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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.
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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%
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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.
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.solarwinds.com/products/pric…
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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).
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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!
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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
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August 21, 2019
Great for an out of box experience.
It's used across the whole organization. We use it to monitor a number of applications and send out alert info/application information to application/support teams.
- Easy to use templates for out of box alerting.
- Easy to integrate and add nodes to monitor.
- Great for identifying issues and remediating.
- Support from Vendor sometimes is lacking.
- Some variables have gone missing in updates and lack of knowledge training for those.
- We would like more integrated application monitoring out of box experiences or ease of use for following community projects.
August 16, 2019
SolarWinds Server and Application Review
We currently utilize SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to watch the health of our server farm and monitor the critical services that support the applications running on them.
- SolarWinds does a great job of alerting us to issues we can address before the end-user experiences any issues.
- The setup and configuration are straightforward and not as time-consuming as other monitoring tools we have worked with.
- The ability to monitor critical services supporting our applications allows us to easily verify the applications are up and running following a server reboot.
- It is difficult to re-add a node to be monitored after deletion.
- It is occasionally difficult to ascertain whether monitoring is occurring or behaving correctly. Enhanced "monitor the monitor" functionality would be helpful.
- Upgrades can be difficult in large environments with several workflows in use.
August 08, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
Hi, I am using Solarwinds DPA for the past 1 year in our environment, which is an excellent tool to monitor the database health checks. I would more learn on how could we able to analyze and understand more on Deadlocks and historical information about resource details and deep analysis on the same.
We are using it to monitor the SQL servers.
We are using it to monitor the SQL servers.
- Excellent tool to monitor the database health checks.
- I would like to learn how could we able to analyze and understand more on Deadlocks and historical information about resource details and deep analysis on the same.
August 07, 2019
SolarWinds SAM. Valued and cost effective monitoring.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is used extensively within our IT Department. It is an integral part of our NOC and is a portal for all our different IT teams to access their monitored infrastructure. SAM is used to monitor all of our SQL databases, IIS sites, SSL Certificates, and many of our home-grown custom applications. SAM is a very versatile tool that allows us to monitor nearly any element in our environment.
- Custom Monitoring support with Powershell, VBScript, Bash SSH as examples
- Out of the box monitors for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, and IIS are very extensive
- SAM is a module of the SolarWinds Orion suite, integration is seamless with the other modules in the suite
- Easy to use dashboards and custom GUI configuration
- Integrated full monitoring of event logs. Log monitoring is available but it is limited to searching for specific error codes. Full event log monitoring requires another module purchase.
- Better End User Experience Monitoring would be appreciated. Integrate WPM (Web and Performance Monitor) into SAM as a single unit.
- Enhance Azure Cloud monitoring support. Some cloud monitoring is supported but we would like much more investment in this category. Custom Proprieties and better API support to get all cloud asset information.
August 07, 2019
Great for small and medium-size data centers
Did a POC using it to monitor some of our mission-critical applications and servers. Helped reduce response time to outages.
- Set up is quick and easy.
- Lots of included application and infra templates.
- AppStack infrastructure mapping feature is cool.
- Not really for huge environments.
- Upgrades are a hassle and are VERY time consuming.
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.
August 03, 2019
Save time and money with SAM!
We use SAM to monitor all infrastructures within our organization. Database servers, email servers, file servers, etc. and mainly for Windows deployments.
- It's very helpful for identifying DBA type issues before they become a larger problem (SQL Server).
- It's flexible, and the sensors work with many different platforms.
- It's straightforward to set up and deploy.
- It's not necessarily a bad thing, but there is an overload of information once you deploy, so it can be overwhelming to know where to start.
August 02, 2019
SolarWINS (Solarwinds) allows us to be more efficient
We’re using it across the whole company. We use it to monitor AD, services for business applications, and services for web servers. It allows us to identify failed services for our business applications. It also allows us to see monitor AD replication and DHCP address allocation. It also tracks if our websites are up or down.
- It is a quick and easy install
- Easy to monitor built-in Windows services
- Gives the ability to monitor custom services
- Ties seamlessly with the rest of the Orion platform
- Basic monitoring requires many licenses
- Alerting and monitoring can be very chatty
- Lots of configuration is required to reduce false-positives
July 30, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
We use it to monitor all our servers and network infrastructures like IIS, Exchange, Active Directory, and VOIP.
- Customizable alerts
- Scalability
- Very good UI
- Excellent community
- Speed up web server
- More templates
- More examples for configurations
July 27, 2019
Not what you hoped for
It allows for the monitoring of our network and addresses issues without user reporting.
- Switches off line during various construction phases.
- Ability to monitor just about anything on the network with an IP address.
- The ability to make heat maps to see your wifi network.
- Tracking devices that use DHCP addressing needs a lot of improvement.
- Network atlas needs a face lift and stability needs to be addressed.
July 20, 2019
Does exactly what you need it to!
SolarWinds is being used internally to monitor the health of our servers. We use it to monitor both the services being provided by these machines as well as the status of the machines themselves. It is an early warning tool in our enterprise that allows the team to fix minor issues before they turn into larger problems.
- Classification of data and default displays.
- Datacenter dashboard.
- Remotely restart services that have failed.
- Non Microsoft SQL support (On Prem).
- Lack of in-program recommendations. (This option is performance heavy).
- Appliances for VMware.
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.
June 26, 2019
SolarWinds alerts and monitoring.
I have been using SolarWinds since I started working. I started with a company of 100 employees and my current company has more than 3000 employees. SolarWinds works just perfect. It works the same as for small network as a larger network.
- Reports and alerts
- IP SLA
- Config push from SolarWinds Orion.
- Netflow/SFlow can improvise.
- The scripting for reports
- Nodes and its related object specification
SolarWinds Server and Application monitor is used by the Information Technology Department at our organization. It is used to log and report on issues with various applications in use at our organization. SolarWinds Server and Application monitor also helps the Technology Team troubleshoot and resolve issues with various applications that are being monitored.
- Easy of installation and configuration
- Great logging capabilities
- Makes troubleshooting application related issues simpler
- Trial and error is required to get the right logging template.
- Standard template needs customization to remove alerts that are not relevant to your organization (for example, the Active Directory Template includes DNS. If you have a separate DNS appliance and you don't remove this alert, the system thinks DNS is down)
June 11, 2019
SAM I am, that SAM I am, I DO like full-stack monitoring from SolarWinds Orion with SAM!
With an enterprise-wide implementation, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor provides a diversity of solution options. A veritable Swiss Army knife of solutions, the out-of-the-box monitors provide a quick time-to-value proposition for Linux, Windows, and application monitoring, while the custom monitoring covers everything in between. URL monitoring? No problem. Custom script to monitor some unique value? No problem. Port monitoring? Yup. It is not an APM tool (this isn't for code-level monitoring, REUM, etc.) but it does fit a very nice gap in an organization looking to have a single platform that can solve a variety of problems, both known and unknown at the time of purchase.
- Extremely short time-to-value with out-of-the-box monitors.
- Shared data model with other SolarWinds Orion-based products makes complex alerting a breeze.
- Custom scripts on both Windows and Linux make your imagination (or business need!) the only limit.
- SNMP monitors: you can do it quite easily, but it is for a single value and you can't transform the data.
- Custom properties on templates: you can assign custom properties once the template is applied (a monitor) but not to the template itself.
- "Salt to taste": reminding users that the out-of-the-box templates are examples NOT best practice and that they should "salt to taste."
June 05, 2019
Now starting off on the SolarWinds path
It is being used across our IT organization for monitoring and predictive alerting. SolarWind's products, along with other products, are integrated into many different areas to help us manage network configuration management, application, and server monitoring.
- Network configuration management.
- Server monitoring.
- Predictive analysis.
- Out of the box monitoring structure example.
- Process best practices would be helpful to get more use of the vast capabilities.
May 25, 2019
A Concise view of SolarWinds SAM
The IT Dept. uses it to monitor the IT infrastructure. It addresses the lack of real-time monitoring and notification in core systems/software.
- Provides notification of service\system faults.
- Provides system performance metrics.
- Provides in-depth analytical data for troubleshooting.
- The reporting interface needs more Crystal/MsSQL SSRS like report building tools.
- Better ability to narrow down multiples of same name services (possibly by root service id) on systems like web servers.
- Cleaner Setup/Upgrade processes, and containerized (docker) setups would be great.
May 18, 2019
SolarWinds provides seamless discovery
It is being used across the organization. We have offices in US, UK, Singapore, and Dubai. SolarWinds helps us monitor the servers in all these locations and gives us early warnings of issues.
- We are able to dial in on services that are important to us on specific servers and monitor if these services are running, and should they go down, SolarWinds can be configured to restart the services. This is a great help if this type of issue occurs during off hours.
- I don't believe we are experiencing any issues or lack of functionality at this time.
May 18, 2019
Solarwinds: The Pro's and Con's
We monitor all of our network devices and all of our servers. We use it to get notified of issues.
- Allows us to stay on top of issues, such as drive space issues.
- We can monitor power outages and see when stores go down by monitoring the network equipment.
- Able to see when applications have issues.
- When you upgrade, certain applications are not as quick to reconfigure.
I purchased it to monitor critical systems for failure. It does a good job of flagging some critical items for us.
- Tells you when a web service goes down.
- Tells you when a threshold has been exceeded.
- You can get very granular in the settings.
- It wants to auto-add everything. It's so annoying to add new machines and make sure it doesn't use SAM.
- It's way too expensive to monitor all but the most critical things. You can burn all the sensors for the lowest tier on one server.
We use SAM to monitor and alert on the health of our Windows servers as well as applications such as Exchange, SQL, IIS and SharePoint. We also write custom monitors for third party software. We monitor servers across all of our locations and data centers. Adding SAM to NPM gave us the level of detail to identify issues before they became serious enough to take the entire server or application down. SAM was critical to our strategy of becoming a more proactive department instead of reactive.
- SAM provides built in templates for monitoring common applications.
- SAM provides a framework to easily write custom monitors for third party applications.
- For built in templates SAM gives guidance for what an alert means and often how to resolve it.
- I believe the pricing of SAM is a bit on the high side.
May 15, 2019
Infrastructure monitoring
Solarwinds is being utilized by our IT department. Both Infrastructure and Application owners use the application. It addresses several areas of concern for us. The most addressed issue that it serves is up/down of server and networking gear as well as CPU and memory utilization across 4 data-centers. Also, we have replaced a couple of other monitoring solutions with Solarwinds product. The latest utilized Solarwind product is WPM.
- Up/Down alerts, memory, and CPU utilization alerting.
- Ease of use.
- Hardware monitoring.
- Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect and Chassis monitoring.
- Alert testing to see which servers would be impacted.
- No additional ability to have monitors based on scripts.
May 15, 2019
Great for a lean IT Team!
We are using it across the organization to manage both our physical and virtual environments. It helps us identify which servers need additional resources or are performing below are established benchmarks.
- Within the VM environment, we are able to highlight when resources are becoming obsolete and we can reallocate the physical resources to the virtual environment.
- It provides metrics to see which applications are being accessed and by whom to provide a better ROI picture as well as internal billing.
- SolarWinds as a whole can still be a resource hog so getting it to operate the way we wanted took some trial and error.
May 13, 2019
Good Product needs to think of future
We are using it across the whole organization on the different servers we have, both on-premise and in the cloud. We use it to gain metrics about how our applications are running.
- It has been tested in the field and has a lot of modules that work well with different applications.
- It can be pretty easy to set up.
- The interface will seem old if it doesn't get an overhaul that allows for more customization.
- It can be tricky to figure out where everything is.
We use SolarWinds to monitor our whole company infrastructure. We currently have over 200 nodes being monitored, around 300 components monitored with SAM, and around 500 components monitored with NPM. It regularly helps me identify performance issues as well as faults in both hardware and application levels.
- Easy to use.
- Super flexible and customizable as far as alerting and reporting.
- A small footprint.
- I cannot customize license levels.
- It's expensive.
- It takes support a long time to get back to you.