A lazy man's review (I prefer Set it and forget it) of Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor.
February 10, 2016
A lazy man's review (I prefer Set it and forget it) of Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We use SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to address the problem of applications that have stopped functioning, running out of control or are lagging behind in their expected performance. It is so useful we even use it to assist sister companies around the world monitor their applications. It also allows us to give a more in depth look to management via reporting on how their environments are running.
Pros
- The ability to quickly and easily create your own application monitors for those custom applications means you never have to say no when a customer of yours wants to make sure their application is running optimally is a huge benefit.
- Out of the box, Server & Application Monitoring begins to deliver value throughout your infrastructure. Just be careful as some results can be shocking that some apps you thought were fine might not be. The proactive stance that your customers will see you taking will be worth it however.
- As always, the Thwack community has your back if you have questions or want a one off monitor that might be better constructed than your programming skills might allow. It is also very nice that the SolarWinds employees are active in the community to help in really tough situations or answer a question that you don't feel warrants opening a ticket.
Cons
- I tend to get a lot of false negatives with the new built in IIS and SQL monitors, so many that I no longer use them and find it annoying that they keep trying to hit every computer I import.
- Navigating the SAM settings page can be very confusing unless you use it a lot (in which case you might be doing something wrong since SolarWinds is largely set it and forget it). It would be nice if it were in a more hierarchical setup.
- If you do set up an application monitor incorrectly you can email bomb yourself or worse your customers very quickly. Test, test, test!
- Minimizing application downtime has been huge. Forwarned is forearmed and the more information you have always makes for a faster resolution.
- SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor allows my department to be more proactive and less reactive. This in turn allows us to look more into what we WANT to do rather than just firefighting and fending off upset users.
- The ROI for my department was instantaneous as we went from 0 - 100 instantaneously and used the results we saw to immediately improve things people might not have even known were a problem but saw the benefits of later.
in the past we have used Nagios and every monitoring tool that comes from the vendor of the machines that we purchased. Nagios had a lot of administrative overhead and tons of development time. Vendor solutions can be nice, however there is no single pane of glass at that point and they might not monitor what you think is important.
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