1. Home
  2. Application Performance Management (APM) Software
  3. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Reviews
  4. User Review of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Get insight into your environment and production systems
November 19, 2020

Get insight into your environment and production systems

Marty Mankins | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We have production-level servers that we are wanting metrics on for data processing. We want to know the loads they are under and the amount of connections that are being made to them. The sites we host for our customers need settings and configuration changes to help improve responsiveness and reduce load times. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor dives deep into these servers and the applications they run like IIS and Apache and points out areas where speed and data accessibility can be improved with code changes, optimized settings, and updated versions of internal applications. While it's a very robust system and there is a lot to learn, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor has the ability to optimize servers and a production environment to better improve customer-accessible sites and portals for data retrieval.
  • Identifying inefficiencies in data serving environments
  • Giving access to multiple services and the behind-the-scenes operations
  • Showing a view into backend operations on a production system
  • The environment took some effort to set up
  • Getting familiar with all of the inner workings and settings is time consuming
  • Better response time from support techs when you are needing assistance with the installation
  • The constant tweaks and management of the servers SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor monitors is time consuming for existing IT staff
  • The tweaks to code and other functions are helping to identify needed changes
  • Forecasting data access has been important to planning future upgrades to production servers
The nature of monitoring applications is to alert, offer ways to keep a production environment up and running, and limit/reduce interruptions. We have Zabbix and Nagios Network Analyzer in place, which help uptime and other critical infrastructure stay in operation. Metrics like CPU usage, network congestion, and what applications are using up resources certainly are key to any environment. SolarWinds Server & Application Manager takes this to a different level and sees, in much greater detail and with endless granularity, layers of how to improve operations of servers and applications.
A robust an application for monitoring multiple systems, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor certainly is not short on capabilities for taking a multiple-server environment and digging into all of the services and applications and helping to optimize the overall environment. Any serious production environments that are slow and needing help to better serve up traffic to customers should consider SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor as a way to make improvements.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
7.7
Application monitoring
8
Database monitoring
8
Threshold alerts
7
Predictive capabilities
8
Application performance management console
8
Collaboration tools
8
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
8
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
7
Virtualization monitoring
8
Server availability and performance monitoring
8
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
8
IT Asset Discovery
6

ROI

Once SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor was installed and up and running, there was considerable time adding servers and making sure any issues with services and proper credentials were ironed out. Using SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, the interface and the many details of what information is being monitored is good, and anyone that is already familiar with monitoring applications can acclimate themselves fairly quickly. SolarWinds provides a wealth of help in the form of KB articles, videos, interactive classes, and other sessions to become more proficient at using SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Support

The initial SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor setup for our organization was a project tasked to me. I had to spend some time getting things prepared, such as finding a place for the VM that would be running SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor and making sure we had sufficient resources available. The install of the product was very frustrating, as there were a few failed installs--mostly getting rights to the MS SQL server for the database. Even after the install, there were calls to support where I needed some hand holding to get to the next step. Once escalated emails were sent, a support tech was able to resolve all issues and we got SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor up and running. Highly recommend taking the free classes SolarWinds offers to learn more about this product. They helped a lot to improve product knowledge.