SAM is a good addition for a heavy server shop if you can afford it
October 16, 2019
SAM is a good addition for a heavy server shop if you can afford it
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SAM is used for the Network, Application, Development and Server teams.
- Flexibility for alerting setup.
- Control of thresholds.
- Templates for many applications.
- .NET and O/S updates can kill SAM on the 2016 Server. I'm dealing with a case right now with support—the September 2019 updates have broken a small environment.
- Disks need GB/MB threshold alerting. % Percentage disk alerts are too inflexible for large TB/PTB volumes.
- AppInsight templates are too inflexible, there are many threads about this on Thwack, the Solarwinds User support forum. AppInsight templates cannot be copied. Many PowerShell based components are not editable, this leads to a lot of management hassles and perceived inflexibility.
- Dynamic volume discovery and management: SolarWinds does not discover new volumes so if a disk is added or the label changes, it will NOT be alerted on. People say "schedule a discovery." Nope, this is not the solution for a shop with 100 unique Windows domains, 1400 unique subnets. Auto-discovery is not the answer. Scanning daily a TON of servers with no flexibility on auto adding the volumes, this is not feasible.
- I could spend all day on here listing my feature requests and gripes, but all of them are documented in the link below.
- https://thwack.solarwinds.com/community/systems-management/server-and-application-monitor-sam/server-and-application-monitor-feature-requests
- SAM is expensive for small shops, especially now with SQL required now. But if you have deep pockets the upfront SQL license and $3000 a year SAM support license is not too much for what you get.
I have recently evaluated Panopta and LogicMonitor. Panopta wanted $100,000 a year for substandard monitoring. We pay $25,000 a year for the SolarWinds suite of SAM, NTA, NPM, IPAM, NCM. LogicMonitor and Panopta are 20 years behind. SolarWinds is a Lamborghini. Panopta, LogicMonitor, and Kaseya are Volkwagon Jettas. There is no comparison. This is why Microsoft or Amazon will buy SolarWinds within the next 5 to 10 years.