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Prometheus Group vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 3, 2025

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

Prometheus Group
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
9th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
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 Prometheus Group is 3.4%, down from 3.6% 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

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities
Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform. It is free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities. It allows me to save money by avoiding costs associated with AWS native services like CloudWatch or Amazon Prometheus. The ability to deploy on any cloud platform or environment, including Kubernetes, is a major advantage.
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

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I like its lightweight configuration functions."
"The solution offers an easy way to install and scratch values."
"The most valuable feature is that we can receive information in different formats."
"Prometheus is an open-source product that helps mold and improve it per our requirements. It is a lightweight solution that gives you many different metrics you can use in your application. The product offers complete granularity of your infrastructure. It integrates seamlessly with other tools like Grafana, which offers dashboard visibility. Prometheus is an extensively used product. I haven't seen any organization that is not using it."
"The solution helps us to scale our products and services, and it helps me by gathering those metrics."
"The good thing is it integrates well with the Grafana dashboard. It comes with a UI where you see everything as a graph."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"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."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
 

Cons

"Prometheus can definitely improve its visualization. For example, the matrices represented in Prometheus do not have a very good visualization on their dashboard."
"I would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"There is a tool called Prometheus Exporter that doesn't work well."
"The product must improve its documentation."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"Prometheus has a learning curve when setting it up. It definitely requires a little bit more hands-on than other solutions. It is an open source solution which means you do need to go through and read the literature that they have online for setting it up. The setup could be made easier."
"The UI and GUI are areas of concern in the product."
"The setup process could be more straightforward."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"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."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an open-source tool."
"The solution is open source."
"The solution is not expensive."
"We have the open-source version, so we don't pay for it."
"Prometheus is available as an open-source product."
"The product is expensive compared to Datadog."
"The solution is free of cost."
"The product is free."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
25%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
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 do you like most about Prometheus?
The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Prometheus?
Prometheus is cost-effective for me as it is free. Using cloud-native alternatives like Amazon Prometheus would incur charges.
What is your primary use case for Prometheus?
I use Prometheus for monitoring purposes in IT infrastructure. It is particularly useful for environments using Kubernetes, as it monitors ports, containers, instances, and applications effectively.
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

Information Not Available
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Prometheus Group vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.