Proactive and Reactive Monitoring with SolarWinds SAM
March 08, 2016
Proactive and Reactive Monitoring with SolarWinds SAM
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We currently use SolarWinds SAM to monitor company-wide mission critical systems from both an up/down perspective as well as performance and response time. I have created many flexible, custom monitoring template to detect potential issues with systems such as Microsoft SQL server, MS Exchange, SAP, and our manufacturing and EDI systems.
It has become a critical tool for improving our responsiveness company-wide to existing issues as well as helping us to predict if there are potential issues that may arise, and allows us to react to problems very quickly with minimal to no perceived impacts to our end users.
It has become a critical tool for improving our responsiveness company-wide to existing issues as well as helping us to predict if there are potential issues that may arise, and allows us to react to problems very quickly with minimal to no perceived impacts to our end users.
- Instant problem identification
- Ability to easily and fully customize monitored components
- Gain insight into user application experience issues such as slow response times
- Occasional false positive results
- Quite expensive, as each monitored component (service/parameter) uses 1 license
- Positive impact: reduce response time to critical outages - usually before the end user is even aware there is an issue
- Positive Impact: troubleshooting performance issues becomes a matter of detection rather than experience, especially when looking at database applications
- Positive Impact: Ability to restart Windows services through the SAM console a huge gain when it comes to response time to recovery
The SolarWinds suite, including Orion, Network Performance Monitor, Patch Manager and SAM provide a cohesive, enterprise level monitoring platform that helps us to quickly diagnose issues at our divisions worldwide. It allows us to pinpoint the exact cause of an outage, and with historical data allows us to view trends that we can use to better predict when an issue may recur. Other products offer a wide variety of monitoring solutions, but none that I have used to date have the deep insight into the entire ecosystem that SolarWinds has. Also, the ability to fully customize any portion or area in SolarWinds allows us to see exactly what we need to see, in a manner that we can use to predict and react to issues suited to our environment, not some perfect-world ideal.