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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

"It is a stable solution...Based on the feedback I have received from my colleagues in our company's IT department, the setup phase of the solution is relatively easy."
"Prometheus gives us high availability automatically."
"The most valuable features of the solution are metrics scraping capabilities and the open source community and support."
"Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform."
"It has lots of APIs and libraries to integrate with any kind of language."
"It is highly valuable as it serves as the foundation for our infrastructure monitoring tools."
"The product’s scalability is valuable."
"The most valuable feature is that we can receive information in different formats."
"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 solution can be deployed quickly."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"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."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
 

Cons

"The simplicity of the query language could be improved. The current query language is not easy to work with."
"Its documentation could be clearer to understand."
"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"The query language in Prometheus is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"When it comes to deployment, if you have no experience with something like a CI/CD pipeline, it might be a challenge."
"I would like to see improvement in the analysis tools and customization features."
"Prometheus requires improvement on the query side."
"The DSL could be improved."
"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."
"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."
"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."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free of cost."
"Prometheus is an open-source tool."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"This is an open-source solution."
"Prometheus is available as an open-source product."
"The tool is open-sourced."
"Prometheus is an open-source solution."
"We have the open-source version, so we don't pay for it."
"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 tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"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 might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
"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."
"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 solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
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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.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.