SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review
April 21, 2022

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Review

Mike Hochstein | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is part of my company's monitoring toolset which enhances the overall value proposition of our SolarWinds Orion investment. Being a global company, we currently utilize four Orion instances across multiple data centers and public cloud providers. SAM is currently monitoring on-prem and public cloud Windows and Linux-based applications in addition to providing latency metrics for RDS endpoints in AWS. SAM provides historic metrics in addition to being part of an overall toolset to troubleshoot issues in real-time.

Pros

  • Realtime monitoring of common OS and application metrics.
  • Visibility of past performance issues for server application events/issues.
  • Fast, out-of-the-box setup.

Cons

  • Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
  • Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
  • More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
  • Ability to sunset multiple legacy monitoring platforms.
  • A single pane of glass across global locations (Enterprise Operations Console) simplifies monitoring for junior staff.
  • A single toolset allows staff from across the global environment to share knowledge and quickly set up/modify monitoring.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is able to provide 90% of the functionality my business requires. SolarWinds is able to scale out functionality by purchasing additional modules to meet the individual needs of its customers. While this functionality provides flexibility to build out a robust platform, it can quickly turn into purchasing more and more add-ons which can begin to provide a decreasing amount of value. Companies with requirements for more detailed APM metrics may find SolarWinds comes up short for their use case scenarios.

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

SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (NTA), SolarWinds Network Configuration Manager (NCM), SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (npm), Cisco Intersight
A company that has already invested in the SolarWinds ecosystem can drive additional value by adding Server & Application Monitor. Installing and configuring the additional functionality of SAM can prove to be a very worthwhile investment in most situations. Templates for canned software make the setup quick and efficient. Companies that leverage multi-tiered/in-house applications or require precise details of performance across an entire stack will want to look at solutions from other vendors.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
9.1
Application monitoring
9
Database monitoring
9
Threshold alerts
10
Predictive capabilities
8
Application performance management console
8
Collaboration tools
Not Rated
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
9
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
Not Rated
Virtualization monitoring
9
Server availability and performance monitoring
10
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
10
IT Asset Discovery
Not Rated

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