SolarWinds SAM. Valued and cost effective monitoring.
August 07, 2019
SolarWinds SAM. Valued and cost effective monitoring.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is used extensively within our IT Department. It is an integral part of our NOC and is a portal for all our different IT teams to access their monitored infrastructure. SAM is used to monitor all of our SQL databases, IIS sites, SSL Certificates, and many of our home-grown custom applications. SAM is a very versatile tool that allows us to monitor nearly any element in our environment.
- Custom Monitoring support with Powershell, VBScript, Bash SSH as examples
- Out of the box monitors for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, and IIS are very extensive
- SAM is a module of the SolarWinds Orion suite, integration is seamless with the other modules in the suite
- Easy to use dashboards and custom GUI configuration
- Integrated full monitoring of event logs. Log monitoring is available but it is limited to searching for specific error codes. Full event log monitoring requires another module purchase.
- Better End User Experience Monitoring would be appreciated. Integrate WPM (Web and Performance Monitor) into SAM as a single unit.
- Enhance Azure Cloud monitoring support. Some cloud monitoring is supported but we would like much more investment in this category. Custom Proprieties and better API support to get all cloud asset information.
- SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor should be purchased with an SLX license to fully appreciate the benefit of the software. The unlimited license allows you to really flex the product instead of being hamstrung on what to monitor. Be aware that additional polling engines will be needed the more you scale out your monitoring.
- SAM is a very cost-effective way to monitor your custom and off the shelf software. It is a fraction of the cost of some of its nearest competitors.
- SolarWinds has a very active user community on thwack.com. They listen to their user-base and extend the platforms capabilities based on a voting system.
- HCL BigFix (formerly from IBM)
BigFix is quite difficult to set up and requires a full team to support, It is cumbersome and has a very dated interface. Our SolarWinds environment is run and managed by one person, very easy to deploy and support. The user community on thwack.com is also a benefit of going the SolarWinds route as the user community is engaged.