Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Google and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Google is ranked #26 with an average rating of 8.0, while SolarWinds is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.3. Google holds a 1.1% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Google Cloud's operations s...

Read 10 Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) reviews

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2,209 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 42 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

3,793 Views
2,563 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Google Cloud's operations s...

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Google Cloud’s operations suite are two leading solutions for server and application monitoring. SolarWinds has the upper hand in ease of use and cost-efficiency, while Google Cloud's operations suite offers advanced features and integration capabilities.

Features: Users value SolarWinds for its comprehensive monitoring capabilities, pre-configured alert options, and ease of use. Google Cloud's operations suite is favored for its seamless integration with other Google Cloud services, advanced analytics, and deeper operational insights.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds needs modern and customizable dashboards, better scalability in larger environments, and enhanced user experience. Google Cloud's operations suite could improve multi-cloud support, clarify pricing structures, and simplify the setup process.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds is praised for quick deployment and responsive customer support, resulting in a smooth implementation experience. Google Cloud’s operations suite, with a steeper learning curve and complex setup process, offers comprehensive support and detailed documentation.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds is recognized for competitive pricing and a positive ROI, making it a cost-effective solution. Google Cloud's operations suite, while costlier, is viewed as a justified investment due to its extensive capabilities and superior ROI from sophisticated analytics and integration benefits.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

April 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

Google Cloud's operations s...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

26th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (29th), Cloud Monitoring Software (23rd)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

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 Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 1.1%, down from 1.6% 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_Patel

Senior Technical Architect at T-Systems International GmbH

Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations

As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like the monitoring feature."

"We find the solution to be stable."

"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."

"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."

"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."

"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."

"Google's technical support is very good."

"It's easy to use."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) pros

"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."

"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."

"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."

"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."

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

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."

"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."

"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."

"If I want to track any round-trip or breakdowns of my response times, I'm not able to get it. My request goes through various levels of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and comes back to my client machine. Suppose that my request has taken 10 seconds overall, so if I want to break it down, to see where the delay is happening within my architecture, I am not able to find that out using Stackdriver."

"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."

"It could be even more automated."

"The process of logging analytics can be improved"

"The logging functionality could be better."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) cons

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

"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."

"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."

"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."

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

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

"The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system."

"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."

"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."

"The cost could be lower."

"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."

"The product is expensive."

"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."

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

"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 price is too high."

"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."

"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."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

Retailer

Educational Organization

41%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?

If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analytics can be improved.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Google Stackdriver?

I use the solution for logging, defining alerts, and monitoring. Our company's Java and Python logging teams mainly use it.

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Google Stackdriver?

The Ops Agent and logging transport feature of the solution have had a major impact on improving application performance. The solution also allows the transport of logs into log buckets, which is h...

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 30% of the time

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Dynatrace vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

Compared 5% of the time

Prometheus Group vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

Compared 5% of the time

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Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 18% of the time

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 18% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 12% of the time

Prometheus Group vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

April 2025

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) report

Download Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2025

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Real-time log management and analysis

Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud. Get advanced performance, troubleshooting, security, and business insights with Log Analytics, integrating the power of BigQuery into Cloud Logging.

Built-in metrics observability at scale

Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. Visualize this data on charts and dashboards and create alerts so you are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.

Stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus

Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. Keep your existing visualization, analysis, and alerting services, as this data can be queried with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring.

Monitor and improve your application's performance

Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler to help you reduce latency and cost so you can run more efficient applications.

Google

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

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

April 2025

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