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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

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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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a versatile tool that has been widely used across various industries and departments for …
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True Insight

10 out of 10
January 27, 2022
Incentivized
I use SolarWinds Server Application Monitor to monitor my infrastructure as well as applications within that environment. It provides a …
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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

View all 12 features
  • Server availability and performance monitoring (269)
    9.8
    98%
  • Application monitoring (266)
    9.0
    90%
  • Threshold alerts (271)
    8.9
    89%
  • Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications (256)
    7.9
    79%
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Pricing

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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.

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

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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.

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Features

Application Performance Management

Application performance management software monitors software to ensure performance and availability

8.7
Avg 7.6
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Product Details

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

Screenshot of Multi-vendor application performance monitoringScreenshot of Multi-vendor server monitoringScreenshot of Application dependency mapping with AppStackâ„¢ dashboardScreenshot of Microsoft Exchange performance monitoring with AppInsightâ„¢ templateScreenshot of Microsoft IIS performance monitoring with AppInsightâ„¢ templateScreenshot of Server hardware health monitoringScreenshot of Built-in virtualization monitoring for VMware and Hyper-V environmentsScreenshot of Easily extend monitoring to any custom or home-grown application

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...
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Watch SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Training Videos

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Competitors

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish

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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Comparisons

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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!

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

(226-250 of 278)
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Stephen Swan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our IT department was looking for a monitoring tool to proactively address issues before they were encountered by the customer. Issues easily cropped up as a result of regular maintenance and would quickly be noticed by customers because checks were not done afterwards. We have been able to use SAM to check key services and applications for availability. This has also allowed us to track system uptime and keep better inventory of the monitored software and systems.
  • Powershell. We use this as a key tool to make sure software (both custom and delivered) is up and working correctly. Microsoft has standardized on this for the foreseeable future and Solarwinds does a great job using this tool set.
  • Stack monitoring. It has always been extremely difficult to find the source of a problem. Combining SAM with their other products really provides an amazing insight in correlating a perceived issue with its ultimate cause.
  • Community/Support. While SAM is a great tool, it is the people that really drive this product. Both support and customers are very responsive and excited to help out.
  • Learning Curve. SAM (and other solarwinds products) take a lot of time to learn how to make everything work well. Management can become frustrated with the perceived lack of progress. Solarwinds has recently made efforts to improve this with their Customer Success Center.
  • Reporting. The reporting tool is ok for some basic table reports but lacks a lot in comparison with reporting services.
  • Default dashboards. While custom dashboards can be awesome tools, the default ones are overwhelming in detail and underwhelming in looks. There is are also difficulties in creating great looking dashboards.
SAM is great in monitoring servers and anything running on them. Setting up alerts is straightforward and dynamic enough for any situation. Getting an initial start on monitoring basic SMTP/WMI services is very easy and provides impressive results very quickly. I could see any company finding great value in this software.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used to actively monitor and appropriately alert on servers and applications in our organization. The robust feature set allowed for granular level detail of the servers and applications. This allowed us to create reports on server status as well as better plan for future requirements in capacity. There is also a good level of alerting available on CPU, Memory and disk space as well as application variables.
  • Granular level of detail about servers
  • Robust reporting
  • Alerting on CPU, Memory, Disk.
  • Getting set up took a bit of work.
  • Installing the agent on all of our servers for best availability of information
Infrastructure and application monitoring to best understand your current environment and plan for the future. The feature set is robust and allowed for a granular level of detail about your servers. The reporting was easily accessible. The alert generation allowed us to monitor CPU, Memory and Disk.
Joshua Smith | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Several departments at my employer use SAM for our application monitoring needs. The best thing about SAM, much like other SW tools, is it's integrated with other SW products. SAM works flawlessly with NPM for server maintenance and monitoring. We are able to quickly address software failures via alerts and reports.
  • Alerts software failures
  • Integrated with NPM
  • Integration also allows event history
  • SAM is customizable, almost too much
  • SW relies on it's customer base for direction (too heavily)
  • SAM needs a little too much customization at times
Any environment where monitoring software is a necessity, could possibly benefit from SAM. Quickly address failures and diagnose events via NPM and SAM. Even if nobody is at the helm watching for failures, SAM/NPM can email alerts so that nothing falls through the cracks. Resource monitoring via NPM can also work with SAM to assist in diagnosis.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds to monitor our servers and network infrastructure. It is only used by our IT department. We are able to have a tool to monitor servers every hour of every day without needing to have a dedicated resource to babysit these devices.
  • SolarWinds has a great dashboard interface. The ability to modify the dashboard and add data per user is excellent.
  • Getting detailed event logs is outstanding for troubleshooting. Being able to use the Message Center to gather Events, Alerts, Syslog, Traps and Audit Events is a great resource.
  • The way the tool is organized to display network, application, and server data separately really helps. Top 10 lists are extremely helpful to pinpoint issues during troubleshooting.
  • I would like an easier way to provide SMS messages through a web-based service or other offering.
  • The mobile application is decent but could benefit from an update.
If you are needing to monitor all of your network devices and server, this is one of the best tools out there. I've used Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, Manage Engine OpManager, Splunk, and Nagios. While SolarWinds is a bit more money than some of these when you have a large number of devices, it's the most powerful out of all that I've used.
Dan Lepinski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We primarily use Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) to monitor our Windows Internet Information Services servers across our entire infrastructure. It allows us to alert on down applications, specifically IIS for us, so that our on-call team can ensure the least amount of downtime for our web servers. The down alert will specifically show which servers are having issues, and for how long.
  • Monitors applications. It lets you know when something is down, at what time, and when it came back up.
  • Strong custom community templates. For those of us that aren't as tech savvy, the community offerings are very helpful in getting the best from SAM.
  • You can create dashboards to monitor your most important applications.
  • The process is very manual. It takes a little time to learn, and remember how you did it the first time.
  • Navigation is confusing the first number of times as well. Trying to get back to where you started can be a pain. It's not 100% clear what you're doing at times, until you've done it a few times.
  • Creating your first dashboards can be a bit daunting at first. This is pretty typical of anything I've used from SolarWinds.
If you have a large infrastructure it can be nearly impossible to keep track of everything. Sometimes that's the case even with small/medium sized systems. A properly configured SAM can take the task of watching your servers like a hawk off your shoulders. It's very reliable, and let's you know when it sees a problem. It allows your team to focus on the thousand other tasks your team has to work on.
Elena Goryainova | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
This software is mainly used by Infrastructure department but DBAs are occasionally using it when we need to see the full picture of the server performance.
  • Monitors apps
  • Send alerts when thresholds are exceeded or apps go down
  • Provides useful customizable dashboards
  • Highlights most important issues
  • More customizable application monitoring
Solar Winds Server and Application Monitor is very useful for multi-server environments as it can monitor and group them. Also it is very useful in conjunctions with SolarWinds DPA (available through integration of two) which shows the complete state of the database server performance.
Paul Cardelli, CISSP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We were using it to monitor servers and systems across the organization, but mainly in the IT department.
  • Monitors application health
  • Create customize monitors to monitor status on just about any service
  • Useful dashboards, that assist with troubleshooting and integrate well with Solarwind's other modules.
  • Licensing based on the monitors used instead of the application can make this solution seem a bit limited. For example monitoring all your exchange servers services could easily eat up a number of these licenses quick. So recommend counting each critical service that supports your application.
If you're already a Solarwinds customer, or you are looking at using Solarwinds to monitor your network then Server Application Monitor is perfect for you. You may have other existing systems that can do similar things, but the integration with Solarwinds other products makes this a one stop shop for all application monitoring and troubleshooting needs.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used to monitor both Windows and Linux systems for up/down status and any application errors by our IT department.
  • Notification of disk space usage.
  • Historical cpu/memory usage.
  • Application/server grouping.
  • Alert setup. Email notifications.
  • Ability to use some other functions without needing more modules/products.
  • Ease of setup.
For basic single pain of glass view of your environment it works well. Also works for reviewing of resource usage.
Alex Gouskos | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to monitor our servers and application for issues. SolarWinds is used to monitor general server availability as well as response times. We have created monitors that also monitor free space as well as application availability and CPU load.
  • SolarWinds monitors CPU thresholds well.
  • SolarWinds monitors application thresholds well.
  • SolarWinds monitors application availability well.
  • Setting up the monitors for the first time can be a little tricky.
  • Setting up the monitors requires direct access to the server hosting the application. It would be nice to be able to do that from the webpage.
SolarWinds is suited for a small organization or an organization with plenty of resources. SolarWinds is very heavy on memory and CPU so you need a good machine to handle the load. Licensing can be expensive as it is required on every component of a monitor (CPU, memory, NIC, HDD).
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We implemented SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor as part of our monitoring suite. We are using it to verify the availability of our hosted services and generate alerts feeding to our on call analyst. This allows us to see issues before the users tell us.
It also provides valuable insight into resource constraints and potential hardware issues within our highly virtual server environment.
  • It provides a great way to monitor a complex multi-server application to see a view of the whole system, then drilling down on any pain points to find the root causes.
  • It integrates well with other SolarWinds products. Use this to build a help desk or executive level view of your environment so that they can see any issues before pages and escalations start flying.
  • Having all the monitoring in one easy to use view makes it easy for other teams to check on current issues and how they might be impacted. My favourite example is users are not able to access the network suddenly and helpdesk says they not getting an IP address. The ticket goes to the network team of course. One quick look and you can tell the server handing out DHCP addresses is down. This just saved an hour of troubleshooting why your router isn't passing the DHCP requests along like it should.
  • The report writer on through the GUI is still missing some features and logging into the server console to use Report Writer is not always handy for a quick once-off report.
  • Building some more intelligence into the "Map" creation tools would be nice. For example, something that could tie into Visio so that you only have to add items to the system diagrams once, then just tie them together in SolarWinds with Tags or something else.
  • Make Thwack (the user community for Solar Winds) even more awesome.
  • Just joking. It's already 110% awesome.
N/A
March 23, 2016

LunarTides review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor our server uptime and to keep track of our network closets. Whenever one of our servers goes down SolarWinds alerts us so that we can address the issue. The Network tab allows us to keep track of the status and health of our Cisco network blades and the configuration of each port. The Application tab allows us to keep track of our different virtual servers and alerts us when a critical component goes bad. The IP Addresses tab allows us to see who is logged in under what IP address and which ones are being used and what is available.
  • The details that the IP Address application gives back are helpful in finding what user is or has used an IP address.
  • At this moment in time I have not found any areas that they can improve on.
SolarWinds should be used in companies and businesses where there is a heavy need for network maintenance.
March 18, 2016

SAM Review

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our organization is using SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) to keep track of our SQL Server/processes to see who and what is using the most data.
  • Manages SQL Processes
  • Manages server health/performance
  • Helps to minimize downtime for applications
  • Alerts for application errors
  • I think it could stand to be easier to configure. Currently it seems you need to do quite a bit of research to set it up.
It is well suited in any server environment. I could see where it would be less useful in a smaller production environment.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it to monitor our internal infrastructure's overall health. We have set up notifications with it so it can give us up to date information on resource usage on all our server and networking equipment.
  • Email notifications
  • Broad view of the infrastructure
  • Lots of information that it provides
  • Ease of connecting with our environment
  • Good support by SolarWinds
  • Sometimes a bit TOO much information
  • UI can be overwhelming at first glance
When you have a lot of devices and a small IT team, it allows for quick information.
chris ickles | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Used with IT primarily. Used to monitor switch and router infrastructure as well as server farms. Used to alert on down equipment or critical issues.
  • SAM provides trending for how servers and applications are used. With this information, we can scale used systems more effectively and target our primary services.
  • Enhanced reporting on application Quality of Experience. For Example, tied with netflow data, which ip groups experience best/worst User experience.
SAM is well suited in any IT shop for server and application monitoring.
Steve Curtis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Being a small IT group for our department within the university, we utilize SAM to monitor our departmental servers and applications. This allows our team to focus on projects and tasks for our staff, and insure that we will be alerted to performance issues or outages before our end users are impacted and/or to insure that their issues are resolved quickly.
We are alerted on a range of items, from complete server outages to a single SQL database's excessive fragmentation. We also use the statistics from the collected data to determine how we can improve application performance and the end user's experience.
  • SAM can dig deep into the applications to provide a wealth of information and immediate feedback on the items it is monitoring.
  • We can get a bird's eye view of our environment from the out of the box dashboards, with easily identifiable health indicators showing the state of servers and applications, services, connection attempts, and even the amount of network traffic to individual websites.
  • In depth details on our SQL environments allows the team to view the status of the server and databases, but also give detailed information on each component and offer suggestions on how to resolve the issues that we may be facing.
  • Each implementation of SAM is going to be different, and requires customization to correct alert on the environment it is monitoring. I would like to see some better probing and questions pertaining to our environment when installing that would help the refining of the thresholds and alerts on those thresholds. With that said, I think this is a difficult task for Solarwinds to provide, but it would be a huge selling point.
  • Many of the out of the box dashboards are helpful. We also like the intelligent discovery of the applications.
  • I have received a great deal of sales calls from the Solarwinds sales team in the past. It has slowed down recently, so maybe that trend will continue.
Solarwinds can be resource intensive to install, update and manage. It can be helpful for any size organization but you should give it enough dedicated resources to perform well, and there is some administrative upkeep to consider. The software can be a simple tool to monitor servers and apps, or a full time job that requires a Solarwinds administrator to manage for that large organization.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used globally to monitor servers in more than 5 data centers. It is very flexible and provides tons of templates. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is very flexible and uses great logic. Its implementation and deployment are very straightforward and easy to complete.
  • Windows Servers
  • Linux Servers
  • Database Servers
  • Domain Controllers
  • Web Servers
  • Data warehousing
It is very simple to set up and use. There is great support behind the product. We are always getting updates with new and powerful features. So the software is always on the cutting edge.
Edmund Tienzo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have 540+ stores around United States. Across the whole organization, we use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor the network status of each location including every server that we use for IT operations. It has been a helpful tool for us to support every end-user as we have a full visibility of the network and server status in our company network.
  • Linux & Windows Servers
  • Cisco ASA firewalls
  • VMware servers
  • Adding port security monitoring
Yes, it is really well suited to be used by any organizations which has an IT infrastructure to be monitored and maintained.
March 11, 2016

Solid Monitoring Tool

Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use it in the IT department to monitor application status. We use it to provide proactive alerting and monitoring for our critical applications. In the future we plan to use it to justify new hardware purchases based off of the trending and modeling that SAM allows us to do very easily.
  • It has very granular controls.
  • The UI is fairly intuitive.
  • It is very easy to implement.
  • The custom poller feature gives you incredible customization.
  • The licensing is prohibitive.
  • Selecting one SolarWinds pre-defined monitor (Like AD monitor) can consume over 100 licenses.
  • The license structure is confusing.
  • Product documentation could be structured with more flow.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a good general tool for trending, monitoring, and alerting. The licensing gets confusing when you start to monitor many applications, but everything else is very straight forward and customizable. It's probably best suited for general environments that don't employ developers. It's a good out of box solution.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our company utilizes SolarWinds SAM software to visualize what end users are experiencing; from time to complete tasks, to server process monitoring the SolarWinds SAM software manages our entire server infrastructure. We have tried other products in the past but the SolarWinds SAM pays for itself in configuration/installation time alone. The preconfigured options covered all the servers we have on our network.
  • Monitor the time it takes for users to perform a process.
  • Server and Application monitor does a great job at managing DHCP servers and all their many processes.
  • Solarwinds SAM does a great job at monitoring windows services.
  • Alerting being built into the web interface.
  • Reporting engine being built in.
Solarwinds is a great product for any environment with critical servers that require more than simple ping monitoring. If you have a process to monitor, Solarwinds is the company for it!
David Asher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you have used this product, SAM, you would know that it is a value add for a business and a great time saver for all. Setting up alerting for a down node, failed hardware, environmental fluctuation and many more options makes for peace of mind.

Our deployment is being used by many departments across most of our business.

SAM addresses the need to know. Knowing that your infrastructure is up and running and can be addressed at a moments' notice is peace of mind. The product pays for itself buy catching problems before they become a problem.
  • Alerting off of anything is done very well. You can make a simple alert or you can make them as complicated as you want.
  • It monitors port, and can alert on, throughput, response time, and packet loss just to name a few.
  • It gives a rolling list of events for the network.
  • I have nothing here. SolarWinds usually addresses anything needed.
SolarWinds Server & Application (SAM) is not suitable for a very small mom and pop shop.
Brent Lyle | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I am using it to monitor exchange, SQL, and basic information on windows servers. It lets me know of high-level problems sooner than the users report them. At a previous employer, we had the CA APM product. We were never able to get it configured correctly for monitoring. However, the spectrum and eHealth products were configured and working.
  • Easy to configure
  • Single pane of glass because you can monitor network, vm, and storage as well
  • Easy to use
  • The product is not very detailed in monitoring application specifics such as exchange, IIS, SQL, etc.
  • The technical support is lacking when you have a problem. Currently, the exchange insight is not monitoring correctly.
  • I would like to see it make a direct connection to a node and the application that lives on it. For example, exchange applications problems do not turn the nodes red or yellow or create notifications on the node itself.
  • I also do not like how you have to pay for node licenses so it becomes very expensive to try to monitor your environment especially if you are a smaller shop.
If you are wanting high-level at a glance information, it is good for that.
Michael Aguirre | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We used SAM specifically for our SQL Server 2012 and Exchange 2010 and IIS 7. Our IT department monitors a proprietary CRM and web portals that we needed to keep an eye on for 24/7 monitoring and 100% uptime. The Exchange monitoring was just a plus.
  • SQL server monitoring was probably the best use for SAM, although there are other products that get into further detail. SAM basically gives us the confidence to be sure that the source of a bottleneck or error is not hardware or configuration related, but instead a possible code or efficiency issue.
  • Exchange 2010 monitoring is a little difficult through the management console, so SAM provides that extra layer of monitoring that shows what applications are failing, when the management console doesn't load. This can only be done otherwise through advanced powershell scripting.
  • We've seen products that provide that extra level of monitoring that the SQL server monitoring wasn't capable of. However, the cost of solutions like Idera are very high in comparison to what you are getting with SAM.
If you are looking for advanced efficiency monitoring to the procedural level in SQL, i recommend looking elsewhere.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilize SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor various thresholds of our infrastructure and to send the appropriate alert(s) when those defined thresholds have been exceeded. It has given us a "preemptive" ability to avoid disastrous results.
  • A disk was getting full on my log server and I was able to remediate it before it became worse.
  • My memory was getting overtaxed and I found that one of the DIMMs was bad...
  • Make recommendations after doing a discovery of your devices/network.
To me, it is more suited for mid to large sized companies.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use SolarWinds SAM to monitor company-wide mission critical systems from both an up/down perspective as well as performance and response time. I have created many flexible, custom monitoring template to detect potential issues with systems such as Microsoft SQL server, MS Exchange, SAP, and our manufacturing and EDI systems.
It has become a critical tool for improving our responsiveness company-wide to existing issues as well as helping us to predict if there are potential issues that may arise, and allows us to react to problems very quickly with minimal to no perceived impacts to our end users.
  • Instant problem identification
  • Ability to easily and fully customize monitored components
  • Gain insight into user application experience issues such as slow response times
  • Occasional false positive results
  • Quite expensive, as each monitored component (service/parameter) uses 1 license
SolarWinds SAM does an excellent job monitoring any network-joined device that supports WMI or SNMP. It can also monitor TCP port availability using telnet, HTTP(S), FTP among others. It is very well suited to any environment where immediate action is required when an issue is detected, and since polling times are set manually, the detection frequency can be as narrow as needed.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is primarily used by the IT department to monitor performance and availability of servers and applications. We often use it to monitor external web site performance form venders providing us hosted services. It assists us in planning for future resources.
  • We configure SAM to monitor external web sites for http response. This is particularly valuable when there are hosted service performance issues. SAM allows us to show the vendor their site performance from our perspective.
  • We get one tab click to see SQL Server performance and health and a table with the top most expensive queries. Since the exact query is presented we can hand this off to the database administrator or developer for review and remediation.
  • Grouping allows us to place all assets related to a particular function in a single unit to get a quick one button click of high level health of that asset.
  • Single pane integration with NPM and NCM is extremely helpful!
  • Assigning application monitors is confusing, the organization of application monitors is inconsistent. Do I want "web server" or "IIS".
  • Appinsight is a convenient way to assign SAM monitoring but expensive since it takes 50 licenses.
It is great for application and protocol monitoring (like http) but if you just want NIC monitoring then NPM is a more appropriate product.
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