SAM leverages our staff and makes the infrastructure team's life better
August 23, 2018
SAM leverages our staff and makes the infrastructure team's life better
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We use SAM to monitor a number of in-house applications and their underlying infrastructure (IIS, SQL and Windows service monitors). Custom alerts are defined to alert application support teams of potential issues before the users start opening tickets. Our DBAs use AppInsight for SQL to monitor database health and work with the development teams when applications are thrashing the databases.
- The newly-added AppInsight templates are amazingly detailed and useful. They provide excellent granularity of the view into SQL or IIS.
- The ability to monitor a single Windows service and alert when it's not running, or automate a restart of the service, is very useful to us.
- The templates are necessarily complex. I'd love to say make them simpler but don't see how that would be possible and still maintain the level of detail provided my the monitor.
- Scheduled Task monitor is great, but appears to lack the ability to monitor specific scheduled task(s). All-or-nothing gives us too many false positive alerts so we stopped using it.
- We have a small staff for the size of our infrastructure, so robust monitoring is important to us to stay ahead of needs and problems. Pinning problems on code or configuration changes saves us a lot of staff time troubleshooting and chasing ghosts.
We had Nagios installed by a managed-service vendor. When management decided to terminate that arrangement, we attempted to take over administration of the Nagios environment, but found it difficult (Linux-based) and limited. For less than we were spending on the managed service, we were able to acquire our initial install of NPM and SAM and start expanding how and what we monitored.