Solarwinds SAM perfect monitoring tool for Sysadmin
January 06, 2026

Solarwinds SAM perfect monitoring tool for Sysadmin

Younes Akrouch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

We use SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) to monitor the performance and availability of our critical servers and applications. It provides centralized visibility into our environment and helps us proactively identify resource issues, service failures, and application performance problems before they impact users.
It helps avoid downtime and be proactive on issues ahead of user complaint.

Pros

  • Application level health check
  • Smart alerting and tresholds
  • Automated Discovery & Dependency Mapping

Cons

  • Alert Noise & Threshold Management
  • Limited Cloud-Native Monitoring
  • Dashboards Can Be Difficult to Customize
  • Reduced downtime
  • Faster root cause analysis
  • Licensing and infrastructure costs can be high
SAM has
- Strong visibility without needing scripting : Out-of-the-box application templates reduce setup complexity; Dashboards are easy to build.
- Tier-1 / Tier-2 staff can be productive without deep training. Shared alerting and reporting improves usability across teams
- License might get pricy given the way are nodes are licensed specially on the vwware envirement compared to other tools like LogicMonitor
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is an Excellent for Windows-heavy, on-prem or hybrid environments with Solid out-of-the-box templates (SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory) with Mature alert engine with dependencies, suppressions, escalations; Although it is Not built for cloud-native or ephemeral infrastructure and the UI feels dated compared to modern tools but it is good tool for Admin without scripting skills

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?

No

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

Users complained that “applications are slow,” but we couldn’t quickly tell whether it was: SQL IIS SAN or the VM host; with the built-in Solarwinds templates for: SQL Server IIS and Windows services; When the app slowed down, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor showed SQL tempdb latency spikes before IIS errors, we have concluded that the issue was backend storage, not the app code.

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Feature Ratings

Application Performance Management
7.6
Application monitoring
8
Database monitoring
8
Threshold alerts
8
Predictive capabilities
7
Application performance management console
8
Collaboration tools
7
Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications
8
Application dependency mapping and thresholding
7
Virtualization monitoring
7
Server availability and performance monitoring
8
Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting
8
IT Asset Discovery
7

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