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Alluvio Aternity vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alluvio Aternity
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
34th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (4th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (9th), Active Directory Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.4%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Caillin Peacock - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables us to be a lot more agile and proactive in troubleshooting endpoint issues thanks to accurate UX scoring
There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time. The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.
Subhajit Nag - PeerSpot reviewer
The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow
SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The detailed level of information you are able to get on the complete environment all of the way down to a specific machine."
"Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems."
"The most valuable features for us are the Incident Management dashboard, Application Status dashboard, and Activity Analysis UI."
"The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it."
"The data collected by the agents on each end point is the most valuable feature for us."
"The dashboards of this platform are the most valuable, especially the Desktop Health dashboard."
"We've looked at the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use the solution. We have used that to see how we are trending and it gives us some insight into areas that we might need to focus more on. That's helpful."
"Aternity easily provides visibility of all the endpoint machines to my clients."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
 

Cons

"It all comes in pretty nice looking charts and things, but we have a hard time pulling out hard data, which is usually what you'll need if you're trying to be actionable."
"They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow."
"The licensing model doesn't suit the market we are in and has room for improvement."
"In terms of a new feature, it would be good if we could restrict a user to a specific application or server. We have several customers, and we have to set up one or two servers for each customer. We have to set up one server for production and one for the test environment. Each user at the customer level can see all applications and the data of all applications, which is not really useful and good. We should be able to restrict user access at the application level or server level."
"Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it."
"To monitor these transactions, you need to look at it, analyze it and capture it. It requires a little bit of work, but in an environment like ours, you need it to be easier."
"Aternity does provide performance numbers, the data. However, it doesn't tell you what you can do about it. It just presents the facts. How to interpret the data, and how to draw conclusions from a lot of the data, requires knowledge and experience. That's the part that I would hope Aternity can continue to explore and give us that kind of capability."
"Aternity doesn't currently provide metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps. It's something you have to build out. It's not 'canned' that way and there is a lot of configuration that you have to do to the environment to collect the data you want to collect and that is important to you."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Regarding cost, compared to other solutions, Aternity is pretty low. It's definitely lower-cost than others that we looked at, like Nexthink."
"In my opinion they are asking a lot for their SaaS solution, but I also know that that's the direction they're going... The current, on-prem solution is probably a fair price."
"The price for Alluvio Aternity is favorable."
"Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all"."
"The pricing is reasonable for the value that it gives because it does allow you to measure the cost ramifications of direct productivity loss for spends in both your infrastructure and on endpoints."
"I thought the price for Alluvio Aternity was reasonable, but we had difficulty selling it in our market due to the minimum number of agents required for deployment, which I believe was around 500."
"Our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses."
"The pricing is fair."
"The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
"The product is expensive."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Educational Organization
40%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

Also Known As

Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio Aternity vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,476 professionals have used our research since 2012.