The "bullet point" Solarwinds SAM Review
March 08, 2016
The "bullet point" Solarwinds SAM Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
It is primarily used by the IT department to monitor performance and availability of servers and applications. We often use it to monitor external web site performance form venders providing us hosted services. It assists us in planning for future resources.
- We configure SAM to monitor external web sites for http response. This is particularly valuable when there are hosted service performance issues. SAM allows us to show the vendor their site performance from our perspective.
- We get one tab click to see SQL Server performance and health and a table with the top most expensive queries. Since the exact query is presented we can hand this off to the database administrator or developer for review and remediation.
- Grouping allows us to place all assets related to a particular function in a single unit to get a quick one button click of high level health of that asset.
- Single pane integration with NPM and NCM is extremely helpful!
- Assigning application monitors is confusing, the organization of application monitors is inconsistent. Do I want "web server" or "IIS".
- Appinsight is a convenient way to assign SAM monitoring but expensive since it takes 50 licenses.
- External hosted web site monitoring has allowed us to go back to the vendor and tell them they have a delivery problem. In some cases we have switched vendors because they have not been able to deliver the appropriate performance.
- SAM has helped educate employees that the problem is not internal infrastructure but service delivery infrastructure when it is an externally monitored service.
- Query performance reporting allows us to show performance to database administrators or developers to remediate.
Because we have been so satisfied with NPM we did not bother to evaluate any other competitive products. The single pane of glass integration is extremely convenient for enterprise health monitoring.