SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

I use the solution to monitor devices.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring.

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

I have been using the solution for five years.

I am satisfied with the solution’s technical support.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is very easy.

It took us four to six hours to implement the solution.

For the features it provides, the solution's pricing is good. We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution. We don't have to pay additional costs for support, and it is covered in the license.

I rate the solution's alerting mechanism and its impact on our operations ten out of ten. We have around 600 retail offices, and the solution helps us save costs by preventing shutdowns. I would recommend the solution to other users.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution is used for infrastructure monitoring.

Identifying the problem statement is easy. However, we must also find out why the problem happened. The vendor has invested heavily. The solution has a lot of features. It is good. The incident response is connected to the ticketing system. I always ask my team to create their own dashboards.

The biggest pain point is root cause analysis. It is difficult to analyze, assess, and warn my IT department about what will happen in the next five hours. It is also difficult to use AIOps to reduce ticket size. The product does not explain why a problem occurred. It does not tell me how to stop it from happening again.

If the same problem happens consistently, we face productivity loss. There are ITES issues. It affects the other applications. We manage about 145 applications across 1000 servers. If we get a two-second delay in one hop, it will affect us a lot. We cannot tailor the tool for every situation. We cannot re-engineer the ports to suit the infrastructure.

The price is too high. The tool is overpriced. We don't need all the features. The product must minimize the features and reduce the price. It all comes down to pricing. The customers find it pretty costly. It costs us $100,000 to $400,000 per year.

I have been working on application performance and servers since 1992. One tool cannot solve all the problems. We have multiple tools to find the root cause. All application performance monitoring tools have basic features. Not many solutions have correlation features. It helps us understand what is happening and why a particular problem has been triggered.

I am well versed with other technologies similar to SolarWinds. I know SolarWinds could do better. If I knew only SolarWinds, then it would be amazing. The other tools are futuristic. I will recommend the tool depending on what the client needs. Overall, I rate the product a six out of ten.

We are only implementing the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor functionality for every application which is going through migration. The solution monitors the client's full infrastructure, such as prod, non-prod, and QA. If the server is provisioned, you will see it in this solution.

The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities.

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 have been using SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for approximately two years.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is not stable. We have to maintain the platform and it goes down frequently. If we have plenty of resources the solution has problems managing the load.

The scalability of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is good. We can add multiple scalable engines but they have performance issues most of the time.

I have not contacted the support for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

The initial setup of the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is easy. The full process of deployment took approximately three to four months. The amount of time it takes depends on the environment.

I did the implementation of the solution.

My advice to those new to the solution is they should be aware of all the templates that they provide. The template is one of the powerful aspects of this tool, it consists of all the monitoring requirements that anyone can have.

I rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor a nine out of ten.

• Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I was awarded Q3 employee of the quarter. I am the first NOC member to receive this award at Kforc).
• By replacing SCOM and several other monitoring tools and merging them into the Orion Suite, I reduced outages by 66% YOY.
• The NOC saw a dramatic reduction in our MTR (Mean Time to Resolution) thanks to the powerful dashboard and alerting options offered in the various SolarWinds tools.

• Ease of installation and administration
• Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time.
• Powerful data collection from a wide range of different network devices.
• Devices not supported can be added each month via the MIB library update request.
• Robust reporting options and easy to use alerting features. NPM still has very complete alert logic available if one chooses. It takes fifteen minutes to build complex alerts that would take hours in other tools.
• Very active user community (THWACK) and outstanding peer information sharing.
• NetPath is spot on for what many NOC are lacking. CDR search is used daily. There is a huge value add for maintaining a healthy phone system for a company that is very much phone dependent.

• MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring. This is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking.
• Most focus seems to be on AWS cloud services. But some press has been released stating more Azure Cloud Service monitoring options in the near future.
• Without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, as well as many others available today.
• I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools.
• Our current need is focused on Office365, Exchange Web Services, MS Dynamics 365, and other Azure services.
• 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.
• More granular control of what components are enabled for the various AppInsight monitoring options (IIS, SQL, and Exchange currently).
• AppInsight is all or nothing with SolarWinds, and this isn’t the best option.

We encountered issues with stability in a few rare cases, due to being on older versions of the software. But this was self-inflicted in all cases.

For the most part, the Orion suite is very stable, dependable, and easy to manage.

Installs and upgrades are a bit time consuming, but this is expected with such a large platform.

Yes, there were issues with scalability. The polling engine can be a bit confusing as there are several conflicting statements regarding number of components, flows per second, Nodes, Volumes, and other variables that impact the polling engine performance.

In our case, the software stated we were at 65% of the available polling engine that was available. But we experienced monitors going into a hung state at random times.

This was finally determined by SolarWinds support to be due to the number of components we had active in SAM, even though SAM stated we were well below the acceptable number of components for our poller.

We added a second polling engine. (It is a super easy process to add additional polling engines.) SolarWinds has invested a great amount of time in the scalability expansion process, but the tool should reflect accurate info regarding the impact to the polling engine regardless of the source.

I ended up writing a custom SQL query to pull data points which gave us better polling data.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/10 on a good day. Since going to a Philippine support group, there has been a significant decrease in the skill set of the customer support.

Support used to be very results driven and it was not uncommon to have a person help you with whatever issue you had. That has changed in the past two years and support tends to be very quick to state “sorry that’s an unsupported feature and in several cases respond with “we can’t find the issue”.

Regardless of the issue being reported, you will be asked to run diagnostics and upload to their site. This is a time buying move as on several cases, as the logs were uploaded but not used in any way. (I asked where they found the info in the logs and was told it was an internal document that gave them the solution).

I avoid calling support for most issues unless I am at a total loss.

It’s important to note that this was not always the case. The real change seems to have occurred when SolarWinds went private again.

In years past, support used to be one of the HUGE factors that made SolarWinds such a great investment.

Support isn’t what it used to be and this is very disappointing. THWACK is a great resource and most answers can be found there with some searching and posting if needed.

But I should be able to get support from the help desk when I need it, not by manually searching and finding fixes myself.

My entire team avoids calling support at all costs. Sorry, but this is our experience. If I could still get version updates, but give up support, I would drop our annual maintenance in a second, without any hesitation.

We used the following solutions previously:

SCOM, BMC Patrol, HP CIM, What’s up Gold, NetScout, HP Openview, and several other home brewed monitoring tools.

SCOM is very powerful and an amazing tool. The issue is with administration and lack of real network monitoring. It is a monster and requires a very wide skill set to effectively administer.

Even with the skill set, it requires many staff hours for care and feeding. SCOM is cumbersome and very difficult to use.

SCOM is also strictly agent based, while SolarWinds gives you agent or agent-less options.

SCOM network monitoring is hot garbage on a summer day (IMHO).

MS included SNMP monitoring options, but SCOM can’t be used as a true network monitoring solution.

You must have a different tool for Network if using SCOM.

Orion, on the other hand, has it all if you invest in the modules.

SCOM will go much deeper into MS products, but it is not worth it for the amount of staff resources needed.

The setup was very easy. SolarWinds has invested a significant amount of effort into streamlining and improving the install process. It is one of the easiest tools out there to set up. SolarWinds nailed on this one.

Block the sales numbers and email address for all SolarWinds sales people at the engineer level J.

Every quarter close, year-end, or other significant time, there are emails sent to every person on our team who has access to our SolarWinds Support portal.

This is inappropriate and our leadership has asked SolarWinds to stop reaching out to engineers regarding “special pricing” or “super duper deal because it is end of the year”.

I get it, sales are sales, but this issue has been discussed several times on the THWACK forums and has become a running joke on the boards. It is harmless, but annoying.

On a more serious topic, 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.

If you can make purchases with minimal turnaround time, you can do very well.

I would say the pricing of the SolarWinds products are more than competitive, even the list prices.

The ROI for SolarWinds products is unmatched in the industry.

I do annual vendor reviews as part of my role. Its not uncommon to find a tool that offers more functionality in one specific area than the SolarWinds suite. But when it comes to the pricing and across the board monitoring, no one touches SolarWinds. Money spent on SolarWinds products goes much further than with other vendors. This is an area where SolarWinds has left the competition behind.

Oh my gosh, we evaluated all of them. Like I said above, I do vendor reviews every year and the result is always the same.

No one offers the same level of functionality across so many different devices/services in a single tool at such a good price.

We may be buying a small license for Azure service monitoring until SolarWinds has a solution for sale.

Most recently, I reviewed Thousand Eyes, Exoprise, SCOM, Riverbed’s tools, Net Scout, and a half dozen others I don’t recall. All were interesting, but none were competitive price wise.

Before you install, join THACK and start talking to other users. The tool is very powerful and offers amazing monitoring options, if you have someone who knows what good monitoring should look like.

Take advantage of the various custom properties to refine monitors and you will have an amazing monitoring platform.

Install it, compare against others, and you will always find SolarWinds beats them for the ROI.

You must also factor in the savings from being able to train general IT staff how to support the tool.

It doesn’t matter how great a tool is, if you can’t find an admin to run it. Anyone can figure out SolarWinds if they have any sort of APM background. Many other tools can’t say this.

We use the product to monitor the server's health that includes hardware health like power supply, temperature, and other physical parameters and also performance parameters like CPU, memory, server network, etc. We also use it to monitor application health. 

The monitoring is covered under 3 aspects - 

Server Hardware Health

Server Performance Monitoring

Application Performance Monitoring (restricted to services, process)

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 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.

I have been working with the solution for over 6 years. 

The solution is stable. 

The tool is scalable and I have customers who use it to monitor around 2000 servers. 

Some resolutions require catering to the unique environment of customers and can take time. Otherwise, the tool's support is pretty good. 

Neutral

The tool's installation is easy and can be completed in a couple of hours. You need to plan and figure out what exactly would you like to monitor. For example, when a customer has 2000 servers, then you would need to find the application groups and define them. If a customer has a large web server environment then you need to create dashboards for the web administrators. The tool is flexible and allows you to do it. 

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

I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

SAM is an easy-to-deploy solution. You need to plan your monitoring strategy well because if you want to monitor a large number of servers, you need to plan and decide what exactly would you like to monitor. Because things can get pretty complicated, especially when it comes to application monitoring. The solution gives the flexibility to decide as to what you would like to do with their monitoring platform. You shouldn't go blind and say that I want to monitor everything.

VMAN recommendations have helped us manage the VMs to perform more efficiently. They note everything from storage to processor utilizations. This helps us, in the organization, to make informed decisions about whether or not we need to expand the infrastructure. This saves us time and money.

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

The trends help me when I am looking at how my VMs are performing. There are times when we need more performance out of certain VMs. With trends and capacity planning, you can really focus on the items and help get a better picture of how you can move things around to streamline your infrastructure.

For example, with the VMAN recommendations, it immediately show you a graphical view, single click drill down to the actual recommendations, which allow you to read more. Almost a single pane of glass approach to your Virtual infrastructure. From recommendations we can see things like the space utilization on a datastore has reach a critical threshold. With detailed explanation of the issue you can quickly go in and almost effortlessly make corrections you need. Some are more labor intensive however you still know what you need to do. VMAN also details the CPU utilizations on a particular VM which has been both lower, and offering to save you resources automatically or higher, offering to increase your resources automatically by simply accepting the recommendation. The VMAN tool then will apply the suggested changes to the VM for you with usually little interaction from the end user / administrator required. This allows us as a small IT department to operated more efficiently and react to situations before they become larger issues.

The recommendations are a life saver. They have valuable, daily information regarding your VM network. I don’t always follow the recommendations, but when I do, it’s usually automated. There is no other interaction needed from me. It’s like having another employee.

The diagnostics simply helps me make sure that I am meeting my required KPIs.

I would like it to be fully integrated into Orion. Although there are many pieces that are integrated and make it a very good application for managing and monitoring your VM environment, I would like to see more of it in Orion. I would like to not have to switch between sites for information.

I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial.

We create NOC views in Orion. Adding many of the VMAN dashboard items to it would be great added value.

I had some stability issues. I lost my environment, but with the help of SolarWinds support, I was able to get back to a stable platform. I was able to install the upgrade to VMAN to bring me up to v7.

The appliance for VMware would lock up and I was unable to shut it down properly. If I didn’t reboot, I could not see the VMAN admin console. I had to shut it down through VMware, thereby corrupting the appliance.

SolarWinds was not sure why this happened, but after several days, we were better than before. There was not a hiccup since.

We didn’t encounter any scalability issues for our infrastructure. We only have a 50 VM license and we are currently using 27 of them. We are not one of the larger enterprise environments. The speed and stability has been great.

Since 2012, we only had one major issue, and that is pretty good. If Windows were that reliable, what a world we would live in.

At times it’s been difficult to get through to technical support. However, in the past twelve months, they have reformed their ways and it’s been fantastic.

I have used SolarWinds with three different companies in the past seventeen years and they have never failed to help me. Sometimes it takes some time, but they always get you going.

Of course we used other products, and we still do. One product cannot do everything you want it to do, at least with what you can afford.

Sometimes it’s better to run a tiered approach, such as with security, so all your eggs are not in one basket, so to speak.

However, mostly everything else we use is freeware or open source. SolarWinds is the only fully paid product we currently own.

I found the setup really very easy, if you are familiar with deploying '.ova' files. The setup was a snap, and the setup wizard really walks you through everything.

Their documentation is very detailed and if you need support, you can use their technical support and THWACK, which is world class and ahead of its time.

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. But in the case of VMAN, I have exactly what I need and room to grow. That being said, you are not going to find a better solution on the market for the price.

We were only using tools from VMware and we didn’t look at other options. Knowing SolarWinds from using Orion and other applications they sell, I wanted to have my monitoring software to be as integrated as possible. We looked no further.

DO IT!!! You will not regret it. This product is so helpful, out-of-the-box. Even for larger environments, you have a very short roll-out timeline, fantastic benefits, and results.

We primarily use this solution with customers who would like to have insight into their application environments. These environments could be on-premise, hybrid, in clouds, it does not matter where it resides. They want to have deep insight into the performance and availability of applications, databases, networks, VMware, Hyper-V, etcetera. It doesn't matter what they want to look at because all infrastructure components can be monitored using SAM. This product can monitor about 150 infrastructure components by default.  

The most valuable feature of the product is the monitoring capability. Basic infrastructure monitoring is a good start for using the product. For example, I like Microsoft monitoring and various components like SharePoint and Active Directory, which can be very important. But also it is very useful for monitoring Microsoft SQL Server environments. That only covers the surface approach to monitoring applications and servers. You can also monitor the underlying infrastructure. For example, you can monitor hardware components such as the health of your servers so that you know if they are functioning optimally or if they have some type of performance issue or failure. You can go a step further to get deeper insight into specific components. But it is a very good thing to start with APM (Application Performance Management) and to get into monitoring the underlying infrastructure of your system so you are aware of its condition.  

These tools are made for evaluation and monitoring. They were developed some years ago and they are still evolving, and what I would like to see is that they are made cloud-ready as soon as possible. It would be good at this point to have it so you can run them and use them in the cloud. That is actually already possible, but I want to make sure that they continue to mature that type of development and enhance the product's capabilities.  

What can and will be added in upcoming releases is that the product will support a few more well-known database flavors like Oracle SQL server. I would like to see an extension of that capability to other database flavors including freeware environments like MySQL, Progress, and MariaDB. I know for a fact that they will be adding these capabilities in the future for sure, and that is a great step forward.  

 We have been using SolarWinds SAM (Server & Application Monitor) for six years.  

SolarWinds SAM is very stable. We are using it with hundreds or thousands of customers and there are no stability issues.  

The product is very scalable. No problem with that at all.  

The technical support is very good. We can access it 24/7 when we need to.  

The initial setup is very straightforward.  

Pricing is quite cheap. It starts at 2,440 euros. For that, you have the ability to monitor a couple of nodes. You also get one year of maintenance and support included in the price.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SolarWinds SAM as a ten in regards to the total cost of ownership and quality. But being more modest because there is room for improvement I will rate it a nine.  

I would highly recommend this solution to users.  

It has allowed us to present various customer-specific views to many of the IT support teams.

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.

It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window. Much of this has to be rebuilt for every individual monitor outside of the product, since you can’t build a schedule and assign monitors or notification periods to that schedule.

SMNP trap receiver/alerting needs to be built into the alerting engine. Having two places to build and manage alerts is not efficient and not all alerting tools are available in the trap manager. It also needs a data warehouse capability for long-term reporting and looking back in time, especially with some of the new functionality in the latest release.

We did have problems with large numbers of PowerShell and WMI monitors.

There has been at least one unstable upgrade in the past, but then, that happens to pretty much any product out there.

We had scalability problems with the large number of PowerShell and WMI monitors.

Level 1 is level 1. For many, that is sufficient. Having a number of experienced engineers on my team, when we need support we need level 2 or above and sometimes, it takes a bit to get things bumped up. Many of the level 1 guys don’t read all the info you provide and you end up wasting time pointing out that you already provided this information.

The previous solution was too expensive and limited; they dropped support.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, although there are a few gotchas that are not well documented.

Ror small shops and for those new to monitoring it is simple to set up and implement. The OOTB (Out of the Box) implementation does have very good node specific pages and can provide a wealth of information.This is the key.The OOTB it provides is more than other tools in a usable format.

But simple WMI monitors using both canned and user built provide more comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities…This is based on experiences implementing other solutions in very dynamic large environments. It has had improvements in the unix/linux world but still remains primarily windows centric.

Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal.

It had been decided upon before I was employed here; I just got to implement it.

Go onto THWACK (the SolarWinds user community). You will find training, help, and advice from many who have been there before. It is one of the premier user communities that many out there need to emulate!