Item: SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Rating: 8
Author: Nathan Wolford

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Solarwinds is being utilized by our IT department. Both Infrastructure and Application owners use the application. It addresses several areas of concern for us. The most addressed issue that it serves is up/down of server and networking gear as well as CPU and memory utilization across 4 data-centers. Also, we have replaced a couple of other monitoring solutions with Solarwinds product. The latest utilized Solarwind product is WPM.

Pros and Cons

Up/Down alerts, memory, and CPU utilization alerting.
Ease of use.
Hardware monitoring.

Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnect and Chassis monitoring.
Alert testing to see which servers would be impacted.
No additional ability to have monitors based on scripts.

Return on Investment

Lowered cost.

Alternatives Considered

SiteScope (formerly HP SiteScope)

Solarwinds has a great solution in the Infrastructure space. Overall, we have been pleased with the usage of Solarwinds. It would be nice to have the ability to do script monitors which would give us a way to replace site scope.

Likelihood to Recommend

We have had some issues trying to monitor UCS Blades and Fabric interconnects core infrastructure. It does a great job of monitoring each individual server but lacks the ability to understand which FI is in standby and which one is active. It would be nice to have this functionality built in.

Infrastructure monitoring

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros and Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings