SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

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.

I use SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for network device monitoring and server monitoring.

The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best. 

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring.

In a future release of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, they should add some additional features.

I have been using SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for six years.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a stable solution.

The scalability of the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is good. However, if we consider the resources that are required to monitor the servers at times it can be too much.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve their customer service. The escalation procedure when raising a support case takes a very long time to respond. The engineer who is assigned to me for troubleshooting any issue does not give the required knowledge at the initial level. They will investigate for one to five days minimum. If they don't know the answer, they will escalate to the second-level support. This takes a lot of time. If an engineer or technical expert was in the first level of support he can troubleshoot the issue quickly.

I rate the support from SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor a two out of five.

Neutral

I have previously used Microsoft SCOM.

The initial setup of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is straightforward. We only need to make a design based on the infrastructure and applications we have. Then once we design the setup, we can deploy it.

We did the implementation ourselves. We need a lot of staff members for the maintenance of the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

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 rate the cost of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor a one out of five.

I rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor an eight 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.

The primary use case of this solution is for centralized monitoring of the server performance to ensure that the servers have proactive monitoring, CPU utilization, memory, and performance across the monitoring. 

SolarWinds was suggested to our clients running a mid-size infrastructure, with budget constraints and can't afford IBM, Broadcom, or Microsoft.

The customer's requirements are met with SolarWinds.

It helps with server monitoring and not only to monitor the physical servers, but it can also control the virtual environment. It has good monitoring in VM integration by VMware or Citrix.

SolarWinds is not just a monitoring tool, it can provide you with a capacity planning giving you complete a server inventory and helps you fulfill your commitment to the business. 

You will know your plan and what you will need in the next two years to achieve your capacity planning.

You are aware of what is happening in your servers, what their performance is, how the applications are behaving, and it helps you build your CMDB as well.

Our clients like the nice dashboard where they can see the active monitoring and includes performance, CPU usage, memory usage, and files. 

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.

When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed. It's slow. This is an issue that has been going on for a long time that hasn't been properly addressed by SolarWinds. In a bigger architecture, the portal is still slow. They will have to look into it and see how they can improve it because this is the biggest complaint the customers have.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to the reliability and the issue with the speed, especially the slowness with their browser-based solution.

This solution is stable but when the product has a lot of data in the databases, the speed is an issue.

The solution is scalable, but not for large infrastructures. I can recommend SolarWinds for a mid to large scale organization. I am not convinced that customers who have two to four thousand devices and two thousand servers can implement SolarWinds on such a large scale.

The technical support is good, it's above average.

Previously we implemented the CA UIM solution, CA Spectrum, and Microsoft Monitoring.

SolarWinds is much easier than any of them.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to implement, but when you implement it in a huge environment you will have some complexity. Also if you implement it in a single box, it can be complex.

If it is a mid-scale customer they can implement this solution on their own. They will need only two or three bars and a maximum of two servers are more than enough to implement.

If it's a small solution, you can implement it. It keeps the database separate. It's straightforward, it is not difficult.

Overall it is a very simple implementation.

The length of deployment depends on the infrastructure, the customer that I am referring to took a month and a half to implement most of the requirements. 

From a vendor's point of view when implementing this solution, SolarWinds will gives me paid access. 

From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors.

It is clearly a good return on investment for any customer when they implement SolarWinds.

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.

When you compare SolarWinds to Broadcom, Broadcom has a simpler policy, you can install it and you don't have the complex licensing where you need a separate license for every little thing. 

Customers don't understand the complexity of the licensing when you need a separate license for the application and storage as an example. With SolarWinds, you have to pay for every feature.

Improvements come as we are moving forward. Requirements also change with time.

There were times when we used to be a complete physical infrastructure. Most of the customers have now moved to a virtual infrastructure.

The requirements are also changing. In the last ten years, what I have seen is that SolarWinds is improving its product as per the demand of the customer.

SolarWinds is easy to implement and it has most of the information the customer is looking for, and the dashboard has the wow factor.

I think that every IT team should have to courage to try to implement it by themselves because it is not difficult.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use the product to monitor the server's health which does not include power supply, temperature, and other physical parameters alone but also performance parameters like CPU, memory, server network, etc. We also use it to monitor application health. 

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 five 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.

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.  

Any customizable monitoring needed from process/service monitoring to performance counters, PowerShell and Per Scripts for reportable status or values, SQL based queries for status or values

The best example would be that we can provide transparency to the infrastructure which is meaningful to developers, but even to business users. Our IT teams can work with developers using a common reference when reviewing issues or planning improvements.

The overall valuable feature is the integration that exists. It really ties everything together to see the entire stack. Individually, the main focus of each component is the value.

• Being able to see your devices (NPM)
• Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)
• Seeing the components of virtual infrastructure (VMAN)
• Reviewing the storage behind it (SRM)
• Performance of web applications using synthetic playback (WPM)
• Being able to deep dive into DB activities to see blocks, deadlocks, and improve performance by tuning queries (DPA)

The nice thing about SolarWinds is that the company always looks to improve their products. Since they regularly update the software for stability and new features, it’s not easy to pinpoint items to improve unless they directly impact usability.

It’s difficult to find a feature or capability of SolarWinds that needs improvement as they are consistently looking to make the product better. Through the Thwack community, they get great feedback from customers for feature improvements as well as ideas to use the product better in ways beyond original intentions. The community is pretty innovative regards to using SolarWinds. My experience is that if a feature directly impacts my daily routine, then the product needs improvement. So far, any issues I’ve had in the past have been rectified by Support, added as feature to correct, or new enhancements that never allow me to face problems reports by others.

Stability was hardly an issue as long as we balanced what we were monitoring.

Scalability was an issue in the past. It wasn’t growing the environment, but rather it was maintaining it on upgrades. It used to take a long time since we have a large deployment.

Now that the lightweight scalability features exists, maintenance is not time consuming. Another issue was firewalls which is on our part due to “allow nothing, request everything” policy. No product out there will ever connect agnostically when it comes to firewalls.

Support knows what they are doing. Very rarely do I find the standard approach to issues to be “reboot and call back” type of action.

We had another solution for many years and it was functional but not insightful. We needed software that could level the playing field or better; to bring all the fields under one roof without having to build everything from scratch.

The initial setup was straightforward, but it’s very important to understand the amount of objects (CPU, memory, network interfaces, any monitored component) to monitor. You could easily overload the environment if you pull everything.

As mentioned about scaling, 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.

We evaluated Nagios and Nimsoft at the time.

Nimsoft seemed similar to what we were previously using and didn’t want to repeat history.

With Nagios, we found it to be highly customizable, but requiring us to build out everything. We were at a stage where we didn’t know the possible heights of monitoring we could reach, but knew there was more than what we had.

SolarWinds fit the bill because it gave many possibilities in monitoring with a good amount of out of the box capabilities.

If you need a starting point, SolarWinds is a good start.

Be sure to know how many objects or element you plan to monitor to determine the licensing and the topology of your environment to help scale out your deployment. If you have those down, you’ll be able to up in running in no time

Additionally, a nice thing about SolarWinds is that the company always looks to improve their products. Since they regularly update the software for stability and new features, it’s not easy to pinpoint items for improvement. Through the Thwack community, they get great feedback from customers for feature improvements as well as ideas to use the product better in ways beyond original intentions. My experience is that if a feature directly impacts my daily routine, then the product needs improvement. So far, any issues I’ve had in the past have been rectified by Support, added as feature to correct, or new enhancements that never allow me to face problems reports by others.

• 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.