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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)9.090%
- 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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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...
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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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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.
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Reviews
(251-275 of 278)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We use SAM to monitor critical systems in use by our organization. Specifically, we monitor services, processes, etc. for our Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems, our e-mail (Exchange) system, our Active Directory environment and our SQL servers to name a few. SAM is being used across the whole organization and has helped us to be proactive by allowing us to know before anyone else when there is a problem or potential problem with one or more of our systems.
- SQL Server. The AppInsight for SQL Server is AWESOME! We can monitor all of the important SQL Server areas with the press of a button. It takes just a few minutes to setup an start monitoring a SQL environment. We would not want to live without this one.
- Exchange Server. The AppInsight for Exchange Server is one of the best additions to Server and Application Monitor that we've seen. In literally minutes, we were able to start monitoring all of our Exchange servers and collecting information like top mailbox sizes, number of messages sent/received, process status and general health of our Exchange environment.
- Flexibility!! SAM is *so* flexible! We have created many custom templates to monitor different things across our organization that are specific to our environment. We LOVE how flexible and easy to use SAM is.
- The most difficult thing for us is licensing. We are constantly running out of licenses because we keep thinking of more and more things to monitor. I wish we would've purchased the unlimited license because now, we run into approval issues every time we want to add more licenses.
March 08, 2016
SolarWinds, There is no other Tool.
ACOM has several different systems that need to be monitored to include critical applications and sql servers. The primary use is to monitor critical applications and syslogs to ensure that they have maximum up time and to mitigate any failures before they happen. Also use the notification services to allows staff to be proactive instead of reactive.
- Notification Service allows us to apply fixes on our systems before issues occur.
- The performance monitoring allows staff to plan the infrastructure, which allows us to provide the best service to our endusers.
- Helps SQL staff streamline database queries and eliminate bottleneck in resources.
- Allows staff to monitor from the web console and fix small issues that effect performance.
- Reporting, It would be nice to create KPI and report on them on a recurring basis.
- Provide trending activity notifications that will allow staff to see organization needs that should be addressed.
- Provide overall infrastructure dashboard that will let managers look at their server and application performance at a snapshot.
SolarWinds SAM helps us track performance on our Microsoft SQL and IIS workloads. A great tool to hold historical data to investigate current performance issues. SolarWinds SAM templates have everything we are looking for and were great in helping us get set up quickly. We love the SolarWinds product lines and can't wait to see what else is coming up from them.
- Hold historical performance data
- Easy to use templates
- Out of the box compatibility for Microsoft SQL and IIS workloads
- Orion has some learning curve
- SQL database set up can be difficulty
- Some baselines could be easier to configure
February 29, 2016
Solarwinds SAM Review
We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor all of our Windows Server and MS SQL Servers for general performance data collection, OS monitoring and alerting, and application level monitoring and alerting.
- Alerting - SolarWinds SAM has excellent alerting functionality. We haven't run into many situations/alerting workflows that couldn't be accommodated with the built-in reporting functionality.
- Interface - The SolarWinds SAM interface is very sharp and finding information is easy. As well, it integrates into their Orion platform and pulls information from the other products so that all of the information you need is in one place. If it isn't by default, you can easily customize the views, without code, to have them display the information you want/need.
- Discovery Setup & Ease of Use- The SolarWinds discovery tool is very good at pulling WMI information quickly. It takes minutes to set up and you start pulling all the information you could ever want.
- Integrations - While SolarWinds has several products that integrate into various platforms, the SAM tool basically relies on WMI to pull information from servers. The detail of information from WMI pulls is great. The downside is that all of your servers have to be added, or discovered, in SolarWinds. So, while that step seems intuitive and relatively easy, a hypervisor-based monitoring solution can apply rules to all new VMs and they are discovered instantly and automatically added to standard monitoring policies. I don't expect this would be an issue for a larger process-driven department or organization, but in SMB, it can be a struggle to maintain.
- Alerting Setup - As a default, I think the general recommendation is to turn on most of the alerting, and then pair down what you don't need/use. From day 1, expect 6-12 months of honing the product to alert on what you want, unless you have everything documented from the get-go and have an integration plan that includes addressing all of the alerting needs specifically. As well, because the platform allows ultimate customization in alerts, it also requires a lot of setup to get them right.
- WMI - Pulling information using WMI uses a lot of CPU on our VMs. We have to stagger our data collection over longer than desired timeperiods because the VMs spike CPU during the WMI pulls. An agent based solution would almost certainly be better.
February 22, 2016
Solarwinds Review
We use SolarWinds on a day to day basis. It's important to monitor all our WMI, SNMP servers, router switches and AP's. Whether it's drives, CPU, ports or applications NPM, NCM and SAM are essential for monitoring and reporting for our entire network.
- Good interface and and user friendly for setting up alerts.
- Fairly easy to navigate and set up groups.
- Vast variety of alerts and custom alerts to create.
- SAM leaves something to be desired.
- No way of drilling into your node and seeing what apps are currently being monitored by that node.
- NPM, NCM and SAM are almost completely separate from each other.
February 20, 2016
Trust the monitoring tools that really work
SolarWinds is being used to monitor our entire Infrastructure, from Server & Application to Network monitoring. SolarWinds help us maintain and respond proactively to incidents and perhaps before they happen. We have great visibility with what's going on in our Infrastructure and if devices or applications are being affected. SolarWinds gives me peace of mind knowing that I have a system that will alert me if something is wrong.
- Server hardware monitoring.
- Server performance, CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk spaced utilized.
- Application monitoring gives us a clear view on how our applications are behaving and making sure they're running.
- I believe that SolarWinds covers all the areas that I, as an engineer need to monitor to assure business continuity.
- I have no recommendations at this point, keep up the good work.
February 20, 2016
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review with K-12 Enviroment
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used by our district’s network and systems engineer for real time system health and troubleshooting. In a school district our size it’s imperative to have eyes on all our systems down to the applications running within each server. SAM has given us critical information when troubleshooting system issues and alerting when an application being monitored fails or goes to a warning state. We also use SAM for building systems or arranging resources when needed. SAM shows trends that help make decisions on if we need to move or add resources to be utilized by other servers. One of the neat features we utilize with SAM is its ability to interact with all SolarWinds modules like Web Performance Monitor. SAM found an issue with our district website within a matter of minutes of being installed via AppInsight for IIS! We also use custom application monitors running on systems that have critical applications running that are not standard applications. This has helped tremendously with system up time and district situational awareness. I find out more everyday how SolarWindsServer & Application Monitor benefits my school district. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting insight to what's going on.
- Trends! Showing how a particular application is being used gives us valuable information on what's going on. The ability to have historical data to backup reasoning for adding a server is priceless!
- Using the built in AppInsight takes away the need to know what all makes up a service. Also the ability to create your own application monitor for non standard applications is beneficial.
- The ability to create alerts via email or SMS on critical applications is wonderful! This puts our department "in the know" before the phones start ringing. This feature keeps our help desk knowledgeable on what's going on so they can keep the chaos to a minimum.
- Knowing when an application is in a warning state is helpful so we know when to troubleshoot before it becomes an issue. The great thing about SAM is that it tells you where the problems are so you know where to start.
- I know there are a few bugs still with AppInsight for IIS. When trying to unmanage a web site it does not always work correctly. You sometimes need to go back and forth a few times before it changes to unmanaged.
- I wish that out of the box AppInsight for SQL Server didn't have such low thresholds on its templates. The override feature is useful in this case but you need at least a month of real data to set a new baseline.
- New applications! Right now it's just the basic AD, Exchange, SQL, IIS, Windows, Linux.
February 19, 2016
Solarwinds - Monitor with the Big Boys
Solarwinds SAM is our IT department's monitoring software. It allows us to proactively address server and system application issues before they become critical. It alerts us via email when we are not actively watching its output. It provides ultra deep insight into the inner workings of mission critical applications. It keeps a history of our system's health and allows us to produce pretty much any report you can think of. It also, allows us to create custom views of the monitored systems so we can control what a specific user or group can see.
- The ease of creating a custom alert is really incredible. Something that may take 30 minutes in Nagios takes only 3 minutes in Solarwinds.
- The custom views are incredibly useful for meeting the demands of specific department and execs to be able to see only what they want to see of the systems being monitored.
- The Thwack community is a to-the-point technical forum with real-world usable solutions by novice and veteran Solarwinds users alike. Its resources include the actual code/plugin needed to take advantage of the solutions.
- The learning curve can be steep. With so many granular, customizable options, it can be overwhelming.
- The default alerts issue too many emails that sound unnecessarily urgent and are sometime misleading, like saying the Domain Controller is down when a user account gets locked.
- Some of the products in SAM are also included in other Solarwinds products making choices sometimes difficult.
February 19, 2016
SolarWinds in an Aerospace environment
We use SolarWinds to monitor our daily operational status throughout the corporation's IT infrastructure. SW is used solely by the IT department. It addresses the need for real-time network information to identify and remedy slowdowns, downed equipment, and maintain heartbeats.
- Real-Time monitoring
- Vast monitoring database
- relatively easy to input nodes
- licensing is very confusing
- the GUI isn't as user-friendly as one would like
- Would like to see better out of box reporting
February 19, 2016
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Use Review
We use SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at my company to monitor the health of workstations and servers on our production network. When a node is having issues with disk usage, CPU usage, or other issues we get an alert that lets us know. There is also a dashboard that we can access for information about all nodes for monitoring and reporting.
- Node monitoring.
- Dashboard access.
- Email alerting.
- Remote access feature.
February 17, 2016
solarwinds sam review
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is used daily in our organization. Our admins monitor it, and we also have application owners that have their own page to use it as well. It addresses any issue with the application, and proves it is not system resources. It is a great way to see what is going on within an application.
- SAM shows any critical issues within an application.
- SAM shows any warnings within an application.
- SAM monitors services and can notify you if any services/processes are using too many resources.
- SAM could be a little more reliable. We see consistency issues.
February 15, 2016
SolarWinds SAM review
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is used to monitor all the aspects of our customer-facing production environment. This environment consists of heavy processing on a variety of servers with files moving back and forth. SAM allows us to watch individual parts of this process as well as viewing it in its entirety so we can easily find bottlenecks. SAM also allows us to monitor the availability of critical services in this process and alert if these services are unavailable. This lets us take a proactive approach to issue resolution before the customer is ever aware of a problem. In addition, SAM gives us instant feedback on how hardware configuration changes affect this process allowing us to find the optimal configuration for our environment.
- Monitoring critical services. SAM can monitor critical services running on one or multiple servers and alert when these services are unavailable.
- Monitoring detailed system performance. SAM can watch several system parameters right out of the box making it easy to set up monitoring on a variety of systems.
- Real-time performance status. SAM can provide very accurate real-time performance data allowing you to see exactly what is happening at that moment.
- If you are watching processes, SAM is built for processes that run at all time. SAM does not do a good job of monitoring processes that may start up and shut down. SAM will simply report these processes as down if the monitoring doesn't catch them at the right time.
- SAM aggregates data after a period of time so detailed research into a performance issue or configuration problem needs to be done quickly before the historical data is rolled up and the details are lost.
- The interface is still a little confusing if you don't use it every day. In particular, making changes to application monitors is a confusing task that I usually need to attempt two or three times before I figure out how to make the changes I want.
February 15, 2016
SolarWinds Helps Utilities
Currently our SAM solution is being utilized by our IT Department to send out notifications of services which are down. When a service notification is received it is helpful to know where the problem is whether it is a service or a server. We are more efficient in getting problems solved in a shorter amount of time.
- SNMP Monitor allows you to use simple SNMP calls to a server to monitor processes whether it is on a Windows machine or a Linux/Unix machine.
- Exchange monitor can help to baseline your environment using best practices from Microsoft while allowing it to be customized to your environment.
- Alerting can be setup on a process, server, or other items defined to alert you of a problem and if a fix has been successful.
- Sometimes it is hard to find out where to customize a built in monitoring component.
- I wish it were easier to know where to add in additional components to a custom monitor.
- It would be helpful if you could acknowledge an alarm / alert from the Component Monitor page instead of the alerts page.
February 15, 2016
SAM is Almost Where it Needs To Be
My organization uses SAM internally to monitor critical services on servers. Services range from standard IIS services to third party services. The majority of our usage is Microsoft SQL Services and database performance. We also use it for Microsoft Server failover cluster monitoring. The most intuitive use (if I do say so myself) is to identify a problem with SAM, and automatically resolve that problem with other SolarWinds products via script or automatic configuration/reconfiguration.
- Monitor Critical Services - You can monitor and alert any service running on a Windows server in about 5 minutes. It takes a bit more time for Linux services, but it is doable.
- Monitoring otherwise tricky things to monitor, i.e. server failovers.
- Keeping an eye on SQL Performance. There are lots of products out there, but few as quick and easy as SAM to configure.
- SAM could use a "Single Service Monitor & Alerting Wizard" or something similar. While the bundled monitoring packages are nice, they are often overkill and use way more licenses than I would like to use for that particular alert.
- Could make it easier to alert different groups. Often different parts of the business want to know only certain things (i.e. the Analytics team doesn't always want the same information as the Dev Ops team) and it isn't a quick thing to edit an existing alert and only send to a subset of people.
- Auto-restart for services isn't very straightforward. That seems like it should be a pretty easy thing to do, like a checkbox or something.
- Incorporate the SSH command functionality of NCM with SAM. That way I can send commands to Linux servers if something goes awry.
February 12, 2016
Solarwinds
It's used by our technology department, and is used for network/server monitoring and reporting.
- The SAM application is very robust and allows us to monitor everything from switches right down to individual ports.
- The SAM web interface is very customizable and easy to use.
- The SAM alerting features are highly customizable and have worked very well for us.
- More web-based reports with graphs and charts would be nice.
- More support for Aruba and other brand switches for bandwidth monitoring and greater network details. Currently, Cisco is the brand that SAM supports most.
February 12, 2016
Solarwinds Server and App Monitor Review
We use it to track service/application availability. Let's us know when a key business process fails.
- Reliable
- Basics are displayed easily
- Need other Solarwinds modules for full utilization
- Presentation could be improved significantly, often too much data on screen
February 12, 2016
Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor is all your company needs!!!
Solarwinds Server & Application manager has become a major asset for us in helping see small issues before they become a lot bigger. Its addressed numerous issues with slow applications and high usage that we never knew existed until implementing this product. Solarwinds Application Manager not only helps our IT Department but our company as a whole. I couldn't recommend this product enough.
- Monitors memory and data usage
- Monitors user applications
- Monitors crucial server information
- Could be more user friendly
- Difficult for non IT users to understand
- Support structure could use some adjustments
February 12, 2016
Comparison of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitoring vs. VROps
SAM is used by certain departments within Information Technology at UCHealth to provide insight into the performance and availability of applications and environments including SharePoint, Citrix, our public website and a variety of other custom developed applications.
- Real-time service and process explorer provides easy insight into what is currently running on a system and also makes it easy to start building new, custom application monitors.
- SolarWinds provides a huge variety of monitoring templates out-of-box for the SAM product, and the community templates on Thwack often fill in or augment any gaps that there may be in the SolarWinds default templates. There are some really excellent monitoring templates available on Thwack built by other SAM customers.
- Alerting is highly customizeable and includes key features like escalation plans and a wide variety of actions to perform including performing service and node restarts as well as app pool restarts/recycles.
- Building custom dashboards is very difficult compared to the easy point and click interfaces of building custom monitor applications and setting up new nodes (other areas I consider "key" for a monitoring product). I'm really disappointed with the restrictions on the context of dashboard objects, not being able to put summary information on the same page as node or application detail information is a big wall.
- Using WMI based application monitors with a node being polled by SNMP makes it cumbersome to setup the correct credentials to poll with WMI. Additionally, switching a node that was originally setup to poll with WMI (and have application monitors inherit credentials from node) to using SNMP polling causes huge problems with application monitors assigned to the node and the only way to fix it is to manually go in and reconfigure every application monitor assigned to the node.
- There is no anomaly based detection and alerting functionality in the product, everything is threshold based (calculated thresholds just don't seem to cut it). Also, there isn't a "low" threshold for alerting, only a "high" value alert.
February 12, 2016
SolarWinds - SAM Review
We use the SAM module from Solarwinds to ensure the stable of services we provide to our end users is working as planned. It helps my small staff identify issues before they become outages and it helps me to ensure we are meeting our SLA from a performance standpoint.
- SAM helps our support staff identify applications not meeting our designed SLAs. We have two industry specific applications that have memory leak issues and using this platform we are able to set threshold warnings up letting us know it is time to take a preventative step to make the applciation behave correctly.
- SAM also allows us to monitor server performance so if we end up with logs that get out of control and start eating drive space up, we are promptly alerted so corrective action can take place before service degrades.
- I like have the SAM trend reports so I can see how the performance of applications behave overtime so I can ensure we have enough compute resources to meet our growing business demands.
- Really the price is about the only area I'd like to see SolarWinds get aggressive on. There are many players at different levels in this space, and I get questioned often on the need to spend as much as we do on SolarWinds.
February 12, 2016
Visual management
I'm currently using SolarWinds to monitor my network performance as well as my devices.
- I love the fact that I can see details of how my network traffic flows. Using the net flow part of Solarwinds provides me valuable information that has allowed to me better design my network base on the traffic flow.
- One thing that Solarwinds helps me in is backing up my Cisco configuration and providing me detail comparison on any changes made on my present and past configurations.
- The visual map layout of my topology allows to see all my network sites, this is good since i'm a visual person, and YES! Solarwinds does email me alerts if there are any issues with any of my network devices. I can see details of what my device issue my be as well as hardware issues.
- In my experience on configuring SolarWinds I have nothing to comment. This is my first network performance software i have used. I guess I can consider myself lucky since we did research on finding the best solution in the market.
February 12, 2016
Solarwinds review
Solarwinds is used to monitor the Windows and Networking systems here. Limited Linux monitoring currently. This allows easy and quick setup with canned alerting options that don't require a Master's degree in Engineering to complete (i.e. MS System Center). Excellent configurable dashboard options and good reporting. Historical info that can be compared cross platform.
- Excellent setup to production use timing
- Easily configurable dashboards and reporting
- Strong user community support for custom queries
- Agentless connectivity
- Full fault tolerance is a purchased item - should be included as standard
- Better separation of users areas
February 11, 2016
SolarWinds SAM - perfect for standard environments, messy to customize in atypical settings
We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor and remediate web servers and applications. The point is to try and improve SLA for the business and user experience for our customers by automating the remediation of both typical and atypical use cases (application pools, SQL queries, Windows Services, etc.) The theory has been sound, but the implementation has been rife with difficulties.
- Create custom WMI monitors for specific Performance metrics on any Windows Server. This is done through a wizard interface that directly queries the Performance Monitor and gives you the same basic interface for selecting specific metrics. Truly the easiest I've ever worked with.
- Out of the box support for standard IIS monitoring that checks all of the standard metrics using a module called AppInsight for IIS. For straight-up out of the box usage, this is a great solution.
- A very straightforward method of adding additional nodes and matching them to precreated templates to reduce the additional work of adding the same components over and over to the same types of servers (especially when considering a large web farm where every server needs the exact same set of monitors.)
- Customization of the AppInsight for IIS monitors is cumbersome and, in some cases, non-existent. If your organization has atypical requirements, it is difficult to customize and, in a few cases, seemingly impossible (or at least requires a huge effort.)
- Initial setup of SolarWinds SAM was a series of headaches that required multiple calls to support. Again, there is no easy path to solve issues because even the techs have no idea what to do. This just means that SAM's error reporting lacks clarity.
- It is completely confusing as to when you should use Agents or when you shouldn't. Also, techs do not agree. There needs to be more consistent messaging here.
- The SQL backend for this tool is VERY sensitive to performance issues. It really is best to use a dedicated SQL server, but this really shouldn't be necessary. We launched this against a single farm of 10 nodes and it can take up to 2-6 hours for the system to notice changes to that environment. This is unacceptable. The solution? Move to dedicated SQL. That makes an expensive product quickly more expensive.
February 10, 2016
A true Solarwinds SAM review.
Solarwinds SAM is a great tool for network monitoring. It allows you to monitor and analyze server performance as well as application performance from sql server to iis. Solarwinds supports a very wide variety of applications, and tools. For example, I was looking to tie our backup system into solarwinds, and I found the plugins for it in solarwinds to allow me to be notified if there are any issues. Solarwinds has helped me immensely in troubleshooting and alerts when problems occur.
On a side note, there is a huge learning curve to it's use. It takes quite a while to configure, and use it to its full potential. Though once it is working properly, it will not fail.
On a side note, there is a huge learning curve to it's use. It takes quite a while to configure, and use it to its full potential. Though once it is working properly, it will not fail.
- Solarwinds is great at its wide variety of support for different vendor software and applications.
- Solarwinds is great for its customizations.
- Solarwinds is great for being able to monitor almost anything you need it to in a network.
- There is a learning curve to using solarwinds.
- Updates tend to break the logic for all alerts.
- It can be difficult to configure, though the support from solarwinds is awesome.
February 10, 2016
Server Application Monitor... Worth the money!
We use it currently to monitor Exchange, SharePoint as well as other third party applications to ensure they are up and running. We have legacy applications that do not recover by themselves when they crash. SAM helps us monitor them and restart them when needed. This cuts down on calls to the help desk that services are not working correctly.
- Monitors Microsoft products extremely well
- Updates to SAM and the Orion platform are very easy
- Licensing is horrific, I don't really understand why Microsoft SQL monitor can consume X number of licenses. If should be a fixed cost.
February 10, 2016
Basic SAM review
SAM is being used to monitor both servers and network infrastructure. It helps us to monitor and alert on our resources, so that we know right away if a server or switch is overworked or if a service or server goes down. It is crucial in our providing 24/7 up time and support without having someone sit and actually watch all the systems.
- it can alert on server or service outages
- it can be configured to be specific to the applications running on a particular server
- it can be focused on the specific hardware and all alerting levels can be configured according to where you want them to be
- alerting can be easily disabled for patching and maintenance
- if you aren't careful with your alerting, you can get blasted with a huge amount of alerts if a server reboots
- there can be a learning curve when first finding where to enter your devices and manage them. there is a lot to see and do in the interface, so that can be overwhelming for some