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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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Learn from top reviewers

Big, but effective

Rating: 8 out of 10
September 14, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 configurat...
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Will Enestvedt
Manager - Information Technology
Unix Team Manager
Johnson & Wales University
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor4 years of experience

SolarWinds is a useful resource for IT Management

Rating: 9 out of 10
June 15, 2022
Vetted ReviewVerified User
We use SolarWinds as our inventory management tool and it is an invaluable resource that allows us to keep track of all of the computers and the software installed on our comp...
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Connie Inman
Supervisor - Other
Senior IT Technologist II & Desktop Support Supervisor
University of Tennessee
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor6 years of experience

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review

Rating: 9 out of 10
April 21, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is part of my company's monitoring toolset which enhances the overall value proposition of our SolarWinds Orion investment. B...
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Mike Hochstein
Director - Information Technology
Senior Director, Infrastructure Architecture & Standards
Cision
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor10 years of experience

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is good tool to monitor your applications and make calls via APIs.

Rating: 8 out of 10
February 6, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
Little information about health and availability of applications. We need to better monitor our applications and handle applications in API format.
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Fabio Silva
Engineer - Information Technology
Senior Network Engineer
Fexco
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor2 years of experience

Safe, robust and reliable.

Rating: 8 out of 10
February 1, 2022
IncentivizedVetted ReviewVerified User
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 s...
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Rafael Santos
Administrator - Information Technology
Monitoring Specialist
Fleetcor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor1 year of experience
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Pricing

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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

N/A
Unavailable

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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Features

Application Performance Management

Application performance management software monitors software to ensure performance and availability

8.6
Avg 7.7
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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 Integrations

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Competitors

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish

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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Comparisons

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Reviews From Top Reviewers

View all reviews
(1-5 of 159)

SolarWinds SAM - perfect for standard environments, messy to customize in atypical settings

Rating: 4 out of 10
Incentivized
February 11, 2016
LG
Larry Gross
Senior System Administrator
NFP (Financial Services, 1001-5000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
  • 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.)
Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you have a standard IIS environment where little customization is required and can use dedicated SQL resources, SAM shines. It is easy to use, easy to configure and just works out of the box. If your environment required heavy customization or you only need to utilize a portion of the AppInsight modules... you may need to look elsewhere because the setup is a headache. The problem? For the cost, there are few application that provide the level, ease-of-use, and reliability of auto-remediation that SolarWinds provides in SAM. So, this may still be for you, but make sure you budget time and take advantage of all of their free educational tools and prepare for a lot of calls to support to help you overcome this hurdle.

Easy to set-up with solid performance

Rating: 10 out of 10
Incentivized
December 13, 2020
MN
Mike Narumiya
Director of Data and Information Systems
North Central Texas Trauma RAC (Hospital & Health Care, 11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
10 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
  • Ease of use, simple and easy to set-up and issue.
  • Priced right for our organization.
Cons
  • Having so many modules, can take some doing to understand what you need or want.
  • Additional mobile app/device monitoring.
Likelihood to Recommend
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.

be prepared to roll up your sleeves

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
July 15, 2020
BB
Bret Brutlag
Sr. Systems Administrator
GateHouse Media (Newspapers, 5001-10,000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
4 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our environment is very distributed throughout the United States. SAM gives me good insight to what's happening in our various data centers and local sites, in addition to the valuable information that I am getting from NPM about the nodes themselves, resource usage and other metrics. Thanks to the SAM alerts and App Insight I am able to better tune the applications that we are monitoring (AD/SQL mostly). It has exposed some misconfigurations on our SQL servers and lack of resources on some servers. In addition to identifying servers that needed more resources to be allocated we identified some nodes that were over provisioned allowing us to reclaim processors, memory and storage.

If I were to offer a criticism it would be that between NPM, SAM and other SolarWinds monitors that are part of the suite there can be an overwhelming amount of data. It isn't trivial to tweak what you are monitoring and getting alerts for. Depending on the size of the environment don't be surprised if it takes a lot of resources (human time) to get it setup and working to suit you. It will work doing a next, next install but you can end up getting overwhelmed by data you might not care about.

Pros
  • SAM and App Insight are handy to look at the whole environment. When looking at a node I can see how that fits into the whole enterprise. If a issue is reported I can see that there might be some environmental issue at the root of the problem and not necessarily the server that is being reported. For instance the SQL server is fine but a switch upstream from that server is having issue or there is a internet circuit down. This saves a lot of troubleshooting time.
  • When you see monitors that are out of tolerance there are immediate resources to help make sense of the reported issue. Not just that something is out of sorts but why.
  • The metrics that are collected simplifies the process of identifying trends and the predictability monitors do a good job of letting you know that not only are resources are becoming tight on a node but a estimate when they will become critical. This give you that chance to plan for the growth instead if a reaction to some critical event.
Cons
  • I have used both WhatsUp Gold and SolarWinds. One item that I think WhatsUp does particularly well is customizing the user interface for each user. Customizing the interface in SolarWinds is cumbersome. A change to a page layout by one user affects all users that use that page. The security is very granular and it can take some work to get what you need. There is nothing ad hoc about it. But this is more of a complaint about the whole Orion interface that displays the SAM data in addition to data from all the other modules.
  • I would also like to see some improvements in node configuration, I would like for it to be easier to manage nodes as groups. You can groups nodes together for monitoring purposes but there isn't an obvious way to manage them as a group for instance add/remove monitors and pollers. I would like to see a feature to add a server to a group and it automatically gets a predefined set of pollers and monitors assigned.
  • The new modern Dashboard should have shipped with more canned items, a fair representation from the standard legacy offerings. At a minimum the newest SAM release should have included at AppInsight standard items. The Dynamic Designer is difficult to use because no example of whats returned for a is provided. Without an intimate knowledge of the schema its cumbersome.
Likelihood to Recommend
With a limited operations staff it would be next to impossible to get the insight into all the server and applications stacks in our environment. The reality is that there would be issues that would go undiscovered for who knows how long. If there's no smoke you might not notice many issues. SolarWinds Server & Application Manager (SAM) has worked well for us to work with application owners to show that performance issues that they may perceive are not part of the environment but the application configuration. The biggest benefit to me is just shortening the time to resolution for issues and more importantly providing me with information that allows me to be proactive and attack problems before they are noticed by our users.

SolarWinds alerts free up our time from constant reporting.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized
November 18, 2018
KP
Kay Peek
Systems Engineer
Epiq Systems (Legal Services, 5001-10,000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
3 years of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We currently use SolarWinds as an uptime monitor as well as software configuration. It also serves as the main source of reporting on disk space and network utilization for our organization. We use it in combination with SCCM and ServiceNow to be able to prove the growing needs of our department and the current issues that our systems teams need to address.
Pros
  • Uptime reporting
  • Memory Utilization reporting
  • CPU Utilization reporting
  • Managing and sending alerts
Cons
  • Adding servers is not as intuitive as I'd like. It seems like there are multiple places to add, but only one method is correct.
  • There's a learning curve for new users to have to get past in understanding the administrative portions.
  • Sleeping email alerts for times during maintenance windows is not something we have gotten fully worked out.
Likelihood to Recommend
SolarWinds has served us well for reporting and making sure those outside the IT domain have the information they need and want for assessing our situation but in a domain with untrusted subdomains, it does have issues with permissions. That is more of an issue with our particular setup than the tool as multiple tools we use have those issues, but an issue nonetheless.

Solarwinds Review

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized
February 22, 2016
EW
Erron Walter
Systems Operations Specialist
Venable LLP (Law Practice, 501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Verified User
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
1 year of experience
View profile
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
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.
Pros
  • 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.
Cons
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
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