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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
7.3
Number of Reviews
348
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (10th), Mobile APM (2nd), Container Monitoring (1st), AIOps (3rd)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (11th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 10.2%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.5%, down 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.
KhalidOmer - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a good interface used for monitoring devices
I rate the solution's alerting mechanism and its impact on our operations ten out of ten. We have around 600 retail offices, and the solution helps us save costs by preventing shutdowns. I would recommend the solution to other users. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Real time monitoring helps reduce downtime. It saves a lot of time in determining what is the likely cause of an issue an end user may be experiencing."
"From the monitoring perspective, the ability to triage quickly is important, and the ability to alert and tell people where the problem is."
"Having the metrics easily understood and easily articulating the information."
"PureStack, I just love it. It can give visibility from the end-user perspective right through to the code level. That's the most valuable feature."
"It has created total transparency between technology and business on all aspects of systems and performance as well as being a proxy for network performance through user experience monitoring. This followed a major performance degradation of our primary frontline system, which highlighted inadequacy of infrastructure focus tools, e.g., Nagios and Zabbix. It helped detect and remediate several performance issues on systems on both vendor supplied packages as well as in-house developed systems. It also improved InfraOps and development teams understanding of system behaviour and performance characteristics."
"We are able to see globally our end user response time tracing down to the user ID."
"Improved visibility on performance and application issues."
"They have a feature that allows you to monitor the user, and we are able to create a VIP customer."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
 

Cons

"A role-based view and a Python monitoring tool would make a simple user interface more usable."
"Documentation is slightly in error as far as directory set ups and guidance. We came to our own solution for distributing the disk loads."
"A useful addition for known issues would be the ability to automatically perform certain activities as a first attempt to resolve issues which are creating a problem."
"On the side of the end user experience, I would suggest adding a new service for analyzing the backtrace of users."
"Every time we spin up an EC2 instance, we have to slap an agent on it and that is more work. So, if it could go agentless, that would be great."
"Our primary wish list for RFEs or feature requests are additional integration options with ticketing systems. Although, we are able to work around it, 'ticketing' is not a core function of the product."
"The heavy client is not really user-friendly and the concepts (while powerful) are unintuitive."
"The solution's ability to assess the severity of anomalies based on the actual impact to users and business KPIs is great. In my opinion, it could be extended even more. I would like it to be more configurable for the end-user. It would be nice to have more business rules applicable to the severity. It's already very good as it is now. It is based on the impact on your front-end users. But it would be nice if we could configure it a bit more."
"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is a little high, but still cheaper than competitors because Dynatrace at least has pay-as-you-go. Others do not. However, the pricing is confusing. I wish it was more simplified when trying to price out moving to a yearly contract."
"The pricing is not bad, but it could be better."
"The product is really fast to implement and gives customers instant value. This is important, because it reduces costs on the implementation."
"I think that the price is reasonable."
"Dynatrace is very good and it's provided a lot of information, it plays a positive role in making your application up to date in the market. If you want to monitor some applications only, it would be cheaper if you did cloud monitoring, but the price benefit depends on the use case."
"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."
"We have a three-year contract. We have 30 licenses for the full stack and 3 licenses for the DEM unit."
"Pricing can be high, especially for Portuguese standards. But as one says, you get what you pay for."
"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."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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?
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...
 

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: July 2025.
863,679 professionals have used our research since 2012.