Quick Review of SolarWinds SAM
April 27, 2019
Quick Review of SolarWinds SAM
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
We currently have SAM version xxx. We currently use it to monitor our 50 Windows servers, 3 Linux servers, VMware ESXi hosts, IBM fiber switch, HP network equipment and IBM servers for uptime, services, and resources. We also use SAM to monitoring some application on the Windows servers. Those applications are SQL and IIS. We use this product for all of our infrastructures. We really like how you can make custom alerts. E.G. I can make an alert to warn me a server is running a full load for 20mins. Then, I would check it out to see why. The main reason we bought this product is to help users with alerts on the server and application level. E.G. if an IIS website goes down we get an alert.
- You can create custom alerts for basically anything.
- The dashboard has a clean look. Easy for a nontechnical person to understand.
- The application is very stable. I had no issues with it so far.
- The product gets new features once or twice a year, which is nice.
- The support is very good.
- A bit of a learning curve to figure out how to use it the way you want it. Creating custom alerts can be complicated.
- The software requires to be on the latest SQL server (2019 or 2016). We currently use 2012 so I can not upgrade SAM to the latest version.
- I get some false positive alerts sometimes. It could be my environment but it would be nice for SAM to gather some log data when that alert has happened so it would be easier to troubleshoot.
- Response time to outages has increased. Less downtime on servers (if something goes down on the weekend we get an alert and we fix it before Monday comes around. Before SolarWinds we would find this issue on Monday morning).
- Helped us find reoccurring problems we add before SolarWinds was implemented. We fix the issue.
- For the first 3 months of deployment, we could not trust SolarWinds because we were getting false positive alerts. Once I trained myself more on the product, I was able to tweak the alerts and now we don't have that issue.
We use PRTG currently for SFLOW monitoring our network traffic. We previously use Spiceworks to monitor uptime before we purchase SolarWinds. We bought SolarWinds because it can monitor websites and applications. Spiceworks could not do that. Plus, SolarWinds has support, so when I want to make a custom alert, I can ask SolarWinds support how to do that. Spiceworks was a free application so you would get adds popping up.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success | None |