Skip to main content
TrustRadius
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.

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

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

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 …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

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

Popular Features

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

Pricing

View all pricing
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

Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?

17 people also want pricing

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.

Return to navigation

Features

Application Performance Management

Application performance management software monitors software to ensure performance and availability

8.7
Avg 7.6
Return to navigation

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 AppStack™ dashboardScreenshot of Microsoft Exchange performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Microsoft IIS performance monitoring with AppInsight™ 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...
 Show More

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).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(650)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a versatile tool that has been widely used across various industries and departments for monitoring and managing servers, applications, and network infrastructure. Users rely on the software to ensure that critical systems are up and running smoothly. With its ability to monitor servers, applications, and network nodes, customers appreciate the comprehensive insights it provides into their IT environments.

One of the key use cases of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is its role in proactive monitoring and alerting. Users have praised the software's capability to detect issues such as CPU utilization, memory usage, response time, and low disk space. By setting up corresponding alerts, users can address potential problems before they impact end-users. This proactive approach helps prevent system failures and ensures optimal performance.

Another important use case of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is its ability to provide detailed insights into server metrics and application performance. Users can monitor various elements such as CPU, memory, and disk usage on servers, as well as track the health of applications like Exchange, SQL, IIS, and SharePoint. The software's integration with other products in the SolarWinds Orion family enhances network management capabilities, allowing for a unified view of segmented networks.

Additionally, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is valued for its flexibility in monitoring different types of systems and services. It supports Windows, Linux, Unix, and AIX servers both on-premises and in the cloud. Users have leveraged the software to monitor services, processes, URLs, IP addresses, MAC addresses, SMTP devices like networked cameras, and even Linux services such as IPTables. This broad range of monitoring capabilities makes it a valuable tool for organizations with diverse IT infrastructures.

Overall, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor has proven to be instrumental in maintaining system stability by providing real-time alerts for potential issues and facilitating efficient troubleshooting. Its ease of use and customization options allow different departments and administrators to tailor monitoring and alerts to their specific needs. The software's comprehensive insights, proactive monitoring, and wide range of supported systems make it a valuable asset for organizations looking to ensure optimal performance and availability of their IT infrastructure.

Customizable Dashboard: Users appreciate the fully customizable dashboard in SolarWinds SAM, which allows them to tailor it to their specific requirements. This feature has been mentioned by several reviewers and enables users to easily access the information they need for effective monitoring.

Proactive Alerting: Reviewers have praised SAM's proactive alerting capabilities, with alerts being triggered for offline servers, low disk space, rebooted servers, and critical network device outages. This feature has been highly valued by users as it helps them stay on top of potential issues and address them promptly.

Reporting Capabilities: SAM's reporting capabilities have received positive feedback from users who find the detailed reports provided by the software helpful for meeting regulatory requirements and ensuring system stability and performance. The granularity in alerts and reporting has been mentioned by multiple reviewers as a valuable feature of SAM.

Confusing User Interface: Users have expressed frustration with the user interface of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, stating that it is confusing and difficult to navigate. Some users feel that there is a steep learning curve and find it overwhelming, especially for first-time users.

Lack of Comprehensive Documentation: Several users have criticized the documentation provided for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, stating that it is spotty and lacking in examples. They believe that more comprehensive and detailed documentation would greatly aid in understanding and troubleshooting the software.

Poor Customer Support: There have been complaints about the customer support provided by SolarWinds. Multiple users have reported that customer support has worsened over time, causing frustration due to delays in reaching the correct support team and resolving issues in a timely manner.

Users have recommended several key actions for users considering SolarWinds based on their experiences. These include:

  • Recommending utilizing the software for internal use, specifically for monitoring servers and applications.
  • Suggesting taking advantage of the free trial to test the software before making a purchase decision.
  • Advising researching and planning before implementation to ensure the software is suitable for one's needs.
  • Encouraging careful design of the environment, especially when using the software in different locations.
  • Recommending purchasing a license that matches the number of components needed for monitoring.
  • Urging cautiousness when it comes to support and potential glitches with the software.
  • Suggesting working with a detail-oriented engineer for proper setup and configuration.
  • Promoting interaction with the user community site to learn from others' experiences and share knowledge.
  • Emphasizing the need to understand the licensing model before signing up and selecting appropriate licensing based on the number of nodes to be monitored.
  • Suggesting exploring other SolarWinds offerings and using them in conjunction with this software.

While users find SolarWinds to be a valuable tool, they also mention that it may not be suitable for beginners due to its learning curve. Overall, it is recommended to carefully consider setup, pricing, and requirements before implementing SolarWinds.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(201-225 of 278)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are using the server and application monitor to ensure high performance to our end users. We utilize it to track down performance issues, hardware issues and network issues before the users are able to see the issue. Our end users are very sensitive to performance slowdowns, and with our VDI infrastructure, if one user sees an issue, they all do.
Nathan Tennant | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Currently it is deployed to monitor our IT infrastructure. We use it to monitor the network, servers, virtual infrastructure, services, UPS, workstations and printers. This monitoring is across the entire organization though other departments are not currently using or monitoring these resources. We are attempting to define customer pain points and proactively monitor for the causes of those pain-points. In addition we use SolarWinds to help us efficiently resolve issues in a re-active situation such as site outages or unplanned service outages.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor our hosted application servers in our third party cloud environment. It is currently only being used by our Technical Services department. It address our need to have constant data on our application servers to ensure they are running smoothly.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAM is pretty detailed oriented. No joke - It is a full-time job managing it. Once it is configured and working - it does an awesome job. I had to configure the custom alerts from scratch. The out of the box alerts are not that granular and it is hard to understand. Overall it is a great product once fully configured.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is our one-stop shop for monitoring all of our nodes. SolarWinds Server & Application Manager (SAM) is a great tool that really gets under the hood of the OS and APP layer and can give you some really good detailed information about your environment.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We currently use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor an enterprise cloud based VoIP solution for several state agencies. We also recommend it as an NMS solution to companies we provide professional services to when they are searching for a solid and reliable monitoring solution for our product. It provides us the ability to stand up our system and quickly implement a network/server monitoring solution for a wide variety of clients.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
SAM is being used only by the IT Infrastructure team, but also a few of our Application Analysts. We use it primary to monitor and alert on our TIER 1, critical SQL Server Databases, and some IIS service. We also use it to monitor specific attributes of our Exchange server, Tomcat servers, and VMWARE environment.

It also monitors our Active Directory services and counters, as well as AD security auditing. It will notify my team if there are any changes to any user account in AD. We also use it to alert when specific services go down, or if SQL Server falls outside of certain thresholds...such as TEMPDB growing to rapidly, or if indexes become too fragmented.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is being used across the entire organization and it helps us monitor the hardware and application health and performance of our systems. We use this product to monitor our IT assets spread across multiple geographies.
September 04, 2018

Wow great product

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Logging in to the web console gives access to a wealth of information that is available to you on your servers and the applications that run on them. There is a whole bunch of templates and alerts already available to you for both physical and virtual servers.

A multitude of information can become available from the web app by selecting from a series of tabs and dropdown menus, ideal for troubleshooting and getting to the root cause of problems. You can drill down into servers to be presented with metrics dashboards which are all customisable. SAM is a complex tool that is usable with minimal training. But the more you use and learn, the more powerful SAM becomes.

Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our use is company-wide on all of our production servers, network devices and UPSs. Many of the existing servers are old and unreliable. Solarwinds has been deployed to get to the root cause of the routine outages and address some of the SQL issues.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
I use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor in the small data center at my company to monitor all endpoints, as well as the virtual and physical server infrastructure that we use. I also use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor all of our Cisco networking equipment, and the APC server racks in the data center. Access to SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is mostly restricted to the Network Operations team, but the entire IT department has read-only access to several monitoring only dashboards in order to assist the NetOps team with keeping an eye on everything. The team likes SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor because the dashboards provide an easy to read overview of system status and network health.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
The site my company and I manage uses SolarWinds Server and App Monitor to monitor all endpoints of our network. Primarily we use it for our virtual infrastructure but do use it for our physical infrastructure as well. Additional physical infrastructure monitoring is used for networking and APC systems. It's pretty much a one-stop-shop for monitoring as it gives us a great visual overview of our network. We handle a lot of highly sensitive and high availability products so utilizing this in our shop is extremely beneficial. Most of our IT department has, at minimum read-only but administrative access is used by other sections primarily server, VDI, cybersecurity, and networking.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Solarwinds Server and Application is currently being used by the IT Systems Engineering team of the IT Department. It is used to monitor the health, services and statistics of all infrastructure devices and web servers across the organization.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor in our small datacenter to monitor all endpoints, as well as our physical and virtual server infrastructure. We also use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor all CISCO networking equipment, and our APC server racks. Access to SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is mostly restricted to our NetOps team, but the entire IT shop has read-only access to several monitoring-only dashboards. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor dashboards provide a nice at-a-glance overview of system status and network health.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Having SolarWinds in our environment has been very helpful as you can see issues across the environment and prove or disprove something very quickly and easily. The reporting and alerting have been helpful in finding and resolving issues.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SAM to monitor a number of in-house applications and their underlying infrastructure (IIS, SQL and Windows service monitors). Custom alerts are defined to alert application support teams of potential issues before the users start opening tickets. Our DBAs use AppInsight for SQL to monitor database health and work with the development teams when applications are thrashing the databases.
Jamie Webster | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SAM to monitor application and server health across the entire organization. Email alerts can easily be customized to let us know when an application service is down or not behaving up to expectations.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor on a day to day basis. Setting up the software was easy. We just create our subnets and the software scans the subnet and does the rest. We created different types of alerts for different devices. We have over 300 servers, applications, and networks we monitor. We have alerts tied to specific applications which alert different departments that handle those applications. We created a helpdesk node monitor to display on our TVs. It will show the current status of critical servers and items that are down. We manage 33 different locations that all connect to our data center. It is important to know when there is an outage for one of our locations. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor alerts us when it happens so we can get the issue resolved. It is a great product to have!
Justin Harrison | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It has helped with automated scripts running via Scheduled tasks. When they go down, so do our automated processes. Some small and some very important tasks that need to stay running. We also use it for SQL Events which the Dev team uses for keeping their applications up and running for the company.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SAM to monitor our servers, applications and network components. Specifically, I use SAM to monitor database performances and critical services related to our mission-critical applications. SAM allows me to receive real-time alerts to head off service interruptions before our end-users are affected.
Bear Golightly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds SAM in conjunction with SolarWinds NPM to monitor, visualize, and alert on various IT components via email alerts, dashboards, and even a NOC view that is displayed on a large screen. Business stakeholders are often included in the email alerts, so they are aware when issues arise that affect them/their department.
Miguel Angel Merino Vega | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor our applications and databases, both in our development and production environments. Additionally, we recommend and implement SAM to our customers, especially those who work with third-party applications. SAM allows us to have a centralized control of our IT assets. SAM lets us know when an application is using many resources at best, and in the worst case it lets us know when a container like Amazon EC2 or Tomcat is down. Regarding our customers, in addition to the above, SAM allows us (and them) to determine reasonability for the performance of our applications compared to others of the client property (our outsourcing partners).
Return to navigation