SolarWinds SAM - one stop shop for monitoring your enterprise
Updated July 20, 2020

SolarWinds SAM - one stop shop for monitoring your enterprise

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

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Our company uses SolarWinds to monitor our Microsoft Windows Server environment including most, if not all, of the Microsoft applications running on those servers; that includes SQL, Exchange, SharePoint, ActiveDirectory, etc. running on those Virtual Machines.
  • When adding applications to be monitored to SAM, the baselines included in the product normally require very little tweaking.
  • Creating granular alerts for each trigger is very helpful when troubleshooting the exact cause of an issue.
  • Since SAM can monitor so many different aspects of an application, pollers can become overloaded very quickly and require attention to proper sizing.
  • Creating and sizing Operational Kiosk maps to fit specific screen sizes can be tricky.
  • Let's face it, when things are running normally the business rarely recognizes uptime. SAM allows us to be proactive and head off outages, many times before they become a work stoppage.
  • Our previous reporting solution required at least one SME to manage the product, now most of our staff is comfortable managing and monitoring our application from a single tool.
Simplifying our environment from multiple tools to a single monitoring tool has greatly reduced the amount of time we spend configuring our monitors. SCOM is decent at monitoring Microsoft applications but doesn't do a good job with network equipment, and Nagious can be very complicated especially if you're not in the interface every day.
Discovering applications such as Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint for monitoring is very straightforward. The basic thresholds are very good, however combining thresholds for applications and OS sometimes cause issues. As an example, Exchange will use as much RAM as the OS has available which in turn will trigger OS alerts due to high CPU memory utilization.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

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