SAM - simple to implement, but extremely in depth monitoring for any organization
March 14, 2016
SAM - simple to implement, but extremely in depth monitoring for any organization
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Being a small IT group for our department within the university, we utilize SAM to monitor our departmental servers and applications. This allows our team to focus on projects and tasks for our staff, and insure that we will be alerted to performance issues or outages before our end users are impacted and/or to insure that their issues are resolved quickly.
We are alerted on a range of items, from complete server outages to a single SQL database's excessive fragmentation. We also use the statistics from the collected data to determine how we can improve application performance and the end user's experience.
We are alerted on a range of items, from complete server outages to a single SQL database's excessive fragmentation. We also use the statistics from the collected data to determine how we can improve application performance and the end user's experience.
Pros
- SAM can dig deep into the applications to provide a wealth of information and immediate feedback on the items it is monitoring.
- We can get a bird's eye view of our environment from the out of the box dashboards, with easily identifiable health indicators showing the state of servers and applications, services, connection attempts, and even the amount of network traffic to individual websites.
- In depth details on our SQL environments allows the team to view the status of the server and databases, but also give detailed information on each component and offer suggestions on how to resolve the issues that we may be facing.
Cons
- Each implementation of SAM is going to be different, and requires customization to correct alert on the environment it is monitoring. I would like to see some better probing and questions pertaining to our environment when installing that would help the refining of the thresholds and alerts on those thresholds. With that said, I think this is a difficult task for Solarwinds to provide, but it would be a huge selling point.
- Many of the out of the box dashboards are helpful. We also like the intelligent discovery of the applications.
- I have received a great deal of sales calls from the Solarwinds sales team in the past. It has slowed down recently, so maybe that trend will continue.
- We are able to run the shop without a dedicated SQL DB administrator, which saves on that overhead.
- We have been able to provide detailed information on database statistics to our outsourced storage provide to improve performance on those databases, ultimately offering a better end user experience.
- Our IT Team is able to take care of other projects and tasks and not be constantly checking the state of our environment, knowing that Solarwinds alerting will let us know if there are issues we should address.
Comments
Please log in to join the conversation