1. Home
  2. Application Performance Management (APM) Software
  3. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Reviews
  4. User Review of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor - A powerful addition to your IT toolbox
May 15, 2019

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor - A powerful addition to your IT toolbox

John Predmore | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We use SAM to monitor and alert on the health of our Windows servers as well as applications such as Exchange, SQL, IIS and SharePoint. We also write custom monitors for third party software. We monitor servers across all of our locations and data centers. Adding SAM to NPM gave us the level of detail to identify issues before they became serious enough to take the entire server or application down. SAM was critical to our strategy of becoming a more proactive department instead of reactive.
  • SAM provides built in templates for monitoring common applications.
  • SAM provides a framework to easily write custom monitors for third party applications.
  • For built in templates SAM gives guidance for what an alert means and often how to resolve it.
  • I believe the pricing of SAM is a bit on the high side.
  • For us the ROI with SAM has been that is allows us to identify issues earlier and prevent unplanned downtime. Thereby increasing employee productivity.
We found SAM to be more intuitive to manage than What's Up Gold.
If your environment is predominantly Windows (there is Linux support but I have not used it), you leverage applications such as AD, Exchange, SQL and IIS, and especially if you already use NPM then SAM may be just what you are looking for if you want to take your server & app monitoring to the next level. The ability to use templates from other SAM users through the SolarWinds community site is also a great way to further leverage the investment.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
9.5
Application monitoring
10
Database monitoring
Not Rated
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
Not Rated
Application performance management console
9
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
9
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
9
Server availability and performance monitoring
10
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
Not Rated
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated

Feature Questions

SAM is a powerful product with an intuitive interface that makes it very simple to use with little training.
  • Monitoring Windows Services
  • Monitoring TCP ports
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
  • Vendor Reputation
  • Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Integration with other SolarWinds solutions