SAM Review
January 23, 2019

SAM Review

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor to monitor critical applications and alerts on those monitors with NPM. It is used solely by the IT department but covers all applications across the organization.

Pros

  • We found AppInsight for exchange very useful. The level of detail on the inner workings is almost too much.
  • User experience monitors are also very useful. We use them to verify web form logins, SSH, and other processes are up and running.
  • Windows process monitors are great too! Very easy to set up and a quick way to monitor services.

Cons

  • AppInsight takes up 50 licenses: a bit steep. With a base 150 license count, we can't run AppInsight for SQL, Exchange, and IIS without running out of licenses.
  • We get a lot of timeouts monitoring external websites. Still, we haven't determined why this happens. We have dual 2gig pipes to the internet.
  • SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) gives our entire IT department visibility into our organization's application performance, availability, and status.
  • Over the years, I believe having SAM and NPM have saved countless hours of troubleshooting, both by being a tool for preventing outages, and a tool for troubleshooting them when they happen.
  • SAM reduces outages by notifying us when they occur. Downtime = lost productivity, lost revenue, and loss of confidence in IT.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is way more user-friendly than PRTG. We can't get OpenView anymore, but we moved from that to SolarWinds at one point and never looked back. Prime really doesn't offer any application monitoring.
Great for putting eyes on up/down status of applications and monitoring windows services. Performance monitoring requires a little more effort unless you can afford to throw AppInsight at the application.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
9.3
Application monitoring
10
Database monitoring
9
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
8
Application performance management console
Not Rated
Collaboration tools
Not Rated
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
10
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
Not Rated
Server availability and performance monitoring
10
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
8
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated

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