SAM I am, that SAM I am, I DO like full-stack monitoring from SolarWinds Orion with SAM!
June 11, 2019

SAM I am, that SAM I am, I DO like full-stack monitoring from SolarWinds Orion with SAM!

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

With an enterprise-wide implementation, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor provides a diversity of solution options. A veritable Swiss Army knife of solutions, the out-of-the-box monitors provide a quick time-to-value proposition for Linux, Windows, and application monitoring, while the custom monitoring covers everything in between. URL monitoring? No problem. Custom script to monitor some unique value? No problem. Port monitoring? Yup. It is not an APM tool (this isn't for code-level monitoring, REUM, etc.) but it does fit a very nice gap in an organization looking to have a single platform that can solve a variety of problems, both known and unknown at the time of purchase.

Pros

  • Extremely short time-to-value with out-of-the-box monitors.
  • Shared data model with other SolarWinds Orion-based products makes complex alerting a breeze.
  • Custom scripts on both Windows and Linux make your imagination (or business need!) the only limit.

Cons

  • SNMP monitors: you can do it quite easily, but it is for a single value and you can't transform the data.
  • Custom properties on templates: you can assign custom properties once the template is applied (a monitor) but not to the template itself.
  • "Salt to taste": reminding users that the out-of-the-box templates are examples NOT best practice and that they should "salt to taste."
  • ROI was so short that we had to repeatedly present the numbers because finance didn't believe us!
  • Performing ETL on the database for SolarWinds meant that our CMDB was updated by our monitoring platform—a double ROI.
  • The single framework, single tool, scalable to the enterprise—the ROI potential is incredible through the displacement of other tools.
SAM shines in a mixed environment but really excels where the environment is predominantly on-prem. Both New Relic and Datadog offer an Infrastructure + APM solution. New Relic struggles with Infrastructure and Datadog struggles with APM. SolarWinds does not claim to be an APM solution, though they do offer one through their AppOptics offering, it does not fully integrate into the Orion platform.
SAM fits well in a space where there is not a requirement for managing an APM-focused platform. SAM does not do code-level monitoring, so no traces and spans, etc. It does have the ability to do some very cool mapping for monitored items and how they connect to each other (Server A talks to Server B on port 123), etc. It is a strong player in the single-pane-of-glass, non-APM/REUM/DEM space.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
7.4
Application monitoring
6
Database monitoring
6
Threshold alerts
9
Predictive capabilities
7
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
8
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
8
Virtualization monitoring
6
Server availability and performance monitoring
8
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
8
IT Asset Discovery
8

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