1. Home
  2. Application Performance Management (APM) Software
  3. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Reviews
  4. User Review of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SAM from the perspective of MS SQL and application monitoring
Updated August 13, 2018

SAM from the perspective of MS SQL and application monitoring

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

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.
  • SAM gives excellent out-of-the-box insight into database performance.
  • SAM's flexibility and configurability allows us to add our own custom metrics. For instance, I currently have a query I wrote that checks a table and sends me an alert when performance is beyond my set threshold.
  • I find setting up new pages in SAM to less than intuitive.
  • Setting up new alerts can be cumbersome depending on the alert type.
  • In the past we didn't have a good view into email outages in one of our applications. We only knew when the end-users called. However, using SAM alerts, we now we know email is down before anyone else.
I don't have experience with other monitoring systems.
Again, database performance (being the area I monitor most) from SAM is excellent.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
8.8
Application monitoring
9
Database monitoring
9
Threshold alerts
9
Predictive capabilities
Not Rated
Application performance management console
Not Rated
Collaboration tools
Not Rated
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
8
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
Not Rated
Server availability and performance monitoring
9
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
Not Rated
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated

Feature Questions

The product is one of the most usable we own. Even though the processes are complex Solarwinds has created a surprisingly intuitive UI. Additional products are quick to setup and support has always been helpful if we get stuck. I rate it at 9 simply because I don't give 10s. Nothing is perfect in technology.
  • Identifying failed processes such as OS updates, APIs, SQL Agent, etc.
  • Alerting for OS level resource contentions like CPU and memory.
  • Correlating SQL statistics for resource and index tuning
  • A host of network-related issues.
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
Functionality. The SolarWind products provide a large feature set out-of-the-box. The stock templates are simply invaluable. They provide information that is immediately useful and industry standard.