SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a solid and easy to use tool
Updated November 05, 2019

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is a solid and easy to use tool

Ryan Andrus | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We currently use Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor for monitoring and alerts for all our Servers. It is used primarily to help keeps us informed on the status of any of our servers. Such as space and capacity planning, uptime, CPU utilization, and allows to keep tabs on the many servers across our data center.
  • It does a good job of letting us know when a server goes offline, or when it is rebooted.
  • It warns us when we are getting low on disk space.
  • It lets us know if a node on the network, such as a switch or other critical network device, is offline.
  • It provides feedback in the case of an outage, letting us know time and the resources that were impacted by the outage.
  • Most alerting tools are a challenge to get fine tuned, Solar winds is no exception to this.
  • The GUI for managing the Alerts is pretty klunky and could use a face lift.
  • The application monitor portion is a little more challenging to get setup. To the point that we don't use it very much.
  • It is a pretty affordable option that provides good information about what is currently happening in your environment.
  • It allows us to see growth trends which helps us budget and plan our capacity, which is critical for a government entity that is tied to a strict budget.
  • Realtime data that allows a network manager to stay ahead of issues as they happen across the network.
  • Radius
Once we upgraded to a newer version of radius, I found it to be very challenging to configure and work with. It was time consuming and the alerts oft times didn't make sense. It got to the point where the time needed to setup up made it not worth even using.
Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor is well suited for medium-sized organizations that want a good Server Monitoring tool. It also can be utilized as a tool for tracking other network nodes and devices. It does a good job of keeping track of beats, and uptime, as well as gauging performance and capacity planning.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application monitoring
4
Database monitoring
5
Threshold alerts
7
Predictive capabilities
7
Application performance management console
3
Collaboration tools
3
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
5
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
6
Virtualization monitoring
7
Server availability and performance monitoring
8
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
8
IT Asset Discovery
5

Feature Questions

What makes this product great is that it is easy to setup and configure. Many products are very time consuming to get setup and implement. This leads to a delay in their use, and slow adoption. Because of the ease of use of Solarwinds we have gotten a lot of use out of it.
  • We use it to monitor server up time and performance.
  • Storage monitoring allows to track our growth and usage.
  • Alerting us of any outages or issues regarding the network or a server.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
The single most important reason that we went with Solarwinds over our Radius product we had been using was that it was much simplier to implement and use. Since its implementation it has been a very valuable resource of information in keeping on top any issues that might happen in our environment.