Item: SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Rating: 8
Author: Brian Aguirre

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as part of our internal IT monitoring solution. We generate proactive support tickets for systems coming close to outage thresholds and we use it to page out different teams when their application isn't responding. We support 3500+ servers and datacenter infrastructure that where a good portion is in SolarWinds.

Pros and Cons

The simple addition of nodes.
Lots of templates that help with application monitoring.
Community input is very helpful.

Some of the documentation doesn't make much sense to a new user, need to show use cases.
Creating graphs and custom dashboards seems overly complicated.
Having to use SQL queries in several scenarios for various widgets shouldn't be needed.

Return on Investment

Positive, we have prevented outages caused by the power going down.
We have been able to determine disk space issues and resolve them before taking systems down.
We know when data center networks are down before the network team does.

Alternatives Considered

I have used WhatsUp, Nagios, and Zabbix. Very similar in ease of use to WhatsUp, but missing some features of the Zabbix and Nagios XI on the nix side of the house.

Key Insights

Do you think SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor's feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor again?

Yes

Other Software Used

SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm), SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM), SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM)

Likelihood to Recommend

For IT infrastructure teams, SAM is a great fit, and even including the Linux side seems to be getting better. The application aspect is great but understanding the alerting of application issues vs node issues is a little complicated at times. If we could work on module integration so a simple build of a system that included all applications, node, and infrastructure monitoring would be great.

SAM I AM

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor