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LogicMonitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

LogicMonitor
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (10th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (12th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th), AIOps (6th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (16th), Server Monitoring (9th), Active Directory Management (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. LogicMonitor is designed for IT Infrastructure Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 2.1%, down 2.4% compared to last year.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, on the other hand, focuses on Server Monitoring, holds 2.6% mindshare, down 3.4% since last year.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Henry-Steinhauer - PeerSpot reviewer
They have an active community of users who are willing to share their experiences and how they have extended the solution to do unusual things.
I'm a learn-by-example person, so it would be nice to have a cookbook for enterprise management. They have a rich API process, but there aren't many examples of how to do enterprise-style work. It is peculiar about how to do it for one device, but not necessarily thousands. LogicMonitor can effortlessly pull data from one item at a time. I have yet to find an excellent way to get LogicMonitor to show me all the WAN devices and how they're doing in terms of capacity.
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

"Another feature from the technical aspect, the back-end, is the ability to allow individual users or customers to have their own APIs. They're able to make changes using the plugins covered by LogicMonitor. That is a very powerful feature that is more attractive to our techno-savvy customers."
"The breadth of its ability to monitor all our environments, putting it in one place, has been helpful. This way, we don't have to manage multiple tools and try to juggle multiple balls to keep our environment monitored. It presents a clear picture to us of what is going on."
"LogicMonitor is good for getting a full view of your topologies. They have LiveMaps, which give you a visual representation of your infrastructure."
"I really appreciate the reporting function because it allows me to create dashboards that will be emailed to me during the morning so that I have a complete overview of my client's health, within a specific time frame."
"The solution’s overall reporting capabilities are pretty powerful compared to ones that I have used previously. It seems like it has a lot of customizations that you can put in, but some of the out-of-the-box reports are useful too, like user logon duration and website latency. Those type of things have been helpful and don't require a lot of, if any, changes to get useful content out of them. They have also been pretty easy to implement and use."
"We have very fine-tuned alerting that lets us know when there are issues by identifying where exactly that issue is, so we can troubleshoot and resolve them quickly. This is hopefully before the customer even notices. Then, it gives us some insight into potential issues coming down the road through our environmental health dashboards."
"The most valuable feature of LogicMonitor is the infrastructure monitoring capability."
"The alerting would be number one in my book. The thresholds for getting alerts for different criteria are pretty well-thought-out. We don't get many false positives or negatives on the alerting side. If we do get an email alert or some similar alert, we know that it is something that has to be looked at."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds."
 

Cons

"One drawback of LogicMonitor is its licensing model, which requires an additional license for each module. For example, if you need to use Azure monitoring, you'll need an additional license on top of the base license."
"We are working with LogicMonitor to get flexibility to see the absolute running numbers, rather than doing an average. They can keep the average for customers who want it, but there should be a way to at least show the real numbers, which are coming every second on the screen."
"LogicMonitor has good features, but the ease of use is a little bit confusing. Additionally, we are looking for workflow automation, which is a little bit tricky for LogicMonitor."
"LogicMonitor should improve its logging features. It can become expensive and should be cost-effective. It would be great to see prebuilt templates for alerting methods in LogicMonitor that are similar to the prebuilt dashboards. Currently, users have to build their alerting configurations."
"The ease of use with data source tuning could be improved. That can get hairy quickly. When I reach out for help, it's usually around a data source or event source configuration. That can get challenging."
"The process of upgrading some of the collectors has been a little bit confusing. I need to understand that better."
"I'd like to see more automation in the tool, especially around remediation."
"LogicMonitor's reporting capabilities definitely could use an improvement. We have made do with the dashboarding and done what we can to make that work for our customers. However, there are definitely customers who would like a PDF or some kind of report along those lines, where we have been utilizing other tools to provide them. The out-of-the-box LogicMonitor reporting is the only thing that we have been less than impressed with."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"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 needs to reduce its price."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an enterprise-grade solution and competitively priced compared to the other solutions that are out there... Our organization is not huge, but LogicMonitor is worth every penny that we pay for it. I've never heard anyone say, "I'm not sure that we're getting good value for money from this product." It's integral to our business."
"As a managed services provider, the licensing model that LogicMonitor provides us is excellent. We are able to scale up and scale down as needed. The pricing is reasonable for the amount of features and support that they provide."
"We have definitely seen ROI with LogicMonitor. We used to provide 24/7 IT support for our users. We have since been able to change to operating just within normal business hours for IT support, and LogicMonitor was a large part of being able to accomplish that."
"The pricing can be a little aggressive. Right now, it's a bit much for smaller organizations to adopt it. But comparatively, it also provides good features."
"The features were very valuable to us because we could consolidate them into one platform and have a good user experience with the platform, our accounts, and the support team. That was the key driver for us. That was what we were looking for. We looked for a comprehensive solution that could provide advanced features all in one platform, and LogicMonitor was the solution that we chose. It definitely has a premium price. However, you are getting what you pay for in a very effective way. That was important in our decision-making.The features were very valuable to us because we could consolidate them into one platform and have a good user experience with the platform, our accounts, and the support team. That was the key driver for us. That was what we were looking for. We looked for a comprehensive solution that could provide advanced features all in one platform, and LogicMonitor was the solution that we chose. It definitely has a premium price. However, you are getting what you pay for in a very effective way. That was important in our decision-making."
"The license is annual, and I'm not fully aware of what it costs. We have a through-cycle that we go through, and they've been generous with us going above our limit. They're not strict on it. At the end of the year, they got us to renew. We always add some cushion for what we expect. Also, if you need custom monitoring or design work, you can pay them for consulting services."
"It can handle scaling. It is like any other cloud service. There is a cost associated with scaling, so we currently don't monitor all of our environments. We monitor just the customer-facing production environments. It would be nice if we could monitor our dominant environments, but we will have to pay a lot more due to the scaling issue. So, there's a balance there between what we would like and what we are willing to pay for."
"It's affordable. The price we get per license is a lot cheaper than what we were getting with some of the other tools. There are other monitoring tools out there that are cheaper, but what you get with LogicMonitor, out-of-the-box, makes it worth the cost."
"The price is too high."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"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."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"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
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
39%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What do you like most about LogicMonitor?
LogicMonitor helps us prevent potential downtime. It's pretty good. It generates low-level warnings that aren't necessarily preemptive but can still alert us to issues we should investigate. These ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LogicMonitor?
The pricing can vary yearly or monthly, depending on the clients we're working with and their size and scale. For example, the pricing for a customer with ten thousand licenses versus a hundred lic...
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

Kayak, Zendesk, Ted Baker, Trulia, Sophos, iVision, TekLinks, Siemens
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.