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Dynatrace 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

Dynatrace
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
345
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (5th), Mobile APM (1st), Container Monitoring (2nd), AIOps (2nd)
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 Dynatrace is 10.8%, down from 13.8% 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

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems
There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
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

"Quick availability of multiple aspects of performance from infrastructure to application layers."
"It makes our lives easier as we drill down to problems."
"Dynatrace has helped us reduce outage times and severity of impact."
"UEM helps to identify user experience and detailed steps performed by the user."
"Developers love the tool, because it is easy to use. They can immediately see how their code behaves."
"Dynatrace is a powerful tool for full stack monitoring with APM capabilities and AI root cause problem analysis. This helps our customers with their digital transformation and gaining insight into their infrastructure."
"Often, we are busy working on other tasks when something goes wrong with the site. Getting timely alerts is very important to our needs as a business."
"You can always get in touch with support representatives and the developers if you want to, and you can get the solution directly from them. They are good about giving customer service, which I really like."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"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."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"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."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
 

Cons

"Documentation could be improved. E.g., you don't know how to properly use Dynatrace because documentation is almost lacking behind the features being deployed."
"They should provide a guide to arrive at the solution for non-super experts."
"We have had problems with our middle layer application implementation."
"Two things that can be improved are the licensing and the Business dashboard."
"The one thing I do not like about Dynatrace is that their web dashboards are very very slow. They seriously have to improve their web dashboard configuration and SSL timeouts."
"The scalability is there, but it is a headache when you do a lot of stuff and when you need to compare a lot of servers and do a lot of things. The scalability is very difficult to maintain."
"​An additional feature that we could use is the rollover. If we could rollover to different datacenters, then it would satisfy our requirement. I.e., if one datacenter fails, then we could rollover to another datacenter.​"
"We would like to see an AI tool that detects issues with our site in real time."
"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."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"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."
"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."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"As compared to New Relic and other providers, it is more expensive, which is its biggest disadvantage. Its biggest advantage is its capability. It is more feature-rich."
"The pricing and licensing are very expensive."
"Consider volume because that is where you will get the most benefit. Doing a point solution is not cost-effective."
"You get a really well-planned out monitoring suite for the money spent."
"There is a license cost, which is obviously more expensive than an open-source solution, but for the return on investment from what you get from it, it's a great investment. Of course, it could always be cheaper."
"Licensing is very interesting, as you pay only for what is being monitored. A lot of things are given away for no additional cost. If you have a great IT consolidation, it will be pretty cheap. If you have a lot of servers, it will be heavier."
"We asked for a three-year license, and the price was quite good."
"It's more expensive than other solutions, but worth it. We use full APM monitoring on our primary systems, but only resource monitoring on lesser systems. We shift licenses around our environment when a deeper dive into lesser systems is required."
"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 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."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"The price is too high."
"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."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
36%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
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

Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if you need to monitor applications end to end. I have tested them all and have not f...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire stack. Both production and Dev/Test. I find it to be quite superior to anything els...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems, the scope of implementation). Our goal was to consolidate APM and infra monitor...
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

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Dynatrace vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
844,944 professionals have used our research since 2012.