We performed a comparison between SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Grafana based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Grafana stands out due to its open-source nature, flexibility in integration, and visually appealing graphs. SolarWinds falls short in terms of stability, flexibility, ease of use, and pricing, although it offers valuable monitoring capabilities. Grafana's customer service and pricing are positively reviewed. Overall, Grafana is user-friendly and provides a positive return on investment, making it the preferred solution.
"Grafana's best features are live monitoring and alerts."
"There are multiple kinds of models there to create dashboards, which is quite useful."
"Almost any kind of visualization is possible with Grafana and all dashboards are configurable."
"Provides good dashboard visualization."
"It excels in providing comprehensive details when there are downtimes or fluctuations, offering thorough reports."
"It is easy to change and move virtual servers."
"The most valuable aspect is customization. There are many customizations possible, so I like that."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"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."
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"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."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"Its UI features to create charts can also be improved. Some features could have a link to the documentation."
"The product's configuration for saving files could be improved."
"It would be helpful if Grafana provided more information and training on how to use Prometheus."
"The main drawback is the necessity for endpoint monitoring."
"There are not a lot of plugins for financial market monitoring."
"There are some areas of network drives that are not showing as expected based on server usage."
"Lacks in-depth graphs and sufficient AI."
"The solution has room for improvement with a better API to help automate the construction of the dashboards easier."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"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."
"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."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"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."
More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →
Grafana is ranked 6th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 39 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 18th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. Grafana is rated 8.0, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Grafana writes "Agent-free with great dashboards and an active community". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". Grafana is most compared with New Relic, Azure Monitor, Sentry, Dynatrace and Elastic Observability, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and SCOM. See our Grafana vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.
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We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.