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Very Happy with Solarwinds SAM
Updated December 11, 2020

Very Happy with Solarwinds SAM

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We use SAM to monitor all of our servers (across 4 different sites in North America) as well as our store registers (Over 350 stores). We report and get alerts on disk space, high CPU/Memory usage, running processes and just implemented AppInsight for Exchange (which is awesome).
  • AppInsight for Exchange gives us stats on DB sizes, mailbox sizes, errors, ETC.
  • Email alerts let people in our organization who don't normally log into Solarwinds, get notified of any possible problems
  • Historical reporting lets us see trends over time for CPU, memory, repsonse times, disk space, ETC.
  • I, personally, had a hard time figuring out how to add AppInsight for Exchange and had a tough time finding any documentation on it. When I figured it out, it was easy, but took me quite a while (and numerous attempts) to get there.
  • The new web reporting is difficult to use. In the end, I love how the reports look, but i have to spend a lot of time to get there.
  • We get a lot of alerts that we aren't sure what they really mean. A better explanation of why an alert occurred or what it means could be useful in finding the root cause.
  • We had a problem where servers would stop responding because they were out of disk space. Now we get email notifications when a disk is at 90% capacity to either add more disk or remove files before it gets to 100%
  • We get notified if a server goes down. During off hours, we can address this problem and get the server working again so there's no impact. During business hours, we can get to the problem before most users report an issue.
  • Reports for maximum CPU and memory from certain production servers let us know if more resources need to be added to stay efficient.
I was not involved in selecting Solarwinds
We use it to monitor all of our servers (over 500) and over 750 Windows XP machines in our retail stores. We find that we get a lot of false-positive alerts on the more in-depth component monitors so we have shy'd away from using them - mostly because I am unsure what they actually mean.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
6.1
Application monitoring
9
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
3
Application performance management console
4
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
3
Virtualization monitoring
4
Server availability and performance monitoring
10
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
7
IT Asset Discovery
5

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Premier Support

ROI

In my experience, setting up alerts and monitors for services or processes isn't difficult once you understand the software. But with Solarwinds SAM, it was almost too easy. I found it to very intuitive to create exactly the alerts that I wanted to see, or the dashboards for our NOC operators. Another issue with monitoring tools is that they will generally fire off so many email alerts, that people will start to filter them out and defeat the entire purpose. We were able to create specific alerts with thresholds so that 95% of the time, if we received an alert after hours, we new it was important.