Wow great product
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Logging in to the web console gives access to a wealth of information that is available to you on your servers and the applications that run on them. There is a whole bunch of templates and alerts already available to you for both physical and virtual servers.
A multitude of information can become available from the web app by selecting from a series of tabs and dropdown menus, ideal for troubleshooting and getting to the root cause of problems. You can drill down into servers to be presented with metrics dashboards which are all customisable. SAM is a complex tool that is usable with minimal training. But the more you use and learn, the more powerful SAM becomes.
- Customization for alerts is probably the best feature of the SAM product with virtually limitless options on what you can monitor. With customization for alerting we've even set it up to send emails to our exchange tools to automate actions we want taken when certain alerts are received.
- App Insight for SQL. Its personally one of my favourite templates that SolarWinds do out of the box. It can make you appear to know what you're talking about with your SQL environment.
- Customizations and includes support for DAG monitoring for Exchange environments. Important information and alerts are pre-configured. Synthetic monitoring gives you the chance to catch issues before they arise. Combined with the SolarWinds Orion suite, you can use this tool to monitor every performance aspect of your IT infrastructure.
- We have enjoyed the ability to manage and monitor home grown applications as well as generally available ones. Being able to watch for runaway processes and over utilization of things like SQL and AV have been a benefit.
- Sometimes it is a little harder to configure than we would like. It has been a good buy for us but it is not as 100% user-friendly as we would like.
- If you have a server that has multiple DNS names there is no way that you can have a pointer that redirects you to the proper server name. There still needs to have more work done on the SQL AppInsight. We get a lot of false positives, but its better than nothing, so you need to adjust the metrics.
- I find the licensing model to be less than ideal. I don't hate it, but I just don't love it. But, to be honest I have not got a better solution either.
- Even with all the customizations, a lot false alerts are created. We have worked with SolarWinds engineers and we have not been able to create rules to limit our false positives alerting. This in return has generated about 10,000 extra emails to our admin accounts. While the tool gives us what we need, it also produces way too much noise. This has caused our team to create a lot of email rules to filter out what is needed and auto-delete of alerts. In return, we get the alerts we need but with too many alerts. The dashboard is ok, but needs improvement.
- Not enough flexibility within the supplied templates and alerts.
You have all the information that you need in only one single point. SolarWinds have the agents that help you to understand what is happening on your servers and not only the bare metal you can go until the application.
“This is one of the mandatories tools that all organization should have. Solarwind SAM helps us to see what was happening with our servers and application. They have several agents that help us to know better the behavior and follow from the server to the client. For better results you should add the other solarwinds components like Virtualization Manager, NPM, SRM, that will give you the big picture of all your infrastructure. The admin console is very easy to use and by default give you a lot information”