles and perceived inflexibility.
- Dynamic volume discovery and management: SolarWinds does not discover new volumes so if a disk is added or the label changes, it will NOT be alerted on. People say "schedule a discovery." Nope, this is not the solution for a shop with 100 unique Windows domains, 1400 unique subnets. Auto-discovery is not the answer. Scanning daily a TON of servers with no flexibility on auto adding the volumes, this is not feasible.
- I could spend all day on here listing my feature requests and gripes, but all of them are documented in the link below.
- https://thwack.solarwinds.com/community/systems-management/server-and-application-monitor-sam/server-and-application-monitor-feature-requests
October 04, 2019
Pass on Server and Application Monitor, but definitely buy Database Performance Analyzer
SAM is being used to monitor and report outages for Windows servers, Linux server, various applications such as Tomcat on servers, and MS SQL Database Servers.
- Monitors many various applications
- Emails notices of outages
- Provides historical information to review
- Cumbersome to setup
- Database Query monitors are very restrictive and can only process number responses
- Single polling engine seems limited on how many monitors it can functionally manage before monitoring performance is affected
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.
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.
September 30, 2019
Great performance monitoring tool!
SolarWinds is being used by our department to monitor the organization. IT addresses the need to monitor devices and network traffic and does a good job.
- Monitoring support for over 600 devices in our company and the ability to create custom monitors to support any application or server. It also provides customized alerting and event triggers.
- Sometimes we have issues with it loading slowly or can't get in.
September 30, 2019
How SolarWinds helps our company be competitive
We currently use this to monitor all data access for our clients. This helps us know if there are any issues with the point-to-point circuits.
- SolarWinds provides real-time analytics for our data connections.
- SolarWinds helps us trouble shoot customers.
- SolarWinds helps us provide customer uptime and packet usage.
- SolarWinds could be more user-friendly for non-technical folks.
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 20, 2019
SolarWinds Review
Used for monitoring the network and getting us advanced notice of outages and issues.
- Monitor systems for uptime.
- Monitor network connectivity and getting notices that the backup is in use.
- Specific port monitoring for traffic analyses.
- Dependencies are not easy to configure.
- Make sure that only one salesperson is sending messages. I hate notices from multiple people about the same thing.
- The graphical interface could use a facelift.
September 17, 2019
Efficient Data Monitor
Using SolarWinds to monitor the database performance. This is being used across the organization for all the domains. It has the scope to also monitor performance over the cloud platform.
- Easy to identify the issues and pin point the root cause for the issue.
- The analyzer has the ability to identify the most impacted queries that need to be optimized.
- Monitors multiple instances of the databases simultaneously.
- Some of the data display visuals are too complicated and outdated.
- Version upgrades are more complicated than it should be.
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 29, 2019
Very new to SolarWinds
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use SolarWindsServer & Application Monitor for a subset of systems in our company, mainly the systems our department supports. It enables us to monitor and manage our resources so we can proactively address issues and prevent downtime.
- Provides near real-time email alerts
- Collects information into a single dashboard
- Extremely customizable
- Look and feel can differ from screen to screen in the web portal
- Software upgrades can be tedious
- Heavy support reliance on user community (THWACK) can sometimes be frustrating
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.
We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to watch and alert on critical applications in our organization, as well as server hardware.
- Out of box templates for common applications cover a number of the applications we use. Can easily create custom templates for our more unusual applications.
- Integration with other parts of the Orion suite for better correlation of different items and dependencies.
- The out-of-box support for some of the Dell hardware could be stronger; especially around storage.
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