Solarwinds SAM and Virtualisation Monitor
April 09, 2021
Solarwinds SAM and Virtualisation Monitor
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
[SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor] is used to monitor the status of our operational technology platform used by production critical systems. It operates behind a firewall without internet connectivity and we use it to notify of issues with our VMware cluster, windows server VMs, and physical windows workstations. It also tracks the status of services at a basic level (eg IIS website up or down). It is capable of more advanced monitoring and analysis but we haven't used those features in great detail yet.
It does work well, however can be a little noisy with email alerts if you don't put some effort into tuning resource thresholds for VMs especially.
It does work well, however can be a little noisy with email alerts if you don't put some effort into tuning resource thresholds for VMs especially.
- The dashboard is easy to use and very informative
- Notifications are customisable
- Setting up polling is easy without the need for agents on each system
- Polling agents are useful for cross firewall applications and scalability
- Alerting and setting thresholds can be difficult to ensure you aren't notified spuriously
- Documentation on remote access permissions and tight firewall rules was a little hard to find. Some example group policies would have been helpful to allow monitoring without compromising security
- The online update feature, where you use the system to deploy updates to other polling agents etc never worked for us, potentially because our system is quite locked down. We had to use the offline manual installer and the process wasn't as smooth as you would want
- This is not for ROI over a short term period, it is a risk mitigation and any returns are in limiting lost production through early detection of issues