SolarWinds SAM (Server & Application Monitor) - Catch issues before your Users do!
December 13, 2019
SolarWinds SAM (Server & Application Monitor) - Catch issues before your Users do!
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is being used across our entire company, globally across 250 locations in 30+ countries. We use SAM to monitor server uptime, performance, and to gather alerts for potential capacity issues (disk space, memory, CPU utilization). Utilizing active monitoring has allowed us to prevent potentially catastrophic system failures before the system users were impacted.
We leverage the reporting capability to report on our SLA Uptime, based on un-planned outages, and have these reports scheduled on a weekly and monthly basis for executive reporting of our stability across our server and network platforms.
We leverage the reporting capability to report on our SLA Uptime, based on un-planned outages, and have these reports scheduled on a weekly and monthly basis for executive reporting of our stability across our server and network platforms.
- Uptime status monitoring: SAM monitors system uptime through polling (Ping) or through system traps being sent to the poller agents.
- Various application level monitors: We are able to monitor performance of many or our critical applications, from web servers, SQL, AD, and Exchange, and the data gathered helps to ensure user experiences are maintained at a positive level.
- Linux/Unix support is very limited. We have to set up custom agents and custom scripts to retrieve any usable data from our older systems, and each one needs to be customized to report back what we need. The effort that has gone into the Windows systems is amazing -- the Linux effort is very limited and has almost no automation ability.
- Installation and configuration is very daunting. The upgrade processes have caused many outages and unexpected tickets to be opened for support. The upgrade/maintenance process needs to be cleaned up and updated.
- I do not have quantitative numbers to show the value returned, due to catching issues before they occur.
- The avoidance of outages, and the reduction of IT Engineering time to remediate issues has a positive impact in our ability to deliver a better environment, with the same (or fewer) resources.
The monitoring capabilities of both SCOM and Zabbix was OK, the licensing and configuration complexity for SCOM was huge. The Zabbix system was very good on the non-windows side, and limited on the Windows side. SAM, when utilized with the different modules that we own, provides a much wider range of monitoring and reporting capabilities, and again, the single solution to manage from.