DX Unified Infrastructure Management vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

DX Unified Infrastructure Management vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

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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

DX Unified Infrastructure M...

Ranking in Server Monitoring

24th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

121

Ranking in other categories

Network Monitoring Software (75th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (55th), Cloud Monitoring Software (41st), AIOps (21st)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Server Monitoring

9th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (16th), Active Directory Management (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of DX Unified Infrastructure Management is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 2.6%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Server Monitoring

Featured Reviews

Arunpandiyan M

Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Easy to set up, simple to use, and offers great technical support

There are quite a few manual processes. We've had issues with pulling reports. Sometimes we have trouble or get errors. The reporting process should be easier. If you have a hub, you should be able to have an unlimited number of servers. For example, if you have 500 servers, and the limit is ten, you have to pull 50 reports. We'd like to just pull one report for all servers. This also increases the time to pull reports. If we have to pull more reports, it takes that much longer than just pulling one. The product can be expensive. Right now, they are updating and consolidating the dashboard. I'm expecting an update that will resolve a few glitches in the server.

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Subhajit Nag

Senior Process Associate at Tata Consultancy Services

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.

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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

"You can scale it pretty much however way you want to as long as you have the servers to throw at it."

"MultiWAN and Balance service"

"We are able to go in and actually leverage the thick client for a nice easy drag and drop solution."

"DX UIM is scalable."

"I recall the initial setup being straightforward."

"It gives an alarm when there's something going on, not just when there's an expected spike that happens every night on a server."

"One of the things that I like about DX Infrastructure is that the topology is good enough to see what is happening in the infrastructure. You also get alerts if something is happening in the network. There are many features and benefits. It is serving our customers in knowing exactly how their network is performing in terms of reliability. It also helps them in planning the capacity. They know how much bandwidth the branches are consuming."

"Monitoring infrastructure and business applications are the most valuable features."

More DX Unified Infrastructure Management pros

"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."

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

"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."

"Identifying the problem statement is easy."

"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."

"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."

"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."

"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"Stability."

"We had to do some work to make what was more of a business class solution work at an enterprise level."

"It would be good to implement views showing the aggregated status graphically."

"I think it can be improved by a greater provision of specialized technical support, as there are very few trained personnel there."

"Within this product there are individual probes, and each of these probes doesn't always necessarily output the same kind of information into our database. So when we try to collect what's called QoS data, from one probe we might get a ton of information, lots of good stuff that we can use in our database, but then from another probe, we might not get so much or we might not be able to pull the things that we want to."

"The only challenge that I have with this solution is the reporting part. The users are not really comfortable with the kind of reports they are getting. Sometimes, they want to see reports in their own format. Customizing those reports with Jasper is not very easy. It could be because of the knowledge gap. If you have the knowledge of how Jasper can be configured to suit customer requirements in terms of reporting, it is good. There was a time a customer complained about one issue related to Netflow analysis. Broadcom has a separate model for that, but the customer wanted everything bundled together. It could also have IP management so that I am able to see or analyze IPs so that the IPs that are already in use don't get assigned."

"The other element is that there are no real templates, out of the box. Let's go with an example where we do have the probe, which is great, and we do have a really nuanced customer with a small set of devices that maybe not a lot of other customers use. There might not be a template in place, so effectively we have the tool in front of us but we still need to develop a solution. So it would be really nice to see a little bit more of something like a central repository of templates that we could use. That would help us expedite our onboarding process."

"We would like the navigation of this solution to be more user friendly for our system administrators."

More DX Unified Infrastructure Management cons

"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."

"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."

"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."

"The technical support was better in previous years. With the launch of the premium support service, the normal support has declined."

"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."

"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"

"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."

"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"CAD $400,000 annually."

"Reasonable setup cost and licensing prices."

"This product is expensive compared to other vendors (SolarWinds, ManageEngine)."

"Customers pay for the license and the support."

"The product-price ratio is better than other brands such as Fortinet or SonicWall."

"The license cost depends on the number of probes and robots."

"Pricing for DX Unified Infrastructure Management isn't cheap at all. It's a complex tool, so you have to pay more. No one is happy with a large bill to pay, but if it's a complex product and you designed a complex solution to be monitored, it'll be your fault that you need to buy an expensive product, and that would be implicit in the design of DX Unified Infrastructure Management. Monitoring is just a small part of it. Sometimes you have to pay a significant amount of money for a complex yet very good solution."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Computer Software Company

12%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Educational Organization

45%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What is your primary use case for DX Infrastructure Manager?

We are an integrating company that offers DX Unified Infrastructure Management to customers. We help them set it up, do the integration, and provide support. Our end customers include financial ins...

What advice do you have for others considering DX Infrastructure Manager?

I would recommend DX Unified Infrastructure Management to others as it is a good and reliable solution. I would rate it nine out of ten due to its robust functionality and capability to support inf...

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DX Infrastructure Manager?

The pricing of DX Unified Infrastructure Management is high and often a concern for customers. The cost is higher compared to other Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), which is feedback we hav...

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

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

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.

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.

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Product Reports

DX Unified Infrastructure Management

Download DX Unified Infrastructure Management product report

DX Unified Infrastructure Management report

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Also Known As

DX Infrastructure Manager, DX Infrastructure Manager for Z Systems and CA UIM for zSystems, CA UIM (DX Infrastructure Manager), CA Nimsoft Monitor, CA UIM, DX Infrastructure Manager

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

DX Unified Infrastructure Management is the only solution that provides an open architecture, full-stack observability and zero-touch configuration for monitoring traditional data center, public cloud, and hybrid infrastructure environments.

Designed to ensure an optimal end-user experience, this solution provides a modern HTML5 operations console that makes it easy and fast for today’s IT teams to implement, use, and scale – leading to faster time to value.

Broadcom

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

CBNCloud, IIJ Global Singapore, AT&S, AXSOS, Aozora Bank, HCL Technologies, IntelliNet, Securex

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

DX Unified Infrastructure Management vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor