Easy, yet informative, server and application monitoring
April 27, 2019
Easy, yet informative, server and application monitoring
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We use their monitoring services on all of our production servers to monitor server performance and for server notifications when something might be going wrong. We use the graphs and reports to analyze past trends. We have found the server monitoring especially helpful when deploying new software updates and we want to visualize how it impacts our servers.
- Visual reports of historical data.
- Alerting team when something is going wrong.
- Analyzing server performance in real-time.
- It would be nice to overlay metrics on the same graph, so we can compare metrics.
We have a mix of different servers. Web servers, database servers, etc. It's nice to be able to monitor them all in one place and install the relevant monitoring plugins on each server. We use the dashboards to group different server groups together. For example, we can monitor how all of our web servers are performing on one dashboard to see if there are any anomalies. And on another dashboard, we have database servers being monitored so we can see how they are currently reacting to web traffic.
- It has saved us considerable time by not having to build our own monitoring.
- It has alerted us to potential outages so we could resolve them early on and avoid outages.
We use Nagios in conjunction so that we have multiple platforms monitoring our production environment. What's nice about SolarWinds is we don't have to dive into text-based configuration files as we do on Nagios. And we don't have to mess around with firewalls when installing plugins as we do with Nagios. We just install the plugins from SolarWinds and they report back to our account. The setup is so much easier with SolarWinds, but we do give up some of the customization and control we have with Nagios.