SAM - Like an IT Swiss Army Knife!
September 26, 2018
SAM - Like an IT Swiss Army Knife!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SAM is being used only by the IT Infrastructure team, but also a few of our Application Analysts. We use it primary to monitor and alert on our TIER 1, critical SQL Server Databases, and some IIS service. We also use it to monitor specific attributes of our Exchange server, Tomcat servers, and VMWARE environment.
It also monitors our Active Directory services and counters, as well as AD security auditing. It will notify my team if there are any changes to any user account in AD. We also use it to alert when specific services go down, or if SQL Server falls outside of certain thresholds...such as TEMPDB growing to rapidly, or if indexes become too fragmented.
It also monitors our Active Directory services and counters, as well as AD security auditing. It will notify my team if there are any changes to any user account in AD. We also use it to alert when specific services go down, or if SQL Server falls outside of certain thresholds...such as TEMPDB growing to rapidly, or if indexes become too fragmented.
- I really like the way it auto-scans a server whenever you add it to Orion, and will setup the initial monitor for you. So, if it detects IIS, it will auto-add the basic IIS monitors already. You don't have to go through all servers and manually add these app monitors.
- It's also very each to create custom monitors, and add them to any server already being managed. We have special retail software that requires special PORT monitoring - and the SAM tools allowed us to easily setup the monitor and alerting.
- There are very many templates right out of the box for almost anything you can imagine. For those templates that I can't find, if always been able to find something via the user community site: Thwack.
- It's a little overwhelming right out of the box. It can take months to get it fine tuned to your particular environment so you don't get 10,000 email alerts each day. This is specifically true with SQL Server monitoring. We have about 50 SQL Servers using SAM, and almost everyone of them are reporting CRITICAL right out of the box, even though the servers are running fine.
- Right out of the box, the alerts do not give you any useful information. They only have hyperlinks to the dashboard. I wish that right out of the box, the email alerts would have all details.
- I don't like the way they implement "light" versions of certain tools within SAM, and then make you pay for the Advanced tools. For example, SAM can monitor SQL Server, but it's consider a light version -- it doesn't go extremely deep. If you want deep monitoring of SQL you have to buy the extra SQL Server Monitor. It should all be bundled into the tool that we already purchased.
- Recently we had a crippling network issue on our network, but couldn't immediately see what was going on. I noticed I was dropping packets to our core router. I soon started getting Alerts from Solarwinds, and so I pulled up our core router in our dashboard. The CPU chart showed that the processor was spiking up to 100%...and staying there. Then, I was able to analyze the processes on our core Cisco device and determine the ARP INPUT was spiking. This led me to find a loop in the network (after turning on ARP debugger). The Orion tools quickly pointed me in the right direction, saving us from working over the weekend!
- We've certainly made back all of the money invested in Solarwinds when you consider all of the time it has saved, it's like having an extra person on the IT staff that works around the clock!
- We have specific SLA's of our applications, and the Solarwinds tool set has allowed us to keep those SLA's, and also lets us to report them to our customers.
SAM's biggest advantage by far is EASY OF SETUP and USE. This is the one reason I went with SolarWinds...it blows the others away when it come to the simplicity. But it's simplicity paired with power.
In the past, when rolling out tools like Nagios, I feel like I needed to hire a special engineer just to come in and mange this one tool - because of all the care and feeding, and also the complexity of configuration.
In the past, when rolling out tools like Nagios, I feel like I needed to hire a special engineer just to come in and mange this one tool - because of all the care and feeding, and also the complexity of configuration.