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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)
    9.0
    90%
  • 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

(650)

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

(26-50 of 278)
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Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used by the IT Infrastructure team to monitor servers and services that sit on an IBMi and Windows platforms. It allows us to monitor a number of critical services where we receive notifications when critical services go offline or if thresholds are met that will indicate a problem needs to be addressed. It is a critical tool we use in order to monitor, identify and prevent serious issues from occurring.
  • Identify and monitor critical services on an IBMi platform.
  • Identify and monitor critical services on a Windows Server Platform.
  • Set thresholds to provide notifications where necessary to address serious issues before it hampers the operation.
  • Provide usage reports and other data that can be useful for forming IT Strategy.
  • Support aspect of the operation could be better in terms of assisting new customers to get up and running quickly.
  • Some of the options can be simplified, broken up into simple vs. advanced properties.
  • More access to knowledge is always useful whether that is a knowledge hub or easy access to support engineers for guidance with specific requests.
-AS400 / IBMi Environments to monitor services and key metrics such as resource utilization and service status
- Windows Server environments to monitor services and key metrics and receive alerts for critical events.
- Reporting & IT Strategy Planning
- To be able to get a snapshot of your infrastructure and identify areas for improvement
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is currently used and administered in the IT department.
It is very useful to be able to detect any type of problem, from very small to [large] problems that can cause severity in any department of the entire company.
  • Logs and Event monitor
  • Sql user experience
  • Oracle User exprience
  • TCP port monitor
  • Multiple Statistic
  • Sybase integration
  • None
I can only mention positive scenarios. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is used for many types of monitoring and to be able to act quickly on the problems that are detected, for example monitoring a transactional table of some product and through SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to be validating that there are no errors or denials.
April 10, 2021

Monitor Expert

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is used to monitor and manage the information technology infrastructure of our organization. Therefore, it is actually installed as an agent on all server layers.

The biggest business problem it helps us is that it enables us to continuously run our system with the data coming from SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor.
  • Easily view everything you want with templates.
  • Installing agents is very easy.
  • Easy to generate reports.
  • Automatically discover systems environment and after start monitoring instantly.
  • Sometimes it gets slow when I want to login.
  • Sometimes you can make it difficult to configure.
Our servers and applications must work continuously, according to the 24/7 rule. Depending on the size of our information systems infrastructure, the number of our experienced personnel in this field is not sufficient. For this reason, we take advantage of the experience SolarWinds has developed over the years, and we benefit from the workload from time to time by being informed through alerts only when there is a problem.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor] is used to monitor the status of our operational technology platform used by production critical systems. It operates behind a firewall without internet connectivity and we use it to notify of issues with our VMware cluster, windows server VMs, and physical windows workstations. It also tracks the status of services at a basic level (eg IIS website up or down). It is capable of more advanced monitoring and analysis but we haven't used those features in great detail yet.
It does work well, however can be a little noisy with email alerts if you don't put some effort into tuning resource thresholds for VMs especially.
  • The dashboard is easy to use and very informative
  • Notifications are customisable
  • Setting up polling is easy without the need for agents on each system
  • Polling agents are useful for cross firewall applications and scalability
  • Alerting and setting thresholds can be difficult to ensure you aren't notified spuriously
  • Documentation on remote access permissions and tight firewall rules was a little hard to find. Some example group policies would have been helpful to allow monitoring without compromising security
  • The online update feature, where you use the system to deploy updates to other polling agents etc never worked for us, potentially because our system is quite locked down. We had to use the offline manual installer and the process wasn't as smooth as you would want
[SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor] is too much for small systems, it is best suited to medium or large deployments. It does a good job at monitoring infrastructure and the status of standard services like databases and IIS. If you want to monitor bespoke or custom applications it may be able to do so but likely in a limited way. We would like it to monitor or control system and historian statuses but are not sure if it can or would be worth the effort.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is used to provide us up-to-date information on the performance of our applications hosted on virtual servers. It's most useful to give all users visibility to critical health monitoring where Linux may not necessarily be their strength. Having a single pane of glass to track health makes troubleshooting issues quick and easy!
  • Flexible
  • Easy to use interface
  • Large product monitoring scope
  • Cost somewhat high
  • Scalable licensing could be better
  • Upgrades can be painful
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is well suited to applications that are hosted across a bunch of machines, virtual or otherwise. It really does help by providing a single place where we can monitor everything at once. It's easy to identify when issues come up, and integrates well with the existing SolarWinds' ecosystem.
Joe Parlett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is used to identify poor performing SQL servers and SQL processes.
  • High wait time.
  • Long running queries.
  • Poorly designed SQL tables and code
  • It is not simple to navigate.
  • The user interface takes a while to get familiar with.
For SQL monitoring it does a good job but I am an experienced SQL developer and you need that experience to understand what it finds.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor module is used across our entire infrastructure. It gives visibility into a lot of data and issues across the organization.
  • SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor was able to give info on certs that are going to expire, which helped us renew before they caused an outage.
  • SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor module gave us insights into resource utilization for multiple servers due to which the debugging and fixing of issues was very easy.
  • Alerting is broken for us. When we asked about it, we were told it is a bug and to upgrade our SolarWinds. It is a very huge upgrade. We didn't even get a workaround.
  • Support is sometimes very slow.
I haven't seen any other tool capable of monitoring certificate expiry like SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor. It is suited for infrastructure monitoring but it is absolutely useless to monitor application performance.
Nikhil Kumar Sharma | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor for our customers Server and Application Infrastructure monitoring such as Windows, Linux, Unix, AIX server infra which are on-premises as well as on cloud. We also do monitor their applications such as enterprise application Office365, Teams, Skype For Business, SAP, Databases (SQL, MYSQL, Oracle).
  • GUI
  • Monitoring Method Flexibility
  • Great Out of the Box monitoring templates
  • Ability to write own script
  • All infra in one view
  • Cloud Services monitoring out of the box
  • Transactions monitoring
  • application dependencies can be improved further
  • reduce dependency on agent
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can be used for any sort of servers or application monitoring such as Windows, Linux, Unix, AIX etc it also do not have any dependency on on-premises, google cloud, AWS or azure. All SAM does is to use the appropriate monitoring method having all pre-requisites in place already.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
[SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor] is our go to Monitoring Solution, spanned across the entire company that might have any sort of monitoring needs.
  • Volume Monitoring is absolutely Essential
  • WPM synthetics are cheap and efficient
  • Design is Clunky
  • Features are burried
  • Regular Users do not like it
  • Need to spend a lot of time in it to really understand anything going on.
[SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor] does almost everything well. How many people log into their 90 web servers to check if the Volumes are almost full every day? Pretty much zero so this is something [SolarWinds] is essential for. Also [SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor] has so many features its hard not to use it for almost everything.
Mike Narumiya | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds brings our uptime up by allowing fewer people to monitor applications and servers in a single application with a great notification system. Previously, I had been using a variety of programs that this new one suite can do. It is easy to use. In addition, the option to prioritize notifications allows for better and more accurate resource allocations.
  • Ease of use, simple and easy to set-up and issue.
  • Priced right for our organization.
  • Having so many modules, can take some doing to understand what you need or want.
  • Additional mobile app/device monitoring.
If you have a wide variety of systems, and perhaps some rarely used or interacted systems, this is a great tool for monitoring servers and applications. In addition, if your staff is small, can greatly empower those that you have to keep an eye on more. Easy to use and train to newer staff. Notifications are easy to set-up and modify.
Curt Sminkey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SAM to monitor all of our servers (across 4 different sites in North America) as well as our store registers (Over 350 stores). We report and get alerts on disk space, high CPU/Memory usage, running processes and just implemented AppInsight for Exchange (which is awesome).
  • AppInsight for Exchange gives us stats on DB sizes, mailbox sizes, errors, ETC.
  • Email alerts let people in our organization who don't normally log into Solarwinds, get notified of any possible problems
  • Historical reporting lets us see trends over time for CPU, memory, repsonse times, disk space, ETC.
  • I, personally, had a hard time figuring out how to add AppInsight for Exchange and had a tough time finding any documentation on it. When I figured it out, it was easy, but took me quite a while (and numerous attempts) to get there.
  • The new web reporting is difficult to use. In the end, I love how the reports look, but i have to spend a lot of time to get there.
  • We get a lot of alerts that we aren't sure what they really mean. A better explanation of why an alert occurred or what it means could be useful in finding the root cause.
We use it to monitor all of our servers (over 500) and over 750 Windows XP machines in our retail stores. We find that we get a lot of false-positive alerts on the more in-depth component monitors so we have shy'd away from using them - mostly because I am unsure what they actually mean.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is currently being used to monitor services, process, URLs, and various other things on Windows and Unix servers. It is also used to monitor network devices through traps and certain script monitors. It is a cheaper way to monitor these items throughout the system. It allows for easy and quick access, and even incite to the environment. It offers a wide range of usage just by being able to configure and run scripts as monitors. One of the key features that allowed Regions to choose to use it, is the option to not have to install an agent on a server. You can use WMI or SNMP to app monitoring.
  • Application Monitoring
  • Easy of Use
  • Versatile
  • Could use more in-depth functions with APIs
  • There are more options for Windows than Linux/Unix
I would 100% recommend SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to a colleague. It's a cheaper, [more] versatile, easy to use product. It has a fantastic user support base. (Thwack.com) SolarWinds offers live online training sessions for free if you have purchased the product, where you can ask questions and learn how to use or even get pointers on best practices.
Chike Igwegbe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds allows our company to monitor our servers 24/7. When we have emergencies, downtimes we instantly get a notification via the app and SMS. Their monitoring process has literally saved us thousands of dollars!
  • Monitor website downtimes.
  • Monitor apps downtimes.
  • Please provide integration via Cloudflare.
  • Extend trial periods for startups.
If you need to monitor your website or app 24/7 then this is a must have. I have been using it for over 5 years and I am perfectly happy.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are leveraging SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor all of our servers and networking equipment, as well as creating customized alerts that will notify the help desk team when things are less than ideal. We are using it across our entire department, but not necessarily the entire organization. The business problem it is solving is creating that single pane of glass that we can see green/yellow/red how our network/infrastructure is currently doing.
  • Alerting- You have the ability to alert on many different things and get pretty granular.
  • Dashboard-You can create customized dashboards for different people/groups that can see what they need to see.
  • Monitoring- You can also get pretty granular as far as what you want to see, and if they don't have something built-in, things can always be added.
  • Some things are kind of hard to find unless you know exactly what you're looking for and where to find it.
  • It's a lot to manage for just one or two people.
  • Some of the graphs/charts can't be customized in all the ways we want to.
It's great to monitor environments of all sizes (provided you have the licensing for all of the nodes you would like to add). I think it's a little less appropriate if you're not a huge IT shop. There are probably other, cheaper, better-suited products out there at that point.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Server and application monitor to monitor our production servers, networking equipment, and critical applications across the entire organization. We are able to see details about specific applications, insight into response times, uptime, and server performance in near real time. We are able to see issues before our end users, and proactively communicate what we are doing to address the issues.
  • Gives me the information I need in a dashboard web interface that is easy to read and share with non-IT people.
  • It's easy to setup and add new devices to SolarWinds.
  • The application is easy to administer and easily installed on virtual servers.
  • Needs to be a little easier to set up and manage alerts.
  • Mobile viewing could be improved upon
  • make it easier to drill down into TCPIP packets from top level views
It is well suited for someone who needs application and server monitoring in a small to medium environment. Solar winds can handle multiple operating systems and applications. It's also good for monitoring networking infrastructure and conjunction with the server modules to provide a more complete picture of information technology environment performance. It gives insight into the entire traffic flow from server to application.
December 11, 2020

Overall Satisfaction

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I was working with the IT department using SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor our company's server environment and alerts. By using the tool, we are enabled to maintain at the level to be informed of the status of our servers at all times. It also enables us to monitor SQL and other apps.
  • Quick insights.
  • Continuous monitoring.
  • Alerts.
  • No auto-tuning.
  • A bit clunky.
  • Low flow visibility.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is well suited for start-ups and small IT departments when the budget is limited, despite the clunky and low visibility issues that it has. The tool gives you the basic monitoring work that you need at a fairly low cost. After all, you get what you pay for.
Adam Gadsby | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Server and Application Monitor has been deployed to all servers within our client's organization, and it has enabled our support team and the client's staff to identify potential issues before they become critical saving time and money. The application monitor elements allow us to keep tabs on the health of key business applications such as email, SQL, and identify and resolve issues quickly.
  • Quickly identify potential issues with applications and their root causes.
  • Server resource usage can be kept on top of, with additional resources, added before its needed.
  • Its simple and intuitive to use.
  • Easy to drill down to get the detail behind the headline information.
  • Could have more application insights.
SAM module is well suited to organizations with multiple servers in one or more sites, as it takes care of the mundane monitoring tasks, allowing your staff to focus on more pressing matters. Business-critical applications, such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, and SQL databases, can all be monitored out of the box, and other applications can easily be added in and monitored using the template creation features.
Devbrath Pant | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used to monitor servers and application metrics all over the many Infosys clients' IT environments. I use it to gather metrics of servers CPU, Memory, Disk, and much more and alert on them. Also, it is very useful to monitor application processes and performance counters and set up an alert for them.
  • Server metrics monitoring
  • Application metrics monitoring
  • No transaction monitoring
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is well suited for the environment where we need to monitor infrastructure architecture and applications purchased from other vendors. It is not suitable to monitor the applications made by the organization itself as it doesn't give full stack trace and is unable to monitor business transactions.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used by the whole company. It helps us monitor any issues that arise. It helps us in trouble shooting and saves us a lot of time. I would strongly recommend SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor for any IT needs. Their support is also great they will spend time in resolving your issue.
  • Drills down to source
  • Notification of issues
  • Easy management
  • Easier navigation
December 03, 2020

SAM at a glance

John Martins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds SAM is being used by one of my customers in their department. I was responsible for the installation/configuration/ day to day operations of SAM. My customer is utilizing SAM to replace their previous monitoring product. SAM is used for them to be able to monitor servers and applications, to ensure their environment is healthy.
  • Ability to monitor and graph specific components of servers and applications.
  • A various amount of already built templates ready for deployment.
  • Fast and easy set up with subnet scans.
  • There is no option out of the box for SAM to show you the process that is consuming the most CPU. To be able to do this you need to ensure that the process/service is actually selected for monitoring (this is a problem as we just want to know frequently the top 5 processes consuming the highest CPU without monitoring them all).
  • We find the interface a bit slow sometimes (yet, with this being said, we are currently rebuilding to ensure everything is set up right, as we are not sure if it is an environment or application issue).
SAM is suited for monitoring components of a server/application e.g. CPU usage, memory usage, a specific service. There are a lot of components that can be monitored via SAM and SAM comes with several default templates to help the users.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is mainly used by our IT department, but our IT department uses it in a way to support other departments throughout our organization.
  • SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor helps monitor the status or some of our most important applications. It has the capability of letting us know when an application goes down which helps us fix the issue faster.
  • SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor helps monitor the resources on servers. By knowing the key components of the server such as CPU, RAM, and storage, we can forecast whether we need to increase or decrease resources on any server.
  • SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor helps us by sending real time alerts when issues occur related to servers that we are monitoring.
  • SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor has been extremely helpful for our organization. I can't think of anything to improve on.
Any server administrator needs a tool such as SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor in their environment. Having the ability to receive real time alerts when an application or server goes [down] only helps in the troubleshooting process and the down time. No one wants to see a server or application go down but it is inevitable that it will happen. Having the ability to get it back up and running in a timely manner is most important.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We have production-level servers that we are wanting metrics on for data processing. We want to know the loads they are under and the amount of connections that are being made to them. The sites we host for our customers need settings and configuration changes to help improve responsiveness and reduce load times. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor dives deep into these servers and the applications they run like IIS and Apache and points out areas where speed and data accessibility can be improved with code changes, optimized settings, and updated versions of internal applications. While it's a very robust system and there is a lot to learn, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor has the ability to optimize servers and a production environment to better improve customer-accessible sites and portals for data retrieval.
  • Identifying inefficiencies in data serving environments
  • Giving access to multiple services and the behind-the-scenes operations
  • Showing a view into backend operations on a production system
  • The environment took some effort to set up
  • Getting familiar with all of the inner workings and settings is time consuming
  • Better response time from support techs when you are needing assistance with the installation
A robust an application for monitoring multiple systems, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor certainly is not short on capabilities for taking a multiple-server environment and digging into all of the services and applications and helping to optimize the overall environment. Any serious production environments that are slow and needing help to better serve up traffic to customers should consider SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor as a way to make improvements.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to closely monitor all of our important infrastructure and interfaces across our organization. It allows us real time alerts if any mission-critical applications or hardware develop problems. This often allows us to rectify those issues before they potentially impact users.
  • Physical port monitoring
  • Monitoring of resources during peak usage
  • Monitoring servers for outages
  • Finding root cause sometimes requires drilling into a few things with added clicks.
It is well suited for medium sized organizations who want a cost effective way to monitor critical pieces of their infrastructure.
November 08, 2020

Great Product

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor across our entire organization in order to monitor in real-time the status of various aspects of our application and server environment. We use it to keep track of our production servers, services, and applications in order to provide world-class information technology service to our customers (other company employees).
  • Critical Services Monitoring
  • General Server Health
  • Current Server Status
  • Print Queue Monitoring
If you are looking to monitor servers, services, and applications (on those servers), SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is well suited for you. I have had difficulty implementing Print Queue monitoring, but admit that I am not well-versed on how to implement it. I plan to contact support for guidance in this area.
Mandy Ferguson | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds helps our team to manage the network and all of the servers we support for our entire line of centers across Marriott International. Prior to SolarWinds, our server management was done manually, and was not very organized. We were unable to collect much data. After implementing SolarWinds, we were able to manage the network and servers in a more efficient way. We were also able to provide much better data for both of these areas.
  • Provides specific data on how network is performing.
  • Allows for easier management of large amounts of servers.
  • Creates a more organized way of reporting out on data.
  • Training could have been better so more employees know how to correctly use the system.
  • Better price point would allow a company to use more product features.
  • Ability to add more custom fields.
I did not use SolarWinds as much as my colleagues but when I used it, it was easy to understand. All of my colleagues really enjoyed using the tools and found it much easier than previous things we were using.
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