SAM Review
Updated September 03, 2020
SAM Review
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
It is being used to monitor applications and services across the organization. The plan was to replace What's Up Gold and Nagios with SAM. I've used it at many organizations when I was doing professional services on SolarWinds products.
- It let's you build in depth component monitors to watch almost anything.
- It allows you to grab additional information at the time an alert is triggered to help provide a complete picture for the admin.
- Most of the functions are tied into the API which makes integrations and automations possible.
- The new node based licensing model makes it difficult to justify the price for nodes that only utilize a few components.
- Script results need to be a statistic. It would be a lot more useful if we could populate a table of results, including alpha-numeric strings, boolean, etc.
- A lot of the AppInsight components cannot be disabled. You have to either use the whole template or nothing.
- We are working to minimize the number of tools in our environment. SolarWinds is helping with that. However, we may be looking at moving some monitoring away from SolarWinds to other services because they either do a better job than the comparable Orion module, or the Orion module isn't justifiable for the price.
- The SAM module pricing went from getting an unlimited license for $40k to a 2000 node license for 5 times that amount. Quite a jump in price without adding to the benefits.
SAM is one of my favorite Orion modules because of its ability to monitor almost anything using custom templates.