BMC TrueSight vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

BMC Helix and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. BMC Helix is ranked #30 with an average rating of 8.3, while SolarWinds is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.4. BMC Helix holds a 0.8% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.3% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of BMC Helix users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

BMC TrueSight

Read 50 BMC TrueSight reviews

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1,560 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 43 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

3,599 Views
2,339 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

BMC TrueSight

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 3, 2025

BMC TrueSight and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor compete in the IT infrastructure and application monitoring category. BMC TrueSight has the upper hand due to its extensive event management capabilities and integration of diverse assets, while SolarWinds is noted for its ease of use and rapid deployment.

Features: BMC TrueSight offers seamless integration across various tools, rich knowledge modules, and wide monitoring capabilities. Event management capabilities and unified infrastructure health views are key strengths. SolarWinds provides AppInsight and PerfStack for in-depth monitoring, a robust set of monitoring features, and straightforward remote management capabilities.

Room for Improvement: BMC TrueSight could improve ease of deployment, reduce hardware requirements, and enhance reporting and cloud monitoring stability. SolarWinds can improve web console performance, expand AppInsight support for more applications, and address slowness issues in complex architectures.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BMC TrueSight's deployment is complex and resource-intensive while offering a solid integration platform. SolarWinds, though easy to set up, struggles with performance in larger environments. Both receive mixed reviews on customer service, with BMC's noted for commitment but long resolution times, and SolarWinds for improving responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: BMC TrueSight is recognized for a high cost and complex licensing model, less attractive to SMEs, though it provides significant operational savings. SolarWinds is competitively priced for mid-sized organizations, offering a quicker return on investment and easier licensing process, though costs may rise as monitoring needs expand.

To learn more, read our detailed BMC TrueSight vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BMC TrueSight vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

September 2025

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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

BMC TrueSight

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

30th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Event Monitoring (7th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (34th), Cloud Monitoring Software (26th), AIOps (5th)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of BMC TrueSight is 0.8%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, 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
Product	Market Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.3%
BMC TrueSight	0.8%
Other	97.9%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Srri G

Senior Project Manager - Head of Application Performance Management at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

The product is reasonably priced, but the solution is a little obsolete because it is deployed on-premise

If I want custom monitoring across a very large estate of more than 50,000 units, the on-premise deployment gets quite slow. The on-premise product’s performance must be improved. The solution is a little obsolete. That is why the solution moved to Helix, a SaaS operating system. The SaaS platform has the features I like. There is no point in BMC expanding TrueSight Operations’ console. It's high time that BMC starts a demise path for the product and is associated only with Helix. If we need any additional function, we must switch to Helix. Since TrueSight is deployed on-premise, the scalability and usage of the product are mainly focused on providing basic features and not enhanced features like analytics or cost analysis. People should move to a SaaS platform because on-premise products have limited storage and capacity.

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VIVEK PATHAK

Solutions Architect at Airtel

Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring

My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It provides common administration, and a Single Sign-On Platform with RBAC, which eases the cross launch between multiple tools"

"Signature baselines, which have allowed us to fine tune many of our events and significantly reduce the number of events generated."

"It allows our operations team to have one single application to reference when investigating issues in our environment."

"Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers."

"The solution's event management capabilities are fantastic. We do a best of breed. If, on the network side, they use a different tool, we pull all that data in so that we have a single console. It's kind of like the monitor of monitors. We're able to aggregate all the different types of data sets, whether it's log data, app data, OS data, infrastructure data, or network data. We're able to aggregate all those events and then correlate and be able to say we're having an event."

"The fact that they have a very integrated relationship with Sentry Software, the Knowledge Module, is valuable... The richest feature for us is the number of Knowledge Modules that we can load into the product to add breadth of service to the customer. It enables us to move up the operational stack from hardware, to operating system, to application, and to cloud... That enables us to provide one pane of glass over all those layers - hardware, OS, app, and cloud."

"Valuable features include wide support for monitoring, strong event management, service management capability, baselining (analytics) and easy to integrate other tools with it."

"The most valuable features are the rich reports, high performance, and the look and feel of the WebEx webpage are very good."

More BMC TrueSight pros

"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."

"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."

"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."

"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."

"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."

"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."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"One of the things that the TrueSight environment is missing is some of the HA abilities. The data collection server called the ISM doesn't really have the HA functionality or workload balancing. It was missing from the previous product as well. It's missing redundancy."

"The dashboards are not good. We have a limited dashboard, and if we want better dashboards, we need to use other solutions like Grafana because the TrueSight dashboards are not good."

"The one piece that I would love to see is a general-purpose, configurable agent which would be a framework that you can deploy on anything, whether it be Java or anything else. It would allow you to easily deploy it on a platform that they support."

"The stability of BMC TrueSight Operations Management needs improvement. My organization's infrastructure is vast and implemented based on BMC recommendations, but the solution needs to be optimized for large-capacity infrastructure."

"We have a unique use case because BMC typically sells this solution into enterprises that are deploying it within their IT, versus to a managed services provider like us where we're supporting thousands of customers. Multi-tenancy and the scalability have been challenges along the way, as we've grown... If anything could have gone better as we were ramping this up and adding a lot of volume to it, I would say it's the scalability. That would be one thing that could be improved."

"The pricing could be better."

"The product must provide application or service monitoring features."

"Deployment requires lots of resources (servers). It has too many consoles."

More BMC TrueSight cons

"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."

"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."

"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."

"This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities."

"Mapping interactions between systems."

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."

"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We did a five-year, multimillion dollar deal."

"The only possible additional cost that I can mention, that you might not be aware of, is that it uses Oracle partitioning, if you use Oracle. There are Oracle partitioning fees that go with that."

"There is a big upfront cost when you buy the license, then there is annual maintenance. We look at, if I bought a license and paid for maintenance for five years, then average it out, what would be my monthly cost. We have had some of the competing tools come in around four dollars. This is coming in as a premium, which is why I don't have it deployed as I would like it. Therefore, we're in negotiations right now. If I can get it down to the four dollar range, I will triple my deployment in a year and a half."

"The solution is based on endpoints and knowledge models which can be costly."

"The price of BMC TrueSight Operations Management is very high. If there was more flexibility with the sizing of the licensing it would be helpful, especially during the pandemic. We have wanted to expend but the licensing cost is too high."

"Other products are more expensive than BMC TrueSight."

"The cost depends on the usage."

"We're end-of-lifeing it now. Overall, the licensing costs of BMC are a challenge for us in that they're hard costs, whereas open-source monitoring has soft costs, where it's harder to line-item."

More BMC TrueSight pricing and cost advice

"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."

"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."

"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

26%

Computer Software Company

12%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	23
Midsize Enterprise	6
Large Enterprise	24

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	21

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BMC TrueSight Operations Management?

The solution provides visibility to our infrastructure, how it is, the resources we are monitoring, and quick updates when it has any problems. We have integrated it with ServiceNow to open instances.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BMC TrueSight Operations Management?

Though I have no clue about the tool's actual price, I know that it is astronomical.

See all answers

What needs improvement with BMC TrueSight Operations Management?

Cost is an issue with BMC TrueSight Operations Management. Though I am not responsible for the budget, I know that it is an expensive tool set when used only for event management. The tool's issue ...

See all answers

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs BMC TrueSight

Compared 5% of the time

ServiceNow IT Operations Management vs BMC TrueSight

Compared 5% of the time

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Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 16% of the time

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 14% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

Prometheus-AI Platform vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

BMC TrueSight

October 2025

Download BMC TrueSight product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

September 2025

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

ProactiveNet, TrueSight Operations Management

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

BMC TrueSight offers extensive event management and seamless integration, providing comprehensive monitoring across varied infrastructures through its centralized console and Knowledge Modules.

BMC TrueSight delivers robust event management capabilities with seamless integration and comprehensive monitoring of diverse infrastructures. Its single console simplifies management, offering automated triage for standardized alerts, enhancing efficiency. Knowledge Modules support services from hardware to cloud, while proactive monitoring and capacity optimization enhance customization. It efficiently supports mixed environments by providing detailed insights and intelligently routing alerts to reduce noise. While improvements are needed in deployment, integration, AI, automation, reporting, and complexity reduction, it still meets diverse operational needs effectively.

What are BMC TrueSight's key features?

Robust Event Management: Offers efficient handling of events.
Seamless Integration: Integrates easily with existing systems.
Comprehensive Monitoring: Supports hardware to cloud infrastructure.
Centralized Console: Simplifies management processes.
Automated Triage: Standardizes alerts for better efficiency.
Proactive Monitoring: Improves forecasting and issue prevention.
Capacity Optimization: Efficiently manages resources.
Customizability: Tailors to specific service needs.

What benefits and ROI should users seek in BMC TrueSight?

Enhanced Proactive Management: Reduces downtime through efficient monitoring.
Improved Troubleshooting: Provides visibility into systems for quick issue resolution.
Effective Integration: Blends well with other tools and platforms.
Resource Efficiency: Optimizes use of infrastructure and servers.
Global Support: Facilitates operations across sectors worldwide.

BMC TrueSight is widely used in performance and availability monitoring for infrastructure and applications, supporting the monitoring of servers, databases, networks, and IT environments. It is implemented to improve management and reduce downtime, serving needs in data centers and cloud services. Organizations leverage it for event management, comprehensive data center monitoring, and cloud services, using its capabilities for alerting, ticket creation, troubleshooting, and compliance, enhancing operational efficiency globally.

BMC Helix

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

Ensono, Transamerica, Boston Scientific, Park Place Technologies, inContact, TD Ameritrade, PNC Bank

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

BMC TrueSight vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

September 2025

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