Mission Critical, we can't live without Server and Application Manager.
Updated July 17, 2020
Mission Critical, we can't live without Server and Application Manager.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SAM is used primarily for operations support, and is extended to datacenter and technical support teams. While we use some canned monitors, the bulk of our SAM components are custom written script monitors using Perl, PowerShell, VB, or TSQL. We monitor everything...
- Flexibility with specific monitoring requirements by creating our own scripts to control output messaging, and monitor for statistics that are unique to our in-house written applications.
- Out of the box support for common vendors' hardware MIBS or API to report on chassis hardware issues, etc.
- Customization of the web portal provide specialized dashboards for our various NOC teams using Orion, as well as executive dashboards, alert boards, historical reporting, etc.
- User roll granularity. While this has improved over the years, the user rights are not granular enough.
- Profile based views. End users frequently want to modify their own views, but views are generally global. Under account rights, I would like to be able to allow an account to have a profile based set of views. It's also important to easily review a users specific profile views to check for resource abuse.
- Better information on user activity, views usage, etc. Knowing what views are used the most or least would be helpful information when considering what works and what doesn't, what needs to be cleaned up, etc...
- Orion is instrumental for the success of our organization.
- Orion is occasionally challenged by free or open source tools internally, and always wins, proving it's ROI again and again.
- We occasionally struggle with support from SolarWinds where if the technician can't solve the problem, they quickly blame our environment and close the case. Support quality has had it's ups and downs, but lately (the last year?) has been pretty poor for us. Rarely do we get a rep who really can tackle our cases quickly and expertly.
Nagios and Rancid are used internally by a company that was acquired last year. They're a big open source group.
Other groups also use HostMonitor, Big Brother, and a couple of home grown tools that don't really stack up. Those groups don't want to change the way they do things, or give up control of monitoring, even though Orion doubles up the monitoring for the same inventory.
Other groups also use HostMonitor, Big Brother, and a couple of home grown tools that don't really stack up. Those groups don't want to change the way they do things, or give up control of monitoring, even though Orion doubles up the monitoring for the same inventory.