SolarWinds Helps Utilities
February 15, 2016

SolarWinds Helps Utilities

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Currently our SAM solution is being utilized by our IT Department to send out notifications of services which are down. When a service notification is received it is helpful to know where the problem is whether it is a service or a server. We are more efficient in getting problems solved in a shorter amount of time.
  • SNMP Monitor allows you to use simple SNMP calls to a server to monitor processes whether it is on a Windows machine or a Linux/Unix machine.
  • Exchange monitor can help to baseline your environment using best practices from Microsoft while allowing it to be customized to your environment.
  • Alerting can be setup on a process, server, or other items defined to alert you of a problem and if a fix has been successful.
  • Sometimes it is hard to find out where to customize a built in monitoring component.
  • I wish it were easier to know where to add in additional components to a custom monitor.
  • It would be helpful if you could acknowledge an alarm / alert from the Component Monitor page instead of the alerts page.
  • We have been able to identify using SAM to understand if a server is short on resources and if we need to plan for an upgrade, physical change, or give additional resources, virtual change.
  • Locating process that may be hung to know where we may need to start troubleshooting.
The TCO for SolarWinds was more realistic for what we had to spend. We can't afford a lot of solutions and having one that is able to handle a lot well is useful.
The App Aware (aka AppInsight) monitors while they are nice sometimes don't allow you to fully customize them to your needs without some headache.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application monitoring
8
Database monitoring
Not Rated
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
Not Rated
Application performance management console
7
Collaboration tools
Not Rated
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
Not Rated
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
8
Server availability and performance monitoring
7
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
Not Rated
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Support

Sometimes it takes a while to get an issue resolved. There was only one instance where I had to call in on the same issue.
ProsCons
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Difficult to get immediate help
Not Sure - I am unaware of Premium Support through SolarWinds.
I had called in about an issue I had been experiencing for quite some time. Unfortunately I was unable to get the problem resolved right away. I had gone 4 months before I was able to get back to my problem. I opened up a new case and had the issue resolved within 30 minutes. The support person was extremely knowledgeable and was able to get my problem addressed quickly.