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Solid Monitoring Tool
March 11, 2016

Solid Monitoring Tool

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We use it in the IT department to monitor application status. We use it to provide proactive alerting and monitoring for our critical applications. In the future we plan to use it to justify new hardware purchases based off of the trending and modeling that SAM allows us to do very easily.
  • It has very granular controls.
  • The UI is fairly intuitive.
  • It is very easy to implement.
  • The custom poller feature gives you incredible customization.
  • The licensing is prohibitive.
  • Selecting one SolarWinds pre-defined monitor (Like AD monitor) can consume over 100 licenses.
  • The license structure is confusing.
  • Product documentation could be structured with more flow.
  • We use it to monitor the health of an application. It does that job well.
  • Hardware forecasting for future growth.
  • It is fairly resource intensive once you begin to monitor more than 250 devices with multiple pollers.
SolarWinds is the only one I've used. I've seen demos of competing products, but they are generally geared toward a specific hardware/software vendor. I prefer Solarwinds when I need a good general tool for alerting, monitoring and trending. The customization that is available in Solarwinds really gives it the edge.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is a good general tool for trending, monitoring, and alerting. The licensing gets confusing when you start to monitor many applications, but everything else is very straight forward and customizable. It's probably best suited for general environments that don't employ developers. It's a good out of box solution.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
5.5
Application monitoring
7
Database monitoring
7
Threshold alerts
8
Predictive capabilities
7
Application performance management console
7
Collaboration tools
Not Rated
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
1
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
3
Server availability and performance monitoring
6
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
6
IT Asset Discovery
3

Using SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

5 - Information Systems
2 - We have two system administrators to resolve communication problems between SolarWinds and the monitored applications.
  • Utilization trending
  • Resource monitoring
  • Up time monitoring
  • .exe monitoring
  • Monitoring individual VMs
  • Tracking VM movement in our cluster
  • Hardware purchase forecasting
  • Hardware purchase justification
  • Escalating alerts
SolarWinds SAM gives us proactive alerts on application health that we are not able to get any where else.

Evaluating SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor and Competitors

  • Product Features
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Prior Experience. I've known that SolarWinds is a highly customizable monitoring solution and I prefer it.
We would have gotten more detail about how SAM is licensed. In the initial discussion, the licensing did not appear to be as complicated as it is.