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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Overview

What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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

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

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

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

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What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://www.solarwinds.com/products/pric…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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Alternatives Pricing

What is Azure Monitor?

Microsoft's Azure Monitor is designed to analyze and optimize the performance of web applications and infrastructure, including virtual machines (VMs), Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Storage, and databases. Monitor Linux and Windows VMs and their health and dependencies—all on a single map.

What is SolarWinds Pingdom?

SolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.

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Features

Application Performance Management

Application performance management software monitors software to ensure performance and availability

8.7
Avg 7.6
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Product Details

What is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor?

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot issues faster. The vendor’s value proposition is that this solution prevents slow applications and downtime from impacting end-users and business services. Users can use this tool to pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack.

The vendor says SolarWinds SAM is affordable, easy to deploy, use and customize. Users can automatically discover their systems environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SAM is built on SolarWinds Orion® platform enabling native integration with Network Performance Monitor and other IT management software from SolarWinds.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Features

  • Supported: Single Web interface to monitor multi-vendor applications and server infrastructure.
  • Supported: Out-of-the-box monitoring templates for 200+ enterprise applications.
  • Supported: Easily extend monitoring to virtually any custom or home-grown applications.
  • Supported: Gain contextual visibility of relationships and dependencies between applications and physical and virtual servers.
  • Supported: Monitor server hardware health, perform capacity forecasting, and manage asset inventory. Remediate server issues remotely with built-in management actions.
  • Supported: Monitor VMware and Hyper-V environments to identify problems impacting application performance.
  • Supported: Centrally manage IT asset inventory and keep track of server hardware and software information.
  • Supported: Leverage the wealth of built-in alerts and reports, and easily customize them as needed.
  • Supported: SAM is an agentless monitoring software. Optional agent installation extends monitoring to the cloud.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots

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

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Videos

An introduction to and a brief overview of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
In this video, the TrustRadius team is going to take a look at Solarwinds Server and Application Monitor, a powerful tool that can help you monitor your systems and identify issues early. We'll explore the overview, user sentiment, pricing, top features, and use-case, and help...
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Watch SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Training Videos

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Competitors

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.

Progress WhatsUp Gold, Nagios Core, and Tivoli Monitoring (legacy) are common alternatives for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor.

Reviewers rate Server availability and performance monitoring highest, with a score of 9.8.

The most common users of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(648)

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

(1-25 of 159)
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September 14, 2022

Big, but effective

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We monitor servers and network gear to track uptime, and to alert when certain resource metrics are reached on a system (e.g., low disk space). My team does not use configuration management abilities. We're also working to integrate SNMP monitoring of data center power gear and PDUs, in order to get away from the vendor's proprietary client and to have our monitoring more standardized.
  • Server uptime monitoring
  • SNMP monitoring
  • Reporting
  • Network device monitoring
  • The web interface reloads when certain options are chosen from pop-up menus, which interrupts quick page navigation.
  • Configuring custom SNMP alerting is onerous.
  • I wish custom reporting was easier to use.
For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is part of my company's monitoring toolset which enhances the overall value proposition of our SolarWinds Orion investment. Being a global company, we currently utilize four Orion instances across multiple data centers and public cloud providers. SAM is currently monitoring on-prem and public cloud Windows and Linux-based applications in addition to providing latency metrics for RDS endpoints in AWS. SAM provides historic metrics in addition to being part of an overall toolset to troubleshoot issues in real-time.
  • Realtime monitoring of common OS and application metrics.
  • Visibility of past performance issues for server application events/issues.
  • Fast, out-of-the-box setup.
  • Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
  • Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
  • More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
A company that has already invested in the SolarWinds ecosystem can drive additional value by adding Server & Application Monitor. Installing and configuring the additional functionality of SAM can prove to be a very worthwhile investment in most situations. Templates for canned software make the setup quick and efficient. Companies that leverage multi-tiered/in-house applications or require precise details of performance across an entire stack will want to look at solutions from other vendors.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Little information about health and availability of applications. We need to better monitor our applications and handle applications in API format.
  • Handling API requests.
  • Monitoring SQL thresholds.
  • Monitoring DHCP pools.
  • Cover non-windows based applications.
  • API Poller doesn't provide friendly messages when getting issues to retrieve info.
  • Unable to edit Authorization Poller settings.
A good tool to use as rest API and to create different reports and alerts based on API information.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The tool is used to monitor the entire technology infrastructure allied with other vendors. Here it is useful to identify outages, failures, and performance degradation, the scope of action involves the communication, servers, services, and business layers. Through this monitoring, alarms, reports, integration with ITIL-based tools, and other items such as e-mail, SMS, and messaging applications are generated.
  • Monitors windows and linux servers.
  • NETFLOW based data traffic.
  • Scripting and automating actions.
  • Integration with other tools.
  • Robust and well-distributed architecture.
  • Constant updates and specialized support center.
  • Training and educational content.
  • Capacity reports.
  • Modern interface.
  • Possibility to use other OS and DB as platform software, in addition to Windows and SQL Server.
It can be used in medium and large companies, the capacity resources must be measured well to be able to guarantee that the monitoring health is satisfactory and well distributed, there are architectural scenarios with high availability and the monitoring schedule does not require many resources. There are several ready-made templates and a large amount of teaching material.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I work at a University and we use SolarWinds Server Application Monitor to monitor about 250 servers. We monitor in-house servers (inclusive of physical, VMware and Hyper-V) and cloud-based Azure deployments.
  • Alerts- SolarWinds Server Application Monitor can send alerts based on high disk and CPU usage as well as Server up/down among other criteria
  • Monitor Azure Severs
  • Monitor Hyper-V
  • Monitor VMware
  • Monitor SQL instances
  • Alerts can be easier to create. I understand the need for complex alerting and appreciate that but there should also be a simple way to create basic alerts
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a great product for server and application monitoring. We would have bought the product just to monitor in-house servers and applications, but the bonus of being able to handle Azure cloud was a welcome bonus for us.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor is a great comprehensive monitoring solution. It covers all aspects of your infrastructure via a modular approach. Server and Application Monitor module deals specifically with that: monitoring any server - physical or virtual, applications and services. It covers pretty much everything you want to monitor including hardware, performance, and system services. In addition to basic monitoring, it provides application monitoring via supplied templates for known applications such as SQL, Exchange, IIS, and Active Directory and allows to build custom monitoring templates for other applications.
  • Monitoring Windows servers
  • Monitoring applications and services
  • Alerts and reports
  • Real-time stats and status updates
  • Monitoring non-Microsoft OS
  • Database engine requires a lot of tuning and maintenance
  • Frequent updates and security vulnerabilities require immediate attention
Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor is well suited for monitoring any server - physical or virtual, applications and services. It excels in monitoring Microsoft OS and some of the major applications. It does a great job generating alerts, although that requires some time and effort investment. It also has an impressive library of canned reports that can be run manually or be scheduled. It does require additional effort and set up to monitor non-Microsoft servers, storage, and other devices
January 20, 2022

SolarWinds SAM review

Nick Darnell | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAM is used to monitor all of our existing production environment.
  • Hardware Monitoring
  • Alerting for down systems
  • Statistical information
  • None really, I just use what it provides.
Large companies or users who work remotely will find SAM useful for monitoring issues with servers in their production environment. It is much easier to have one application monitoring their systems then to manually monitor their systems one by one.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We utilize SAM to monitor our Windows servers and Linux servers for CPU Load and Physical Memory usage and drive capacity. We also utilize SAM to monitor the custom applications on our Linux server environment to make sure that the applications are up and that they are functioning properly.
  • Monitor CPU and Memory.
  • Monitor drive capacity.
  • Monitor hardware.
  • I would like the ability to modify custom application groups.
SAM is well suited for monitoring applications, Component response time, monitoring process and the CPU load that they are using, and monitoring the processes by the physical memory that they are using.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At my current company, we use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) to monitor both internal and externally hosted servers. This includes both virtual and physical boxes as well as both Windows Servers and LINUX flavors. We use Server & Application Monitor (SAM) in everything from Up/Down monitoring to memory, disk, CPU usages. We monitor processes and services and can create alerts based on these monitors.
  • SAM keeps historical data on usage so it is great to forecast resource needs such as RAM and CPU.
  • Alerts can be greatly customized and anyone from the local admin to the app owner can be alerted on the issue.
  • Hard to say what features are missing since it's more of the training of the user and their imagination which is most likely the bottleneck in most deployments.
We have both physical and virtual machines deployed not only in the U.S. but also in Canada and our SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) deployment monitors it all for us.
January 19, 2022

Solarwinds Review

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds provides us insights as to what is going on within our environment. We receive alerts on Solarwinds on Hardware failures or when drives start filling up, We will also receive alerts if the server goes down. This is helpful to us on the server team as it allows us to check in and see what happened while we were out of the office.
  • Hardware Health Overview.
  • Predicted Datastore Space Depletion.
  • Top 10 Volumes by Disk Space Used.
  • Lag when switching between pages.
The server team had a need for an application the provided comprehensive server monitoring. Solarwinds full filled that need.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We make use of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor throughout the whole organization. It has solved many issues for us, from quickly monitoring our infrastructure and alerting when systems are down, when resources (eg disk space) are running low to giving us a single view into our virtualization, network, as well as server environment. It is our number one tool for monitoring of the environment and allows us to not only be proactive when it comes to potential outages, but also allows us to quickly diagnose faults and incidents and resolve the outage quickly so that staff are able to carry on working.
  • The layout and feel of the product first and foremost. You can have a product which can do everything under the sun, however if it's lacking visually or hard to navigate, it's not very useful.
  • Seamless integration of assets between the various modules of SolarWinds, makes it a breeze to monitor or report on the environment.
  • Customisation - All aspects of the software is customisable, whether its reporting or when it comes monitoring configuration, SolarWinds SAM allows you to customise it fully to your environment so you achieve the best outcomes when it comes to monitoring and alerting.
  • The get the best out of it requires a decent amount of knowledge of the product. In saying that, you could absolutely get the basics up and running using their how-to's and built in wizards, and with continual use find your way around and customise it further to your environment to best serve your organisation/objectives.
Absolutely I would recommend the product. If you want a single product to monitor and manage your whole environment, whether it's hardware, servers (physical or virtualised), networking and all from a single "portal" Solarwinds SAM is what you want to use. You could quite easily start off with SAM, and then decide you wish to monitor the networking side of things, you can obtain the NTA/MPM module, if you wish to monitor IP address usage, or IP conflicts, DHCP etc., you can install the IPAM module. It all neatly integrates into the same portal, meaning you go to one address and all the information is there at your fingertips.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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