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Prometheus vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
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
19th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Prometheus is 3.4%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.7%, 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 resilience of the solution's metric collection is very nice."
"The best thing about Prometheus is its integration."
"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes."
"The product is easy to maintain."
"The product’s scalability is valuable."
"Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform."
"Prometheus gives us high availability automatically."
"It is an efficient solution."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."
"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."
 

Cons

"Setting up the rules in Prometheus can be confusing, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The initial setup of Prometheus is complex and rated one out of five in ease of setup."
"The setup process could be more straightforward."
"Prometheus can definitely improve its visualization. For example, the matrices represented in Prometheus do not have a very good visualization on their dashboard."
"The scalability must be improved."
"I would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"There isn’t much clarity regarding the issues that happen at the server end. It is a push model and from the client’s point of view, it needs to look better and solve remote issues."
"If you are not quite technical, it can be pretty hard to understand the way it works and how to query data in Prometheus."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"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."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"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."
"The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is expensive compared to Datadog."
"This is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
"The price of Prometheus is good, it is affordable because it is open source and there is no cost to it. You put it on your own server and the costs incurred completely depend on how you set it up."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"The solution is not expensive."
"Prometheus is available as an open-source product."
"Prometheus is an open-source solution."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"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 solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"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."
"We are on an annual license to use the solution. The price of the solution is expensive. The price is based on a bunch of factors, such as the number of engines and elements."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
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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 vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.