Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (5th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (11th), Active Directory Management (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 9.7%, up from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.9%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Swapan Biswas - PeerSpot reviewer
A powerful Kusto query language but the alerting mechanism needs improvement
Alerts cannot be configured to monitor at a certain point in time. For example, we might want to alert people at zero hours but that is not possible. Splunk can accomplish this and its alerts are far better than the solution's options. The alerting mechanism is not up to the market. The default interface should be improved. You can prepare your own dashboard by using custom query language, but the default interface is not good.
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

"It allows you to set thresholds on the metrics and receive alerts."
"In the last company where I worked about a year ago, it looked very simple."
"Good load and metrics gathering and very good analysis."
"The solution integrates well with the Microsoft platform."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"You can scale the product."
"Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment."
"The feature that I found most valuable in Azure Monitor is its monitoring abilities. With Azure Monitor, you are able to monitor all of your cloud resources across multiple subscriptions in one dashboard and create solution-specific alerts that can trigger an email to the team responsible for that specific solution."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"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."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."
 

Cons

"What I feel is when I open a screen of Azure, some places are very complex to navigate to. It is not very user-friendly when it comes to accessing certain sections."
"It's really complex to retrieve or query the logs in Azure Monitor."
"The monitoring of Kubernetes clusters needs improvement to be on par with competitors."
"Automation related to gathering metrics from more applications could be improved."
"The process of implementation needs to be easier."
"The biggest one is probably just the user interface. There could be more advanced logging at the database level. They can also improve their query builder to allow you to search for things better, but I last used it about a year ago. They might have already changed a ton of things in the newer versions."
"They need to work on a more hybrid deployment that will allow us to monitor local on-premise deployments and connect to different systems. I would like to see more integration."
"Setting up this solution is complex. It's also missing the functionality of assigning alerts."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"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."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."
"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."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Azure Monitor is a competitively priced solution."
"Its cost depends on the ingestion of the logs. It could go anywhere. For an out-of-the-box platform such as FrameFlow, you pay pretty much a fixed price and you get what you get, whereas, with something like Azure Monitor, you pay by the ingestion charge, so you can have one client who pays hardly anything for the same alerts, and another client pays loads and loads."
"I would rate Azure Monitor a two out of five for affordability."
"It is a pay-as-you-go model. I find it very cost-effective."
"Azure Monitor is a low-priced solution, which is why it would work best on small-scale projects."
"The cost of Azure Monitor application performance should be less expensive."
"It's a costly solution"
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"The product is expensive."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
45%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What do you like most about Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor could improve by adding capabilities for data observability and integrating more tightly with their data platform components.
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.
823,795 professionals have used our research since 2012.