Item: SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Rating: 7
Author: Lasha Jojua

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SAM module mostly used by IT monitoring team to report more detailed info in case of issues. We are using it for proactive monitoring, more or less deep view of app performance running on business critical servers, better than just hardware health info. Team is able to start fix with good value of data, provided by monitoring team.

Pros and Cons

Configurable alerts.
3rd party integrations.
Custom templates for out-of-box apps.
User community.

Hard to configure and get results.
Alert configuration, you can do mostly everything, but you have to do it, tool does not do it.
Training/support seems not interested to deliver best practices, they just share high level over viewed data.

Return on Investment

Reduced MTTR.
Team collaboration.
KPI outputs.

Alternatives Considered

Nagios XI

Solarwinds needs 5 min for customization, Nagios 10 or more.

Likelihood to Recommend

Agent install is really easy when simple applications are used. But, only install, then you need to do almost everything manually, check/search/try and mostly again one more circle. One case I had with Redis app, data about one app server cannot be checked on one page, if you don't do some custom dashboards, oh, dashboards are fully editable. TBH, after almost 2 year, am still searching how to. Overall, tool does what it is for.

Good tool for application monitoring, with its limits

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros and Cons

Return on Investment

Alternatives Considered

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings