Just as awesome as the price tag suggests!
August 10, 2018
Just as awesome as the price tag suggests!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We use SolarWinds SAM in conjunction with SolarWinds NPM to monitor, visualize, and alert on various IT components via email alerts, dashboards, and even a NOC view that is displayed on a large screen. Business stakeholders are often included in the email alerts, so they are aware when issues arise that affect them/their department.
- Super-simple to configure everything from standard HTTP checks all the way to custom Powershell scripts that return tables of values
- Upgrading is simple- the unified installer detects and upgrades all Orion products (NPM, SAM, DPA) and upgrades them at the same time, to maintain version compatibility
- Documentation and forums are straightforward and helpful
- The web UI is often slow, even on beefy hardware with a beefy database server.
- The alerts are very rigid- e.g. you can't define a group of email addresses and then include the group in alerts, you have to list every email address in every individual alert.
- The F5 BIG-IP support is terrible- you cannot exclude specific components from the view the way you can with other parts of the software, so our balancer view shows a bunch of test/dev nodes that shouldn't even be there
- AppInsights is poorly designed and poorly executed
- Most permissions/settings for users are not defineable by group or policy, you have to edit individual users and edit a big sheet of permissions dropdowns on a per-user basis
- NOC view: Single pane of glass with rotating tabs showing all the information I need to demonstrate that the problem is not on our side. This saves time and thus money.
- In-house monitoring of our payment processor's web API: Allows us to switch to the backup solution immediately (via alert-triggered action) and continue processing credit cards without a hitch when the processor goes down. This saves lost business, and thus makes more money.
- Overall monitoring of our infrastructure helps to isolate faults, detect false helpdesk reports ("system is down!" no its not...) and generally speed up our IT service management process, which translates directly into $
- WhatsUp Gold and Zabbix
The last time we did a monitoring and performance shootout was years ago. While I can say we picked SolarWinds' Orion suite over WhatsUp Gold, Zabbix, and several others, it would be unfair to list the shortcomings of each for our needs, because they might not be valid anymore.