ServiceNow Discovery vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

ServiceNow and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Server Monitoring category. ServiceNow is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.0, while SolarWinds is ranked #9 with an average rating of 7.6. ServiceNow holds a 3.3% mindshare in SM, compared to SolarWinds’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of ServiceNow users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

ServiceNow Discovery

Read 44 ServiceNow Discovery reviews

3,616 Views
1,916 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

4,008 Views
962 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

ServiceNow Discovery

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 2024

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and ServiceNow Discovery compete in the IT monitoring and discovery category. SolarWinds holds an edge in monitoring capabilities, whereas ServiceNow excels in comprehensive discovery and integration.

Features: SolarWinds provides advanced monitoring features, deep insights into server performance, and user-friendly design. ServiceNow offers strong discovery features, automatic IT asset detection, and integration across various systems.

Room for Improvement: Users suggest SolarWinds improve its alerting system to reduce false positives, enhance user experience, and refine reporting. ServiceNow could benefit from better documentation, more tutorials for onboarding, and enhancements in its user interface.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds is known for straightforward deployment and responsive customer support. ServiceNow offers powerful automated deployment but has a steeper learning curve. Both receive positive feedback in customer service, with SolarWinds slightly more favorable due to support responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds is viewed as more cost-effective with faster setup and quicker ROI. ServiceNow, while more expensive, is valued for its robust discovery tools and integration capabilities, justifying its higher cost for many users.

To learn more, read our detailed ServiceNow Discovery vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Discovery vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

January 2026

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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

ServiceNow Discovery

Ranking in Server Monitoring

5th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

IT Asset Management (6th), Cloud Resource Discovery Services (1st)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Server Monitoring

9th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Active Directory Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of ServiceNow Discovery is 3.3%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 3.1%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Server Monitoring Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
ServiceNow Discovery	3.3%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	3.1%
Other	93.6%

Server Monitoring

Featured Reviews

reviewer2759271

Manager, Solution/Service Delivery at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Has supported enterprise needs well and addresses discovery across environments

Small companies will not be able to afford ServiceNow Discovery from the pricing perspective. Hence, they will not opt for ServiceNow Discovery as a solution, either as an ITSM solution or ITOM solution. It will not be affordable. I am specifically talking about the Middle East and Africa region. ServiceNow ITOM is particularly not very strong in terms of monitoring capabilities. They do not have any monitoring tool. They use event management from getting events from other tools. In that front, they had a roadmap for going for an open-source solution, but I have not seen that materialize. There is a lack of tools perspective for monitoring. Perhaps they do not have a plan because there are hundreds of tools available, and they prefer to focus on integration and event management.

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NikhilKalwint

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The product provides great scalability features."

"The most valuable feature is its integration with CMDB, as it collects all the data."

"The solution finds public cloud infrastructures globally and updates the integration management database, service catalogs, and asset management details."

"It is a stable solution...The initial setup of the product is straightforward."

"It has been stable since deployment."

"I find that the Discovery and scripting features are the most useful."

"Most fields on our forms are auto-filled, reducing manual maintenance for our infrastructure team. Post Discovery implementation there is hardly any maintenance."

"The product's discovery feature is valuable due to its accuracy, reliability, and the high prestige associated with the information it provides."

More ServiceNow Discovery pros

"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"

"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."

"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."

"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."

"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."

"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."

"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."

"I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"Debugging is a bit tough in ServiceNow Discovery, so debugging should be made very easy."

"Application discovery could be improved. And, right now, ServiceNow needs to be coupled with another solution in order to verify information."

"I would rate technical support for ServiceNow Discovery as four. This rating is because there are features on the tool that never worked and despite calling our support, there were no results."

"Without improvement in the patters, applications can't be discovered"

"In my opinion, it's quite slow compared to other tools, like Device42. Also, there are predefined fields in Device42 that are not available in ServiceNow. These are the basic things I think can be improved here."

"I cannot tie CMDB at this stage with strategic planning regarding ServiceNow Discovery ability to maintain accurate data in CMDB."

"It's an expensive platform."

"The continuous improvement in the quality and customization of the product features would be beneficial, particularly as more customers rely heavily on its capabilities."

More ServiceNow Discovery cons

"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."

"It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that."

"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."

"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."

"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."

"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."

"The technical support was better in previous years. With the launch of the premium support service, the normal support has declined."

"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."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is not cheap."

"If the product is not deployed properly, it can be very expensive."

"As per a general discussion I had with the stakeholders, I figured out that it is a costly tool. There is a need to make additional payments apart from the licensing fees for better support services from ServiceNow."

"ROI (Return on Investment) is good. ServiceNow don't disclose the price publicly. They'll assess your organization's needs and then come up with a price."

"It is not recommended for smaller companies because of the price."

"ServiceNow Discovery's licensing is not a very small investment, but it definitely pays off."

"It's on a yearly basis. We renew our contract for three years at a time."

"Setting up and licensing for ServiceNow can be expensive, especially for enterprise service management."

More ServiceNow Discovery pricing and cost advice

"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."

"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."

"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 is expensive."

"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."

"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."

"The price is too high."

"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."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Educational Organization

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	23

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	21

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ServiceNow Discovery?

The solution can prioritize the discovery of IP ranges. The product automatically places all Discovery CIs into the correct class within the CMDB.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Discovery?

The pricing information for ServiceNow Discovery was requested but not provided.

See all answers

What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?

A CMDB debugging tool to give indication about the errors that appear would be appreciated.

See all answers

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Discovery

December 2025

Download ServiceNow Discovery product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

December 2025

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

ServiceNow Discovery finds applications and devices on your network, and then updates the CMDB with the information it finds. Discovery is available as a separate subscription from the rest of the Now Platform.

ServiceNow

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

York, National Grid, DXC Technology, experian, BEACHBODY

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

ServiceNow Discovery vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

January 2026

Free Report: ServiceNow Discovery vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

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