Item: SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is our primary monitoring platform for Windows and Linux servers, the applications they host, and key network connectivity, including remote IPsec tunnels, cloud virtual interfaces, and dedicated vendor connections. We depend on SAM’s proactive monitoring and alerting to identify outages or performance issues across our environment quickly.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Monitoring basic SQL Server functionality.
Monitoring Network connectivity.
Monitoring IIS Servers.
Ability to setup custom application monitors for monitoring non-standard applications.
Monitoring HTTPS web sites.
Monitoring DNS and Domain services.

Cons

Custom application monitors can be a little tricky to configure.
Logic in custom alerts can be a little hard to follow and figure out.
Inability to monitor certificates on custom applications or SQL Server.
Can be a little slow at times with on-prem SQL server.

Return on Investment

SolarWinds SAM gives us confidence that our business-critical applications are operating as expected, with real-time dashboards and alerts providing instant visibility into issues.
SolarWinds SAM enables us to focus our time and energy on improving the performance and efficiency of our environment, rather than reacting to issues.
The visibility SolarWinds SAM provides into our critical systems is invaluable. Even brief outages translate directly into lost revenue, and discovering issues through customer reports is not only costly but damaging to our reputation. Having proactive insight allows us to address problems before they impact our business or our customers.

Usability

I would rate SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor an 8.5 out of 10 for overall usability. It’s a very strong and intuitive platform that provides excellent visibility, dashboards, and alerting across our environment. While there are a few areas that could be improved or streamlined, the overall experience is very good, and it consistently delivers the functionality we rely on.

Alternatives Considered

Datadog, New Relic and PRTG Network Monitor

Compared to other monitoring products we evaluated or have used in the past, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor stands out as being significantly easier to use and quicker to adopt. It delivers excellent value for the price, offering a broad set of monitoring capabilities without unnecessary complexity. In addition, the platform is highly customizable, allowing us to tailor dashboards, alerts, and monitoring to our specific environment, and it is backed by strong, reliable support.

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

Veeam Data Platform, Fortinet FortiGate, OpsGenie

Likelihood to Recommend

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is an excellent tool for keeping tabs on all of your servers, network connections, and applications. It can be configured and customized with dashboards to help your team keep an eye on all of your critical resources and the status of your network. It can also be configured to alert you via email, text, or API hooks to on-call software to ensure your team is notified when something is not running correctly.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Comments

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Powerful Cost-Effective Monitoring with SolarWinds SAM.