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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
33rd
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
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.5%, down from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.2%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.2%
Alluvio Aternity0.5%
Other98.3%
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.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Aternity's Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) has been a game changer for us. While knowing your own metrics is nice, if you don't know how you compare to others or what the numbers should be, then it doesn't tell you much. This solution puts that into context (if we are doing better than others or worse), which helps us prioritize where we want to focus and do improvements versus that's just how slow it's supposed to be. It's also great in communicating what we are doing and why we're doing it to our IT leadership teams, by saying, while we're pretty far behind others in certain categories, the time and changes for our prioritizations are justified."
"Aternity easily provides visibility of all the endpoint machines to my clients."
"The item we use the most and what upper management wants is the SLA reports. It's a good summary of how the applications are performing over time from month to month."
"DEM-Q (Digital Experience Management Quadrant) is very useful. This is where they stand out with their dashboard, because it gives us a picture of how our company is doing compared to the other businesses out there."
"The most valuable feature of Alluvio Aternity is the compiling and displaying of end-user data so that we can utilize it to troubleshoot proactively."
"The ability to quickly utilize the dashboard to gather information is valuable from a DXI perspective."
"Being able to proactively identify issues on user systems."
"The infrastructure data, especially the CPU and memory data, is per second, which makes it outstanding as compared to other solutions. Its licensing cost is very low for us."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"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 most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
 

Cons

"The solution's downloadable reports could be improved."
"Potentially, the one thing that could probably help with better levels of enterprise adoption is around creating the application monitoring signatures. That process can be a little bit difficult. If one thing could be simplified a little bit, it would be the application monitoring signature creation process."
"Being able to add custom monitoring to dashboards would be nice. Right now, if you want to monitor the value of a registry key on your systems, to get that added into the dashboard you have to reach out to Aternity so they can start looking for that value. It would be interesting if that were more of a self-serve function."
"I think the workflow needs improvement"
"The solution is available at a higher price than other solutions."
"The other place for improvement, as an on-prem, non-SaaS customer, is that the system administration and management in Aternity are very difficult. They've even told me that most of their support calls come in due to configuration and system administration on their on-prem. Their on-prem solution is not easy to use."
"Integrating the tool with other products is a challenge."
"The only thing I can say which has been frustrating are the Tableau workspace/dashboard options out-of-the-box, at least prior to version 8."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"From an integration point of view, if you want to have a manager of manager kind of layer, that is currently lacking in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor."
"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."
"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"The pricing is fair."
"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."
"The price for Alluvio Aternity is favorable."
"The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry."
"We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license."
"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."
"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."
"SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Computer Software Company
11%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
What needs improvement with Aternity?
Technology changes every six months, and improvements are necessary. The integration of AI agents could enhance these tools further, replacing traditional agents and plugins.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
 

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: November 2025.
872,922 professionals have used our research since 2012.