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Prometheus-AI Platform vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 28, 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-AI Platform
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
Data Scrubbing Software (3rd), ERP (10th), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (2nd)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (22nd), Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Prometheus-AI Platform and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Prometheus-AI Platform is designed for Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and holds a mindshare of 1.7%.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, on the other hand, focuses on Server Monitoring, holds 3.2% mindshare, up 2.7% since last year.
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Prometheus-AI Platform1.7%
IBM Maximo15.4%
Oracle Enterprise Asset Management8.5%
Other74.4%
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
Server Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.2%
Zabbix15.2%
Checkmk7.3%
Other74.3%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
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.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Specialist at ServiceIO
Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility
From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature of Prometheus is its ability to collect metrics."
"The product’s scalability is valuable."
"The scalability of Prometheus is very good."
"The product is easy to maintain."
"The sky is the limit because the solution is a flexible open box that can be used vastly to do anything you need to monitor applications."
"It is an efficient solution."
"The solution can be deployed in thirty minutes."
"The product has an easy-to-understand interface."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
 

Cons

"Setting up the rules in Prometheus can be confusing, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Prometheus can be initially difficult for users since it has its query language, PromQL. The minimalistic interface is complicated to understand. They need to improve their interface so that users who don't know PromQL can also use it. You can only leverage the tool when you know PromQL."
"The alert functionality is kind of lackluster."
"I would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
"The setup could be made easier for new users because it requires a bit of advance knowledge or experience."
"Lacks the ability to clusterize."
"When it comes to deployment, if you have no experience with something like a CI/CD pipeline, it might be a challenge."
"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 tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"From an integration point of view, if you want to have a manager of manager kind of layer, that is currently lacking in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Prometheus is available as an open-source product."
"The product is expensive compared to Datadog."
"The product is free."
"Prometheus is an open-source solution."
"My company uses the open-source version of the product."
"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."
"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."
"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 like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"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 licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
12%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

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 is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...
 

Also Known As

Utopia Data Quality
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Roche Diagnostics Corporation, Harman International Industries Inc., Hilmar Cheese Company, International Rectifier Corporation, Electrolux USA, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, Rio Tinto Limited, Pertamina Pusat, Petrofac International Ltd, Cintas Corporation, Diyar United Company, Nortel Networks, Verizon
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Prometheus-AI Platform vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
882,637 professionals have used our research since 2012.