Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We primarily use Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) to monitor our Windows Internet Information Services servers across our entire infrastructure. It allows us to alert on down applications, specifically IIS for us, so that our on-call team can ensure the least amount of downtime for our web servers. The down alert will specifically show which servers are having issues, and for how long.
- Monitors applications. It lets you know when something is down, at what time, and when it came back up.
- Strong custom community templates. For those of us that aren't as tech savvy, the community offerings are very helpful in getting the best from SAM.
- You can create dashboards to monitor your most important applications.
- The process is very manual. It takes a little time to learn, and remember how you did it the first time.
- Navigation is confusing the first number of times as well. Trying to get back to where you started can be a pain. It's not 100% clear what you're doing at times, until you've done it a few times.
- Creating your first dashboards can be a bit daunting at first. This is pretty typical of anything I've used from SolarWinds.
- It's a great product, but it's expensive. The initial investment can be hard to swallow.
- Our DBAs like the forecasting for CPU and disk usage. It helps guide them on decisions related to DB space usage so that they can be prepared to request additional disk when needed instead of completely guessing when the drive will fill.
- IIS application monitoring has helped our development and sys engineer teams quickly respond to web server outages. They get alerted, they fix it, and revenue impact is reduced. The historical data they can look back on helps them understand what happened before/during/after the outage.