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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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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
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May 01, 2019
While I don't hate Server & Application Monitor, it is my least favorite SolarWinds product.
- Notifies us of failures on scheduled tasks on our Windows automation servers and if it eventually starts working again.
- Maintains statistics on how chatty a service is on a server.
- A strong user community. If SolarWinds does not have an alert for a service, then usually you can locate one that another customer developed in the forums.
- Monitoring IIS, AD, Exchange, SQL will consume a lot of your licenses.
- Configuring the latest IIS is more difficult than monitoring other services.
- Wi-Fi traffic monitoring.
- Physical server monitoring.
- Virtual server monitoring.
- A simplified way to add the dashboard to a Sharepoint page.
- Could be a less resource intensive product.
April 30, 2019
Solid offering that is at a great price-point.
- SolarWinds SAM has a very comprehensive alerting capability. It is easy to set up automated alerts that notify technicians in the event of an issue.
- The built-in application monitor templates are very helpful so that during setup we do not have to build everything from scratch.
- The highlight of SolarWinds SAM is the AppInsight templates. These purpose-built application monitors provide very detailed information that would be difficult to obtain manually.
- It would be beneficial if users had more control over editing the AppInsight templates. There are some built-in monitors that don't apply in all scenarios but they cannot be manually disabled which generates a "false-positive" alert.
- More AppInsight templates for other applications such as SharePoint would be beneficial.
April 30, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is my one point of looking across my environment.
- We have simple monitors combined with alerts such as monitoring drive volumes and alerting the OS team when needed or the application owners depending on the drive.
- We have a high priority DNS internal farm that is monitored, tested, and alerted if anything ever fails any of the customized tests.
- One of the few issues I have is the user rights granularity. I would like a lot more options.
April 27, 2019
Quick Review of SolarWinds SAM
- You can create custom alerts for basically anything.
- The dashboard has a clean look. Easy for a nontechnical person to understand.
- The application is very stable. I had no issues with it so far.
- The product gets new features once or twice a year, which is nice.
- The support is very good.
- A bit of a learning curve to figure out how to use it the way you want it. Creating custom alerts can be complicated.
- The software requires to be on the latest SQL server (2019 or 2016). We currently use 2012 so I can not upgrade SAM to the latest version.
- I get some false positive alerts sometimes. It could be my environment but it would be nice for SAM to gather some log data when that alert has happened so it would be easier to troubleshoot.
April 27, 2019
Easy, yet informative, server and application monitoring
- Visual reports of historical data.
- Alerting team when something is going wrong.
- Analyzing server performance in real-time.
- It would be nice to overlay metrics on the same graph, so we can compare metrics.
April 25, 2019
IT Infrastructure Monitoring that is Easy to Manage
- Easy to manage.
- Allows us to identify issues before they cause outages.
- Customized alerting.
- Integration with the full Orion suite to get a complete picture.
- In-depth customization can take some time.
- Price.
April 24, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor perfect for monitoring applications and servers for issues
- It has some out of the box commonly used application monitors for Windows
- It has some out of the box commonly used application monitors for Linux
- You can set up custom application monitors for Windows systems
- You can set up custom application monitors for Linux systems
- I wish there was more out of the box Linux application monitors
- I wish it could communicate with TR-069 for monitoring our LTE
April 23, 2019
My review
- Very good in-depth detail on memory utilization.
- SQL Agent Jobs: I would like to see in a single report what are the SQL Agent jobs that failed on all the servers last night.
- Database Backups: I would like to see in a single report what are the backups that failed on all the servers last night.
- SQL Server Error Logs of all the servers in production environment in a single report.
- Real time monitoring
- Health of servers
- Health of network
- Ease of use
- Ease of other user management
- Initial learning curve
April 21, 2019
All that your infrastructure needs
- Monitoring servers for performance.
- A configurable alerting system -- for things like high RAM or CPU usage, disk space limits on mounted folders, unexpected shutdowns.
- Reports-- a wide selection of reports (a total of 145 in our instance).
- Performance analytics -- a nice UI feature that lets you build an analysis of the servers you need to monitor for performance issues.
- It's slow most of the times -- we are monitoring hundreds of servers from the datacenter, and going through the screens to look at your server may take some time.
- It is not monitoring all servers in our environment, maybe because of the performance issues. If I need to add one (as a user) I have to send a request to IT, and it may take a few days.
- The User Interface could use an uplift; nowadays people's requirements for usability and user experience are at a very high standard.
- Hardware checks
- Latency checks
- Solid issue reporting
- Mapping could be better.
April 20, 2019
Server and Application total visibility
- Full stack monitoring from the User to the App server.
- Most common apps are supported out of the box.
- Create custom app templates for in house apps.
- There can be a significant learning curve to take full advantage of the product.
- Somewhat limited without integration with other SolarWinds Orion products.
- Reporting requires some SQL knowledge to use them to their full potential.
- Alerts about issues with applications.
- Provides an easy to read and understand dashboard.
- Works well with NPM.
- Costly
- License-based
- Implementation is easy. With a list of IPs/Hostname a mass add, gets you up and running.
- Ability to create custom dashboards help with users seeing their specific items.
- App insights help finding and monitoring on application specific items.
- Dashboard creation is a bit clunky, there are maybe 1 or 2 many clicks
- Hard to edit a template for just one application. For example, if I only want IIS monitoring for app A, I must go into the template to edit for those servers.
March 25, 2019
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, it's like a baby monitor for Servers and Applications.
- SAM provides quite a few application templates and the THWACK (SolarWinds Users Group) user community has hundreds more. There is a huge amount of support for the SolarWinds platform making it easy to get help.
- Lots of customization can be done to tailor the monitoring to a particular application. Templates can be tweaked to add, delete or change the way the application is being monitored. For clustered applications, you can set the level of urgency. By that, if you have multiple clustered application servers and one goes down, it is usually not as critical as an application residing on a single server. The application is still up but degraded whereas the single server application is down. This helps prioritize what needs to be looked a t first.
- With SAM you can set up one pane of glass to see what your application servers are doing. It's usually one of my first stops when I'm looking at what's happening during an outage. A lot of time s you can see what is happening on the server/s and know where to begin troubleshooting.
- When used in conjunction with other SolarWinds products it can give you insight into whats going on in the environment. You can see if the issue is with the server or in some other area such as storage or virtualization. It can really speed up your ability to find the issue and correct the problem.
- Setting up alerts is a bit clunky. It's quite powerful but not that intuitive. There is a bit of a learning curve there.
- The same could be said for setting up and testing application groups from a template. The interface is a real pain to use and the method for looking up applicable servers is, in our case, very slow and inefficient. I must note that we have a huge network over 130,000 network elements so this may not be an issue for smaller installations.
- While SAM supports PowerShell an Python scripting, the documentation for this is sparse. You have to do a lot of playing around to figure out how it all works.
March 15, 2019
I've got my eye on you, services.
- Monitoring critical services.
- Telling which services are taxes the server the most.
- Rebooting services in a single pane of glass.
- Integrate the alert monitoring into the application monitor steps. Like a tab for setting up monitoring that is not required as it is difficult for newer users to set up the monitor and then set an alert on the monitor.
February 19, 2019
Great product, core functionality is very strong!
- Hardware monitoring is the main reason we bought the product, and we use it to monitor over 4,000 servers.
- It also great for network monitoring, although we use other products for this function also. This is mostly because we are a big, siloed organization and is less to do with any issues with the functionality provided.
- Application monitoring is also a capability of Orion. We have experimented with its function, but we have not rolled it out full-scale.
- You still need other tools, so it is not a true enterprise solution. We still use products like Splunk for detailed log info and ThousandEyes to see when/where users are logging into our apps. There are also other products in use like ExtraHop and Dynatrace, but I believe that is more a function of my organization and less to do with product capabilities.
- Sales methodology is very different because they don't travel and have a rep out in front of you. They do everything remotely, so if you are a big company this may take some getting used to.
- The licensing/contracting model is unique. Everything is recurring on a set of data every year. They don't do MSA or SOW, just agree to the EULA and pay for the product. Again, I think this is different than what most large companies are used to.
February 02, 2019
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor -- come out of the dark and see the light!
- SAM has excellent out-of-the-box templates for monitoring common applications and services. These are easily adaptable to your own needs, and the THWACK community provided templates give you even more options!
- The SolarWinds interface is intuitive and easy to use. Even though the options and depth of configuration are very customizable, it never feels overwhelming. The help and documentation are top-notch.
- Naturally a rooter for the underdog, I was skeptical of SolarWinds at first, as it holds a huge market share. However, after using this product for several years, it is clear why it is the market leader. Fantastic product and it is continually improving! Customer feedback and suggestions are taken seriously.
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a super product, but it could use a simplified way of configuring user permissions. It is very granular and powerful, but it would be nice to have some pre-configured roles.
- Automatic Load balancing of polling server workload would be a great added feature.
- They ask for three improvements, but honestly, I can only think of 2!
February 02, 2019
Best Server and Application Monitoring Tool
- Linux Monitoring -- Really helps with Linux server monitoring. There are inbuilt application monitoring templates for Apache Tomcat which we leverage.
- Windows Monitoring -- Helps to monitor AD, DNS, DHCP, High CPU, memory utilization.
- Single dashboard monitoring of all our servers.
- The Server & Application Monitor has a dependency with another SolarWinds module, which is the Network Performance Monitor.
- The dashboard can get too crowded if the number of servers is more. We monitor more than 500 servers in a single dashboard. Sometimes the hostnames overlap, causing confusion.
- An agent is required to be added to all servers.
February 02, 2019
SAM keep an eye on the little things
- SolarWinds keeps an eye on all of the various services we need to keep track of. DHCP, DNS, Radius, HTTPS, SQL...all running under an automated observer. Find out something is slowing down or failing BEFORE the client calls come in.
- Integration into the Orion suite allows SolarWinds to provide more information to the node stack. DPA lets us see the database, NPM the network and SAM the server service. Get a quick glance at where to start troubleshooting
- SolarWinds has a ton of canned services to monitor. There's little setup involved to get a DHCP monitor up and running. Server & Application Monitor also includes the ability to add in custom services if you can't find the one you're looking for.
- Initial set up is easy. So easy that you can flood your views with services you didn't need to know about because you "checked all."
- Canned templates can be vague as to what they are monitoring.
- Views of the information range from overwhelming lists to graphs lacking depth.
February 01, 2019
Great product
- Alerting, it does a great job of letting our techs know when there is a problem and the severity of it.
- We use Netpath to monitor a path to a monitored server and look for issues along that path
- We use it to monitor our wireless infrastructure.
- I would like to see the web interface respond faster, at times it can become sluggish.
February 01, 2019
Solar-wins in many areas
- General alerting for VM overutilization, CPU, RAM, etc.
- Specific service level alerts and monitoring.
- Alert grouping by email distribution list and escalation.
- Log and Event manager needs to be integrated with the SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor web console.
January 28, 2019
SolarWinds SAM to the rescue!
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is very efficient at letting you know if there is a service that's not responding for some reason. It sends you an email notification along with a visual for monitoring.
- SAM is very good at reporting when a service or server comes back up. So if you're doing a reboot or an update SAM will notify you when it's back up. SAM makes things easy to monitor.
- SAM is very easy to setup and maintain.
- The only thing I feel could be improved upon is the interface. Making some minor tweaks to be more appealing to the eye. But still, I love this product.
January 25, 2019
Easy to use product at a reasonable price!!
- A wide variety of applications and OSs supported.
- Easy to use interface that is web-based.
- Large built-in scripting library and the ability to import scripts.
- Added monitoring abilities for SQL, Exchange, and IIS.
- The product is a resource hog. The CPU, RAM, and database bloat need to be improved.
- Not a ton of support for Linux.
- This product requires NPM as well to give you full insight into a machine and its performance.
- Canned reports are not great, you will need to customize to get what you want/need.