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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a versatile tool that has been widely used across various industries and departments for …
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Overview
What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
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Popular Features
- Server availability and performance monitoring (269)9.898%
- Application monitoring (266)9.090%
- Threshold alerts (271)8.989%
- Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications (256)7.979%
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What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
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- No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.solarwinds.com/products/pric…
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What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot issues faster. The vendor’s value proposition is that this solution prevents slow applications and downtime from impacting end-users and business services. Users can use this tool to pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack.
The vendor says SolarWinds SAM is affordable, easy to deploy, use and customize. Users can automatically discover their systems environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.
SAM is built on SolarWinds Orion® platform enabling native integration with Network Performance Monitor and other IT management software from SolarWinds.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Features
- Supported: Single Web interface to monitor multi-vendor applications and server infrastructure.
- Supported: Out-of-the-box monitoring templates for 200+ enterprise applications.
- Supported: Easily extend monitoring to virtually any custom or home-grown applications.
- Supported: Gain contextual visibility of relationships and dependencies between applications and physical and virtual servers.
- Supported: Monitor server hardware health, perform capacity forecasting, and manage asset inventory. Remediate server issues remotely with built-in management actions.
- Supported: Monitor VMware and Hyper-V environments to identify problems impacting application performance.
- Supported: Centrally manage IT asset inventory and keep track of server hardware and software information.
- Supported: Leverage the wealth of built-in alerts and reports, and easily customize them as needed.
- Supported: SAM is an agentless monitoring software. Optional agent installation extends monitoring to the cloud.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Videos
An introduction to and a brief overview of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
In this video, the TrustRadius team is going to take a look at Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor, a powerful tool that can help you monitor your systems and identify issues early. We'll explore the overview, user sentiment, pricing, top features, and use-case, and help...
 Show More Watch SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Training Videos
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Integrations
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Competitors
- Progress WhatsUp Gold
- Nagios Core
- Tivoli Monitoring (legacy)
- Microsoft System Center
- DX Application Performance Management (formerly CA APM)
- SiteScope (formerly HP SiteScope)
- ManageEngine Applications Manager
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Languages | English |
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.
Progress WhatsUp Gold, Nagios Core, and Tivoli Monitoring (legacy) are common alternatives for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor.
Reviewers rate Server availability and performance monitoring highest, with a score of 9.8.
The most common users of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a versatile tool that has been widely used across various industries and departments for monitoring and managing servers, applications, and network infrastructure. Users rely on the software to ensure that critical systems are up and running smoothly. With its ability to monitor servers, applications, and network nodes, customers appreciate the comprehensive insights it provides into their IT environments.
One of the key use cases of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is its role in proactive monitoring and alerting. Users have praised the software's capability to detect issues such as CPU utilization, memory usage, response time, and low disk space. By setting up corresponding alerts, users can address potential problems before they impact end-users. This proactive approach helps prevent system failures and ensures optimal performance.
Another important use case of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is its ability to provide detailed insights into server metrics and application performance. Users can monitor various elements such as CPU, memory, and disk usage on servers, as well as track the health of applications like Exchange, SQL, IIS, and SharePoint. The software's integration with other products in the SolarWinds Orion family enhances network management capabilities, allowing for a unified view of segmented networks.
Additionally, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is valued for its flexibility in monitoring different types of systems and services. It supports Windows, Linux, Unix, and AIX servers both on-premises and in the cloud. Users have leveraged the software to monitor services, processes, URLs, IP addresses, MAC addresses, SMTP devices like networked cameras, and even Linux services such as IPTables. This broad range of monitoring capabilities makes it a valuable tool for organizations with diverse IT infrastructures.
Overall, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor has proven to be instrumental in maintaining system stability by providing real-time alerts for potential issues and facilitating efficient troubleshooting. Its ease of use and customization options allow different departments and administrators to tailor monitoring and alerts to their specific needs. The software's comprehensive insights, proactive monitoring, and wide range of supported systems make it a valuable asset for organizations looking to ensure optimal performance and availability of their IT infrastructure.
Customizable Dashboard: Users appreciate the fully customizable dashboard in SolarWinds SAM, which allows them to tailor it to their specific requirements. This feature has been mentioned by several reviewers and enables users to easily access the information they need for effective monitoring.
Proactive Alerting: Reviewers have praised SAM's proactive alerting capabilities, with alerts being triggered for offline servers, low disk space, rebooted servers, and critical network device outages. This feature has been highly valued by users as it helps them stay on top of potential issues and address them promptly.
Reporting Capabilities: SAM's reporting capabilities have received positive feedback from users who find the detailed reports provided by the software helpful for meeting regulatory requirements and ensuring system stability and performance. The granularity in alerts and reporting has been mentioned by multiple reviewers as a valuable feature of SAM.
Confusing User Interface: Users have expressed frustration with the user interface of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, stating that it is confusing and difficult to navigate. Some users feel that there is a steep learning curve and find it overwhelming, especially for first-time users.
Lack of Comprehensive Documentation: Several users have criticized the documentation provided for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, stating that it is spotty and lacking in examples. They believe that more comprehensive and detailed documentation would greatly aid in understanding and troubleshooting the software.
Poor Customer Support: There have been complaints about the customer support provided by SolarWinds. Multiple users have reported that customer support has worsened over time, causing frustration due to delays in reaching the correct support team and resolving issues in a timely manner.
Users have recommended several key actions for users considering SolarWinds based on their experiences. These include:
- Recommending utilizing the software for internal use, specifically for monitoring servers and applications.
- Suggesting taking advantage of the free trial to test the software before making a purchase decision.
- Advising researching and planning before implementation to ensure the software is suitable for one's needs.
- Encouraging careful design of the environment, especially when using the software in different locations.
- Recommending purchasing a license that matches the number of components needed for monitoring.
- Urging cautiousness when it comes to support and potential glitches with the software.
- Suggesting working with a detail-oriented engineer for proper setup and configuration.
- Promoting interaction with the user community site to learn from others' experiences and share knowledge.
- Emphasizing the need to understand the licensing model before signing up and selecting appropriate licensing based on the number of nodes to be monitored.
- Suggesting exploring other SolarWinds offerings and using them in conjunction with this software.
While users find SolarWinds to be a valuable tool, they also mention that it may not be suitable for beginners due to its learning curve. Overall, it is recommended to carefully consider setup, pricing, and requirements before implementing SolarWinds.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(76-100 of 278)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
February 15, 2020
SolarWinds Server/Application Monitor review.
It is being used by Server Support/Application Support IT groups and IT management. Network Support group uses the modules to troubleshoot server performance and application slowdown issues.
- Provides thw ability to look at specific application counters/parameters and their values.
- Pinpoints bottlenecks in application flows.
- Ability to recommend specific remediation steps for addressing issues.
- Better application flow visibility.
February 12, 2020
SolarWinds: Good Monitoring Tool!
We use SAM to monitor many different aspects of our organization. We use insight for multiple IIS servers, as well as checking event logs. It's only used by the IT department. It allows us to monitor performance and catch issues as soon as they happen.
- IIS App insight.
- Alerting on hardware issues (i.e. disk space).
- Setup can be confusing.
- Since it can alert on so much, some settings may be too sensitive.
February 07, 2020
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is being used by the IT department to monitor the activity, health, resources, etc. of the servers within the organization. It provides us with a realtime dashboard of what is currently happening within the server environment and enables us to respond quickly to any problems encountered, thus maximizing productivity due to minimized business downtime.
- It provides agentless server monitoring. This is useful since some application owners aren't fond of having agents installed on their servers.
- It provides root cause analysis enabling us to identify why certain application servers are slow.
- There is no real downside to using this product as they have many features.
- Can become expensive due to the licensing costs.
January 22, 2020
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor saves on budget
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is used by IT to monitor our system that provides the services to the business. With having a non-profit budget (and personnel can be tight) as well as being in retail the need to be able to bring money is in critical. With SAM we are able to monitor our services that allow us to continue business. With what SAM can do for us we are able to monitor everything with little interaction.
- Shared application templates
- Application alerting
- Adding new features
- Setup can take time.
- Some settings are difficult to find if you don't spend a lot of time in the system.
- There are a lot of templates which is good and bad, writing your own takes knowledge not all have.
January 21, 2020
Solid, affordable, basic monitoring that could use work
SolarWinds is being used as our primary monitoring tool for our servers and critical IT infrastructure. It is used by Technical IT to provide up/down monitoring of the majority of our in house IT infrastructure including networking equipment and servers. It is also being used in a limited sense as our CMDB to feed our ticketing system.
- Low cost
- Easy to install
- Poor UI
- Difficult to use beyond basic functions
We use the products across the whole network. It monitors several services, all of our nodes, and also all network devices. It allows us to be proactive to any number of issues, such as equipment failure, loss of connections to important servers, and alerts of high utilization of bandwidth, memory, etc.
- Tells us when a piece of equipment loses connection
- Lets us know when we have a high utilization of memory or bandwidth
- More hands on training on all the functions it has to offer
January 10, 2020
SAM monitors it again
Managing VM, server process, and HW Uptime. Maintaining visibility and reporting on related KPIs.
- Single pane of glass integration
- Cloud and VM support
- Could always be cheaper
- Easier creation of dashboard views for SR/executive leaders
January 08, 2020
SolarWinds Application and Server Management -- An Upcoming Force to be Reckoned With
Because of the network intensity of the customer solution, there was a high degree of value to bring the network monitoring and the application/service/server stack monitoring and management onto a single platform. While the integration was not seamless, it did bring a commonality of tools, techniques, and outputs across the SaaS delivery model, and thus visibility led to efficient response for infrastructure, application, and even security events.
Overall, this approach brought visibility to business application issues, thus reinforcing the business objectives while also gaining more foothold on the infrastructure.
Overall, this approach brought visibility to business application issues, thus reinforcing the business objectives while also gaining more foothold on the infrastructure.
- In general, the slough of SNMP Traps and Monitors is a good start.
- Automation beyond the SNMP layer is easy.
- The integration with other products could use a bit of polishing. It's not hard or impossible, just a bit clunky.
- Implementation of the application monitors is a small challenge to learn, but once you have the hang of it, it is overall elegant.
December 30, 2019
Small business, but big on tools!
Our environment is casually small compared to an enterprise-sized system. SaM is used to monitor smaller SQL DB's and has proved valuable for us to ensure optimized functionality of resources. Our applications are heavily dependent on SQL(and other) databases due to the nature of our business, primarily security and CCTV applications. Without clear insight into our critical applications, we could certainly be under stress and/or a situation that could impact our security infrastructure.
- Ease of use and configuration.
- Level of detail provided.
- GUI could be a bit more altered to indicate real potential issues.
December 29, 2019
SolarWinds has been helpful in managing our infrastructure
We use SolarWinds Application Monitor to keep tabs on many of our on-premise servers to ensure that they are up and running and functioning as needed to provide the services our users need. We monitor various aspects of the machines to ensure any potential problems can be addressed before they become real problems.
- Hard drive space.
- Memory usage.
- It is kind of slow to start-up, especially the first time.
- Can sometimes get almost too complicated.
December 24, 2019
SolarWinds - the best tools for the job!
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is used across our organisation as the primary monitoring tool for all systems, and it's used by several departments within the company. It acts as a single pane of glass for monitoring and alerting for systems from head office servers to retail POS units. It also reports on uptime for SLAs.
- Automatically adds new systems in. This is easier than most of the other monitoring systems I've used.
- Integrates with ticketing systems like ServiceNow.
- Regularly adds new features or improves functionality of existing ones.
- Very easy to upgrade to the latest version.
- Under the hood, it's a variety of monitoring products that have been added over the years, and sometimes this shows. The integration is pretty good, but not perfect.
- Adding additional custom SNMP pollers could be a lot easier.
- Sometimes you still need to use individual programs on the server to add or configure monitoring, rather than all going through the front end.
- Hard to see exactly what is monitored on each node.
December 20, 2019
steady SolarWinds keeps us warm in the winter
We use SolarWinds & Application Monitor in our organization to monitor business-critical systems that require 99.999% uptime. This has proven to be extremely important, especially during high volume times like the holidays. Many of our customers rely on us to ensure that they can make their sales numbers and goals. These tools give us early indications of any potential outage or issue that allows us to actively manage the availability of our systems.
- SolarWinds is an industry-recognized tool that plays quite nicely with RFC compliant systems.
- I would like to see more integration with CRM tools.
December 20, 2019
It just works
We use it across our whole business unit, monitoring all of our servers and their major applications.
- Quickly implement
- Pre-configured packages for monitoring many applications
- More pre-configured application monitors for SQL Server
December 19, 2019
Solarwinds breeze
Across the entire organization, Solarwinds is used to monitor up and downtimes of network configuration items. We push application install and Windows' updates on clients' devices. Netpath monitor is a tool I find intriguing.
- I like the port monitor alert. It's in real time with alert.
- Netpath helps me push my ISP when they are not being truthful about their downtimes.
- I would lean more towards the bugs repair for now.
- The PMS connect error issue.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used across our entire company, globally across 250 locations in 30+ countries. We use SAM to monitor server uptime, performance, and to gather alerts for potential capacity issues (disk space, memory, CPU utilization). Utilizing active monitoring has allowed us to prevent potentially catastrophic system failures before the system users were impacted.
We leverage the reporting capability to report on our SLA Uptime, based on un-planned outages, and have these reports scheduled on a weekly and monthly basis for executive reporting of our stability across our server and network platforms.
We leverage the reporting capability to report on our SLA Uptime, based on un-planned outages, and have these reports scheduled on a weekly and monthly basis for executive reporting of our stability across our server and network platforms.
- Uptime status monitoring: SAM monitors system uptime through polling (Ping) or through system traps being sent to the poller agents.
- Various application level monitors: We are able to monitor performance of many or our critical applications, from web servers, SQL, AD, and Exchange, and the data gathered helps to ensure user experiences are maintained at a positive level.
- Linux/Unix support is very limited. We have to set up custom agents and custom scripts to retrieve any usable data from our older systems, and each one needs to be customized to report back what we need. The effort that has gone into the Windows systems is amazing -- the Linux effort is very limited and has almost no automation ability.
- Installation and configuration is very daunting. The upgrade processes have caused many outages and unexpected tickets to be opened for support. The upgrade/maintenance process needs to be cleaned up and updated.
December 09, 2019
Overview of the product
It is used by the IT department to track, monitor and validate Server and Network Infrastructure.
- Overview of the Systems
- Provide a status and alarm support for different levels of the device issues.
- Status of the Infrastructure in a single glance
- Need more depth in the Storage support tools
- Data Center support infrastructure (i.e. power, cooling, etc.)
December 07, 2019
My SolarWinds Life
We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor our servers, switches, and routers. We need to be aware of resource usage, preventative maintenance issues, and quick reporting of failures. We also like to watch trends in usage and the application provides good tools for monitoring. Using the data allows us to plan accordingly for maintenance events and hardware upgrades.
- Monitors Windows IIS for responsiveness.
- Monitors SQL servers and gives us insight into what resources need to be modified.
- Monitors our applications on our LInux DHCP/DNS servers for responsiveness.
- Need a tie to firewall/security applications.
- More templates, easier template creation.
- More feedback when adding applications, hard to know what is failing when setting up.
We use SAM to monitor our physical and virtual Windows Servers and HP Blade Enclosures across our entire organization. We needed a reliable product to send us email/pager alerts when our systems are in a Critical or Down state.
- HP hardware monitoring -- email/pager alerts tell us when servers have bad disks, RAM, etc.
- Customized alerts to let us know when very specific errors/conditions arise
- THWACK user community, ability to download user-provided templates and solutions
- Custom reports need to be more intuitive
- DR/Failover/Clustering features need to be more robust
- Virtualization Manager should be part of the base product
December 05, 2019
Life in the SolarWinds
We use the product for server and application monitoring. In most instances, we marry it with other SIEM tools to manage availability and thru-put. We use multiple applications in our environment, however, SolarWinds seems to provide a robust, consistent measurement that our engineers are comfortable using and understanding. I would recommend this product.
- Great for monitoring infrastructure.
- Could be better on the reporting side.
- Great for alerting.
- Would like a built-in feature to marry with popular SIEM tools.
- Would like to automatically send reports to CRM tools.
- Would like to see a collaboration feature built into the tool.
December 02, 2019
SolarWinds Monitor Review
We have been using SolarWinds on a daily basis at work to monitor our devices, take backup, pull out customer device utilization reports, auto backup etc. SolarWinds is a very powerful tool. It has been used in our department as well as at the organization level. Business problems like, daily backups, reports, etc and many more stuff are what I am currently exploring. I always recommend this tool to my friends. Thanks for making such great tool to free up our work time.
- Its give us alerts on emails, whenever there is a device down in the data center.
- It takes backups on auto timer.
- It is useful for CPU utilization monitoring.
- It makes it simple to add, delete, and modify the polling servers.
- It is good to use for syslog servers.
- Please improve on centralizing the data.
- If any new patches have been updated on server, let us know the system capabilities to hold the patch.
- Dashboard has to be more crispy in data viewing.
November 24, 2019
Awesome experience with SolarWinds
We have SolarWinds in place to monitor all server and network devices. SolarWinds helps us a lot in cases of server monitoring and network device monitoring. We get an alert when any server gets high utilization. We also get an alert if any interface goes down for network devices. So to avoid device or a server's unexpected reboot, we can action on devices for which we get an alert.
- Suppose you have critical servers which are in production and suddenly the server rebooted. No one wants that to happen, especially production server in prod hours. What if you get an alert prior to this incident? If you are using SolarWinds monitor then you will have that feature. SolarWinds generates an alert if CPU utilization, or latency is observed on a server. Therefore, you can login to the server and kill non-required processes and save your server from an unexpected reboot.
- If you are using the application monitor and the application is responding slowly, this may provide you with information on what error you are getting and whether there are any packets dropping.
- Some clients wants to check what amount of bandwidth they consumed on a daily basis. SolarWinds allows us to generate & share reports with our clients.
- You can also check bandwidth history in the last year. You can check what the configuration was before 1 year. These are awesome feature SolarWinds provides users.
- While creating reports, there are several options which are missing.
- When creating alerts based on condition, it is quite complex to configure. I think this can be smoother.
November 23, 2019
Solarwinds TO be or NOT to be.
We use SolarWinds to monitor critical Network connections and also DB on servers in conjunction with 'Relic' and wanted to use AppDynamics but we opted to expand our SolarWinds footprint. The product is used by the IT department to support our ever-expanding Network and the DB environment needs to support 90+ clinics that operate 6 days a week supporting our critical patient operations.
- It is relatively easy to install and operate which helps a lot when you have a small IT staff.
- It does not have a large compute/ram need, thus it is sitting in the background and does its job without getting noticed.
- It provides a solid overview of network performance. I would like to have more control over the reporting capabilities and get more graphical (like a show of the US map with our POPs, etc).
- The DB monitor recommendations are great the tool helps my DBA greatly.
- I like to have control over the reports for the network. For example, I like the show of the US map with our POPs.
- Ability to trend over time much like AppDynamics AI that knows on Mondays we had heavy usage thus it is normal and does not alarm us. SMART metrics that is.
November 23, 2019
SolarWinds for a more reliable infrastructure
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used explicitly by our IT staff, however, it's capabilities stretch to various departments. One of the key components allowed us to monitor our online banking environment and know exactly when an issue happened, and exactly what happened. We were able to monitor windows services and task schedules to provide real-time value and analytics to fix issues immediately.
- Consistent service monitoring.
- Schedule task execution status.
- Reliability!
- Set-up is cumbersome!
- The GUI for services is clunky.
- Sometimes downed services don't report.
November 15, 2019
One of the best APM tools!
We are using SolarWinds organization-wide. It's used for network alerts, space alerts, server up-down alerts, CPU and memory alerts, to generate reports, debug the issues, and monitor the server and application logs. It's a super useful monitoring tool, and it's very easy to use it.
- High quality Performance monitoring tool
- Centralized monitoring tool
- One of the best APM software in the market
- The costs are one of the factors, as there are so many.
- The GUI could be more user-friendly and improved for users.
November 12, 2019
SAM has eased monitoring headaches.
We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor our entire environment, from network equipment to servers and applications and storage.
- Very customizable so you only get what you are looking for.
- Works great out of box with the built in templates.
- User templates uploaded to Thwack allow you to find a solution to a monitoring problem without implementing it from scratch.
- Too integrated into the suite of products. Fields that are needed for network equipment must be filled out for servers and applications.