SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

• We are able to correlate application performance issues with bad SQL queries to the database.
• It allows us to identify missing indexes or bad vendor coding.
• It gets us to root cause quicker, especially in identifying whether or not it is something within our control.

• AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters.
• AppInsight for Exchange: Presents the array of processes and the 66+ databases that make up our Exchange service in-house, in a single view. This allows us to analyze and isolate problems quickly. We have seen problems occur with a single database, a small collection of users, that we were able to correct before all the users on that mailbox server went down.
• Active Directory Templates: Allows us to be aware of issues or failures of any of the complex components providing our Microsoft Windows Active Directory services throughout our enterprise.

SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes.

One of the components of the AppInsight for SQL is monitoring of table statistics. A data element within in that set is table indexes. There are certain tables in our databases that we expect to have a high level of fragmentation all the time. It is just the nature of the applications.

However, there are many tables where we would want to know if the indexes become an issue because they adversely impact performance. My comment related to an ability to ignore certain tables within a database but not the whole database.

This way, the status of the database or any of the applications upstream would not be impacted by these specific tables.

We have not had issues with this version.

So far, we have been able to scale up to monitor everything we want without any issues. If we needed to poll more frequently, we would need to add additional polling engines.

In addition, the use of agents that can be deployed on local servers helps to offload processing from the primary poller.

The times when I have needed technical support, they have been responsive and able to resolve my issues.

I use the THWACK community a lot to resolve issues without the need for technical support.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup was very straightforward. Upgrades are getting easier over the eight years that we have been using the products.

Having used various other vendors for monitoring over my career, the SolarWinds products give outstanding value for the price. They satisfied our needs for the mid-sized to large organization we have.

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.

I didn’t evaluate other options. I had previous experience and my boss was willing to go with my advice without having to do a comparison.

• Spend the time to examine the recurring issues in your infrastructure. Are there one or two things that come up repeatedly?
• Determine what data would help avoid the problem.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, policies, and procedures that collect and make use of that data.
• It’s about shifting the work from responding to your customer’s problems to correcting systems and conditions before your customers even notice.

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.

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.

We use the product for application and server monitoring. We use it to get information on web services, databases, and other applications we need to maintain.

SolarWinds is a very good solution. Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us. Infrastructure dependency mapping gives us a view of the networks connected with the applications and processes.

The product needs to reduce its price.

I have been using the solution for six years.

I rate the stability an eight and a half out of ten.

I rate the scalability an eight and a half out of ten. Around seven employees are using the product in our organization. Our customers are enterprise businesses.

The support is very, very good. In case there's any problem, we can contact support.

Positive

The initial setup is very easy. I rate the ease of setup a ten out of ten.

Deployment can take one to two weeks, depending on the customer’s requirements. We give customization documents to the customer and ask them questions about how they want to deploy and use the solution. Then, we request the customer for documents about the server and CPUs to deploy the solution. Before deploying the solution, we also confirm the features they want to install on the server.

I rate the pricing an eight out of ten. There are no additional costs associated with the solution.

I am using the version that was released before the latest version. The solution can be put on-premise or on the cloud. The product is set up for a lot of things. The product can be used depending on our area of interest, be it network, server, or application. Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We are using it for the monitoring of servers and applications. Currently, we are using version 2020.2.5.

Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes.

Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports.

I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on.

It has been close to six years now.

It is really stable. We're making use of a polling engine. When the customer site is experiencing some slowness of the console or the server, they'll know that they have overutilized the resources. So, we'll try to give them recommendations on what to do to make it better.

Its scalability is pretty good. There are a lot of users using SolarWinds. They are mostly financial institutions. We are trying to bring in more people to make use of the product. So, we try to do a comparison to what they have presently and how we can optimize for them.

It was pretty much straightforward. Anybody who doesn't understand the basics of SQL can make use of the backend, but you need to have a little bit of experience with SQL before you can use the frontend for the reports.

The deployment takes up to an hour. Normally, the installation part will take around 45 minutes to complete. When it comes to the configuration part, it takes time depending on the devices you want to onboard to SolarWinds.

I am a consultant, so I did the deployment. Its deployment and maintenance can be done by one person.

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.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 so that they improve on the report.

We implement solutions and make comparative analysis for customers. I'm a consultant and we help clients choose ITSM solutions. 

We use a hybrid version of this solution. 

One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset. 

I had a problem with the price for a client. It was hard to understand the infrastructure and how many devices and how much storage they could get. In the end, we found a different license model for them. 

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

It's very scalable. I installed it in a lot of companies. One had more than 1,000 users. There were no problems with it. We showed an internal team how to configure it for 100 devices and then they configured the rest of the 900.

Their technical support was okay. We only needed to contact them once. 

The initial setup took four hours. Including configuring a network for 300 Cisco switches and 32 cloud servers including database servers.  

The price is reasonable. The price of the package we bought was a differentiating factor in choosing this solution. 

I would rate this solution a 9.5 out of ten. My clients are satisfied. 

We primarily use the solution for Microsoft Exchange. We use it as a monitoring tool to query and monitor databases. Using the solution we are able to see what service is running or what services are not. It allows us to get a complete picture of the SIEM.

We find that the most valuable aspect of the solution is its configuration capabilities. It's quite simple. Users can configure Linux or Windows very easily.

The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause.

The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use.

The technical support is slow to respond. They need to act on tickets faster.

We have been using the solution for approximately three or four months. It hasn't been that long.

We've found the solution to be very stable. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches or crashes. It's been very good.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

We don't have users per se on the solution, as it's only meant to monitor. We have seven people on our team, and any one of us can use the solution to check and monitor everything as needed.

We use it on a daily basis.

We've been in touch with technical support in the past to help us deal with the customization of reports, which is quite difficult on the platform.

Their support is, at times, difficult because of the time zone. For example, if we raise a ticket now, we won't get a response for seven hours. The delay isn't great for us.

We previously used ManageEngine. It was not giving us what we needed, which is why we switched. With SolarWinds, we can even get great performance and good monitoring from MongoDB through SQL. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We found it rather easy.

In terms of setup, traditionally, to configure any single node, it takes about five to ten minutes.

In order to maintain the solution, a company would need at least two people: one to monitor performance and another to monitor the application itself.

I was able to handle the entire implementation myself after going through and reading the documentation. I didn't need the outside assistance of an integrator or consultant.

I don't have any information on pricing, as that is handled by our procurement team.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I believe it is version 12.5.

If a company would really like insight into its database utilization or performance and why their servers are slow or why the database is not giving a proper response, this solution will help. It's perfect for revealing bottlenecks. You will have more visibility once you will install it in your environment. The solution will no doubt help other companies resolve issues very quickly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

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.

The tool’s report feature created issues for us. We needed to gain skills to use that feature. The tool’s customization is not easy since you have to reconfigure the whole system.

I have been working with the solution for five years. We upgraded to the latest version a month ago.

I would rate the tool’s stability an eight out of ten. The tool is more or less stable. We encountered stability issues when there were too many sites or devices to monitor.

The solution is scalable and you can add more devices. My company has 20 users for the solution.

I am happy to work with the technical support team. They are extremely good.

Positive

I have used AvantGard before. AvantGard’s pricing and reporting features are its advantages.

The solution’s deployment is more or less easy. SolarWinds provides a step-by-step procedure for the tool’s installation.

The solution is overpriced in terms of application management.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten. This product is good as a server-side monitoring tool.