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Azure Monitor 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

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (5th)
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 Azure Monitor is 7.5%, down from 8.7% 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

Syed Abid  - PeerSpot reviewer
Monthly and weekly resource monitoring has improved efficiency
Azure Monitor can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs. I can get the runtime logs alone, yet if Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at least to log storage, I can fix the logs without syncing with Log Analytics Workspace and Sentinel. If they do that, and if they can integrate a little pricing adjustment, it will be profitable for the Microsoft tool.
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 dashboard allows us to easily track various metrics and quickly understand the overall health of our system."
"Azure Monitor gives us the observability to check everything that we have in the cloud."
"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."
"Some good integration capabilities are present in the tool."
"In the last company where I worked about a year ago, it looked very simple."
"The overall product rating is nine out of ten."
"Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting."
"The security and support are good."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"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."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
 

Cons

"When something goes down, we want the option to have automation in place to get it back up again as quickly as possible."
"The solution should have cross-connection or cross-communication between tech partners."
"We cannot use AI services with the solution."
"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."
"The onboarding process of certain assets and the overall UI can be improved in Azure Monitor"
"The query builder could be better. In comparison to other monitoring tools, in order to use Azure Monitor, your engineers need to have KQL experience. If they don't, it's not intuitive as a system."
"Azure Monitor could improve the visualization aspect and integrate better with other third-party services."
"The length of latency is terrible and needs to be improved."
"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is very costly because you have to pay for various things such as adding to logs and internet alerts."
"Azure Monitor is a low-priced solution, which is why it would work best on small-scale projects."
"The licensing is a monthly fee."
"Since we are using the basic set, it is more cost-effective compared to other third-party APM solutions."
"The Azure Insight is a little bit expensive."
"There is a monthly fee for the alerts triggered and the data stored."
"Azure Monitor is one of the more cost effective solutions on the market."
"The solution is a pay-as-you-go consumption service and is the least expensive in the market."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"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."
"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."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
45%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
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 can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs. I can get the runtime logs alone, yet if Azure Monitor can independently add one gigabyte, two gigabytes, or five gigabytes at lea...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement. Monitoring these services is more complex compared to others.
 

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: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.