SolarWinds is like hiring someone to just sit and watch your stuff 24/7 and you never have to feed them!
February 17, 2017

SolarWinds is like hiring someone to just sit and watch your stuff 24/7 and you never have to feed them!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We use SolarWinds to monitor our servers and network infrastructure. It is only used by our IT department. We are able to have a tool to monitor servers every hour of every day without needing to have a dedicated resource to babysit these devices.
  • SolarWinds has a great dashboard interface. The ability to modify the dashboard and add data per user is excellent.
  • Getting detailed event logs is outstanding for troubleshooting. Being able to use the Message Center to gather Events, Alerts, Syslog, Traps and Audit Events is a great resource.
  • The way the tool is organized to display network, application, and server data separately really helps. Top 10 lists are extremely helpful to pinpoint issues during troubleshooting.
  • I would like an easier way to provide SMS messages through a web-based service or other offering.
  • The mobile application is decent but could benefit from an update.
  • As a busy IT team, we're able to sleep better knowing we have a tool that is monitoring 24 hours a day.
  • We know that SolarWinds has historical data that will allow us to compare current issues to previous periods to help with assessing performance.
  • We have minimized application, server, and network outage recovery times due to the fact that SolarWinds is fast to report issues and get us looking in the right areas for the solution.
SolarWinds is much more robust and has a ton more built-in application monitors available out of the box. The Dashboards are easier to manage and have a ton more detail. The event engine in SolarWinds has a ton of functionality and there is a built-in Message Center to look at events across all devices you are monitoring. SolarWinds is designed for larger environments but works nicely in 50-150 device networks as well.
If you are needing to monitor all of your network devices and server, this is one of the best tools out there. I've used Ipswitch WhatsUp Gold, Manage Engine OpManager, Splunk, and Nagios. While SolarWinds is a bit more money than some of these when you have a large number of devices, it's the most powerful out of all that I've used.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application monitoring
9
Database monitoring
7
Threshold alerts
9
Predictive capabilities
6
Application performance management console
8
Collaboration tools
6
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
9
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
9
Virtualization monitoring
9
Server availability and performance monitoring
9
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
9
IT Asset Discovery
8