We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Grafana based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Grafana stands out due to its open-source nature, flexibility in integration, and visually appealing graphs. SolarWinds falls short in terms of stability, flexibility, ease of use, and pricing, although it offers valuable monitoring capabilities. Grafana's customer service and pricing are positively reviewed. Overall, Grafana is user-friendly and provides a positive return on investment, making it the preferred solution.
"It is a stable solution."
"Compatibility with Prometheus databases and the Spring Boot application make it the first choice when moving toward an SRE model."
"The most important feature of Grafana is its alarm formatting capability."
"Grafana's built-in integration with third-party tools, databases, and MQs is an amazing feature."
"Grafana's best features are live monitoring and alerts."
"The solution has good features."
"We can write queries in different languages, which is beneficial for visualization."
"Plugin: Connecting Grafana to multiple APIs of leading monitoring tools and alerting tools."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"It would be helpful if Grafana provided more information and training on how to use Prometheus."
"Setting up alerts via Grafana is a bit complicated, and alerting needs to improve."
"We need different kinds of applications in our infrastructure to see information in Grafana."
"They should improve the functioning of its editing tool."
"Lacks event management which affects our DevOps people."
"There is a need for improvement in automating daily monitoring reports, especially when alerts are triggered due to system downtimes or fluctuations."
"Trigger limits are difficult to see in a graph."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now."
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and Elastic Observability, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and SCOM. See our Grafana vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.
We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.