SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs Sumo Logic Observability comparison

SolarWinds and Sumo Logic are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. SolarWinds is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.3, while Sumo Logic is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.8. SolarWinds holds a 1.7% mindshare in APM, compared to Sumo Logic’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 89% of SolarWinds users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Sumo Logic users who would recommend it.

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 42 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

3,793 Views
2,566 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Sumo Logic Observability

Read 6 Sumo Logic Observability reviews

405 Views
270 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Sumo Logic Observability

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Sumo Logic Observability compete in system monitoring and observability. Sumo Logic generally ranks higher for feature richness and data integrations, while SolarWinds is appreciated for cost-efficiency and customer support.

Features: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor offers detailed monitoring capabilities, custom alerts, and responsive customer support. Sumo Logic Observability excels in advanced analytics, real-time data management, and seamless cloud integration.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds users report complexity in the initial setup, high resource consumption, and deployment challenges. Sumo Logic users cite occasional UI lags, a steep learning curve, and performance issues.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds is commended for its straightforward installation but criticized for high resource usage during deployment. Sumo Logic offers flexible deployment but can be complex. SolarWinds provides responsive support, while Sumo Logic has mixed feedback.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor has competitive pricing and satisfactory ROI. Sumo Logic Observability has a higher initial cost but is considered worthwhile due to its comprehensive features and added value.

To learn more, read our detailed SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Sumo Logic Observability Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Sumo Logic Observability

April 2025

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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

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

16th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (9th), Active Directory Management (12th)

Sumo Logic Observability

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

20th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (21st), AIOps (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.7%, up from 1.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sumo Logic Observability is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Subhajit Nag

Senior Process Associate at Tata Consultancy Services

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.

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Shamshir Nangla

Site Reliability Engineer at LHV Bank

Getting up and running is easy, even for a newbie but management of searches definitely needs improvement

Operational effectiveness with regards to when there's an issue, when there's a reactive issue, people are able to, or as well as proactively, actually, because we use their PagerDuty integrations. We use queries in Sumo Logic to trigger alerts based on logging. That allows us to proactively identify issues as they're happening. With those same alerts, obviously, with that platform, you can use it to reactively start looking at troubleshooting issues as they're happening right then and there or incidents. So it's been very, very good for alerting and for troubleshooting issues. For predicting issues before they happen, it is not very good. They have a feature called anomaly detection, but I think it's quite premature compared to other stuff out there. So it's good for alerts and for troubleshooting operational effectiveness. When your operations are down or segregated, it's perfect because it will help you diagnose the issues.

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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

"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."

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

"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."

"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."

"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."

"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."

"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."

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

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

"Alerting and consistency are key. We have different tiers with log collectors, and continuous querying provides near-real-time updates. It's almost like instantly when something happens, like pending transactions or error fees. This helps reduce incident resolution time compared to waiting for thresholds on other platforms. We can continue logging in with them seamlessly and quickly get into action."

"We use queries in Sumo Logic to trigger alerts based on logging. That allows us to proactively identify issues as they're happening."

"The product is easy to learn."

"Sumo Logic Observability presents a range of valuable features, including well-crafted dashboards and a diverse selection of helpful apps. However, personally, I don't hold a favorable opinion of the solution. While I don't struggle with writing queries, my main difficulty lies in recruiting competent individuals and ensuring their proficiency in utilizing the solution. This often leads to additional challenges and complexities. From my perspective, when compared to Microsoft Sentinel or even Splunk, Sumo Logic Observability has a steeper learning curve. One contributing factor to this disparity is the solution's long existence in the market compared to Synlogic. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that there are capable and knowledgeable professionals employed at Sumo Logic Observability. The effectiveness of the solution largely depends on how it is integrated into your internal operations and environment. Its utility and benefits can vary significantly. It is worth noting that organizations like the NSA and, I believe, the CIA used it in the past, primarily for rapidly searching and analyzing large volumes of data. To leverage its capabilities effectively, you must determine how to tailor it to your specific needs."

"I have not seen any stability issues in the product."

"The solution allows multiple groups to converge on a unified platform, allowing for different utilization by various teams."

Cons

"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."

"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"

"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 major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."

"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."

"The technical support team's response time could be improved."

"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."

"The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

"The speed of queries could be improved. When using more advanced functions, especially with large datasets like the 90-day log retention we had, queries could be slow, sometimes taking up to five minutes."

"Fine-grained data can be quite frustrating to work with and should be made easier."

"Implementing a more streamlined enrichment process, and conceptualizing the observability data collection as an ETL pipeline would be helpful."

"Documentation could be better. While it's generally good, sometimes finding what you need requires extensive searching. It's not always clear where to look for specific things."

"SearchUI.exe is a bit clunky in the product, making it an area where the product needs improvements."

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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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 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

"Now, they’re not charging by ingests anymore. You should expect the price to be a bit of an unknown and to basically increase as the business increases."

"I started on the free tier to try it out, but because of our usage, we're now paying for it."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

40%

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Financial Services Firm

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Transportation Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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 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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Sumo Logic Observability?

The product is easy to learn.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Sumo Logic Observability?

The speed of queries could be improved. When using more advanced functions, especially with large datasets like the 90-day log retention we had, queries could be slow, sometimes taking up to five m...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Sumo Logic Observability?

We used it for log observability – log aggregation specifically.

See all answers

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Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 38% of the time

Dynatrace vs Sumo Logic Observability

Compared 32% of the time

Amazon CloudWatch vs Sumo Logic Observability

Compared 17% of the time

Cribl vs Sumo Logic Observability

Compared 13% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

March 2025

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Buyer's Guide

Sumo Logic Observability

March 2025

Download Sumo Logic Observability product report

Also Known As

SolarWinds SAM

No data available

Overview

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

Sumo Logic Observability is widely used for log aggregation, analysis, and SIEM capabilities. It assists in monitoring data, creating dashboards, and managing log storage.

Sumo Logic Observability helps teams with logging in production, debugging with trace IDs, and performing queries across large datasets. Developers leverage centralized logs for error detection and tracking metrics like successful transactions and data volume. Security teams integrate it with SOAR systems for automation and enhanced security investigations.

What are the key features?

Well-crafted dashboards: Provides visually appealing and easy-to-use dashboards.
Diverse apps: Supports multiple applications for various use cases.
Centralized management: Enables streamlined log management from a unified platform.
Near-real-time alerting: Facilitates quick incident resolution with timely notifications.
Continuous querying: Allows for constant data analysis without interruptions.
Proprietary query language: Offers a robust and flexible language for complex queries.
Custom field creation: Simplifies addition of custom fields for better data categorization.
Robust data tracing: Ensures effective log tracing for efficient debugging and analysis.

What benefits or ROI should users look for?

Improved error detection: Helps quickly identify and address errors in production.
Enhanced security: Integrates with SOAR for better security automation and investigation.
Efficient log management: Centralizes log storage and management, simplifying processes.
Timely incident resolution: Near-real-time alerts and continuous queries lead to faster issue resolution.
Customizable to user needs: Offers flexibility with custom fields and a proprietary query language.

Industries like finance, healthcare, and technology implement Sumo Logic Observability to monitor sensitive data, manage high transaction volumes, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. Security and development teams benefit from its robust capabilities, enabling effective collaboration and streamlined operations.

Sumo Logic

Sample Customers

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Sumo Logic Observability

April 2025

Free Report: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor vs. Sumo Logic Observability

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