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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
18th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Prometheus Group is 3.5%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.6%, up from 1.7% 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

"The product has an easy-to-understand interface."
"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is the ease of pulling the metrics."
"Prometheus provides a flexible and adjustable querying and describing time, allowing for more responsive monitoring."
"I like its lightweight configuration functions."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The dashboard is very valuable."
"One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"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."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
 

Cons

"The product must improve its documentation."
"Its documentation could be clearer to understand."
"Prometheus can definitely improve its visualization. For example, the matrices represented in Prometheus do not have a very good visualization on their dashboard."
"Prometheus' UI color can improve. Using the Prometheus UI for configuration or analyzing queries is a horrible experience."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
"Setting up the rules in Prometheus can be confusing, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The solution's error handling part could be improved."
"When it comes to deployment, if you have no experience with something like a CI/CD pipeline, it might be a challenge."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"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."
"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."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is free."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"We have the open-source version, so we don't pay for it."
"It is an open-source tool."
"This is an open-source solution."
"Prometheus is an open-source tool."
"My company uses the open-source version of the product."
"Prometheus is available as an open-source product."
"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."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
26%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
46%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
6%
Government
6%
 

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?
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when...
 

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: March 2025.
839,422 professionals have used our research since 2012.