Server and Application Monitor - Stay On Top of Your Outages
October 13, 2016

Server and Application Monitor - Stay On Top of Your Outages

Dan Lepinski | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

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.
If you have a large infrastructure it can be nearly impossible to keep track of everything. Sometimes that's the case even with small/medium sized systems. A properly configured SAM can take the task of watching your servers like a hawk off your shoulders. It's very reliable, and let's you know when it sees a problem. It allows your team to focus on the thousand other tasks your team has to work on.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application monitoring
10
Database monitoring
Not Rated
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
6
Application performance management console
7
Collaboration tools
Not Rated
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
6
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
7
Virtualization monitoring
10
Server availability and performance monitoring
10
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
10
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated