SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

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

It lacks a user experience for measuring things like the end-to-end time for which a user waits for a specific response in the system. 

In the application layer, it has some very basic stuff. You have to build your own with manuscripts and things like that. 

I have been using this solution for a few years. We installed it on a customer site when we first got the contract. We haven't done any upgrades.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. We have set up a lot of things, like 300 VMs and 10 to 15 different monitors. So, we are talking about a small number of monitors and a lot of VMs. It's kind of a big one.

I am not sure. I'm not the person who tries to troubleshoot it. I don't think we needed much support. Only once there was a corruption in some kind of database, and a colleague of mine asked about how to solve it. Otherwise, we didn't need any technical support from them.

Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation. 

A customer is trying to move some of the VMs to Azure. It is the latest trend, and people are moving from on-premises VMs to cloud-based VMs.

Azure Monitor seems to be more powerful on the log analytics and the application level side, but it is less powerful on the systems side, for example, listening port or service.

It's a decent solution for on-premises servers.

I would rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor an eight out of ten. It needs application-level monitoring and performance output. 

We are a distributor and solution provider, and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. It is used for monitoring the performance of applications and infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager.

It is a very powerful tool for database administration and management.

The support for Active Directory is good.

Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed.

I have been working with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for two years.

This is a stable product.

It is absolutely scalable. We have worked on projects of different sizes for companies operating on local, national, and international levels. The smaller deployments include perhaps 10 network devices, 20 servers, and two network storage devices. We have done several medium-sized deployments with between 100 and 500 servers, including two data centers. 

The technical support is nothing special. The service is available on a 24/7 basis, which is good enough for my market.

I have worked with similar solutions including Zabbix, HPE Performance Manager, and Microsoft System Center Manager. I have good opinions of HPE and SolarWinds.

This solution is simple to deploy. I do not need more than two or three hours to complete it.

I spend perhaps 30 minutes customizing it, making technical changes for the customer's environment and infrastructure. This can be done once we have all of the information that we need concerning the IT processes.

I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product.

There are several tools included in this solution including AppStack (Application Stack Management), PerfStack (Performance Analysis), and NetPath (Network Path Analysis).

This is an open platform so if there is something that it does not support then you can write your own scripts. You have the ability to include metrics from different systems, which is very good.

In summary, I like this product and I recommend it. SolarWinds is one of the best products on the market and if they eventually support the IBM Mainframe then it will be perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is used more or less for the servers for the network including monitoring the logs and all of those tasks.

The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now.

The pricing of the solution should be adjusted.

We've been using the solution for two years now.

The solution has been working quite well. We haven't seen any problems so far. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The product has good stability.

We haven't seen any restrictions on scaling. If a company needs to scale with this solution, they can do so.

We have yet to contact technical support. Most of the time the troubleshooting is done online, and therefore we haven't had the necessity to go through them yet. This is due to the fact that the department is not at that big of a scale yet, and therefore we've just set it up and started using it. We haven't found the need to contact technical support yet.

The solution isn't complex to set up. It's pretty straightforward.

The deployment takes about a week. It doesn't take too long.

We have one person, more or less, that's handling the solution and can handle maintenance as required. 

The cost should be a bit less. It's high right now, or higher than it should be.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

For small, small businesses, this solution will be good. However, if you want to go more complex, I would advise you to potentially explore other options.

So far, I would rate the solution at an eight on a scale from one to ten. We are still exploring its capabilities. It's still pretty new to us. 

The primary use case varies since we deploy for clients. The use case will depend on their use case, each case is different depending on the customer's need. We look for solutions to suit their needs.

The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions.

We cater to all organizations in Nigeria. Most of the financial institutions in Nigeria are currently using this solution. Cellphone companies and telecommunication are also using it.

The beautiful thing about the solution is, the OEM listens to customer reviews. The updates come very frequently, and most of the feedback that customers give is integrated within the upgrade or the update. I think that whatever concerns were have already been treated by the OEM.

There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot.

The environment of the solution is always stable.

Scalability is good. It's modular, so you can just keep adding as you need it.

Technical support is awesome. An email is responded to within five minutes and we will get feedback. Their staff is always on standby to work with you to provide guidance on how to fix the problem.

You also have tutorials online and other articles that have been published that are related to issues you may be currently facing. The knowledge base of the solution is wonderful.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment depends on the customer's infrastructure, on what they have and what they would like to add to the solution.

The solution is structured to be modular. You simply look for the module that looks good for your organization, you can just buy and integrate.

This solution caught my attention and I didn't bother looking at others.

SolarWinds has a network for applications, for virtual infrastructure and every other thing we can think of. Users can look for a module that would suit their company they can buy it and integrate.

If you are looking for end-to-end visibility in your infrastructure I think SolarWinds should be the place you to go. They've got you covered.

I would rate this solution at 9.5 out of 10.

The way NPM determines the network nodes status gives you the trust that you will not receive fake alerts!!

SolarWinds allows network administrators to easily monitor the network by customizing the pages to see what exactly is needed. this is in addition to the deep statistics shown for nodes and interfaces like response TIME, packet LOSS, interfaces CRC, interfaces errors, as well as the rich graphs for all network elements.

For companies with multiple branch offices in different governments/countries, administrators can set their network nodes on the map provided by SolarWinds to easily monitor all locations at the same time.

Using the VNQM module, you can put a probe in each branch, configure all these probes with a couple of clicks, and easily monitor the response time between branches. You can also monitor internet connectivity for the branches themselves.

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

I believe that SolarWinds should spend more effort in reporting. You can easily generate reports for technical engineers, but not such summarized reports that need to be sent to managers!

You can generate a lot of reports related to all modules either NPM , NCM , NTA or VQNM and we don’t have any problem in that.

The problem is that – compared to another vendors developing another H/Ws or S/Ws – you can’t generate such reports full of charts to summarize a kind technical info for managers.

To Elaborate more , looking for some products like McAfee , Fortigate , tenable … etc , you can find the reports in terms of tables and charts beside the tables and easily customize the charts type and location.

Once , I opened a case with our local vendor who contacted Solarwinds as well , asking about creating a report that includes something exactly like the below graphs to show to the management and they answered “No Avaialbility” !! also the below graphs are taken from our NTA module which should be added normally to a report!

Again , it’s a shame that you generate a PDF report from Solarwinds like the below, where headers appears in the report and text shown an clear text not a rich one!!! Simply the report is not generous although having a good technical info but to be seen by me not by managers .

Finally, I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic.

I didn’t experience any stability issue in any of the modules we used.

Like any other vendor, SolarWinds recommend a maximum number of elements to be monitored by each polling engine. In case you have more elements to be monitored, you can deploy additional polling engines.

I managed to monitor more than 13,000 network elements using the main polling engine and four additional polling ones. It was really a great experience for me to handle all these engines with no problems.

For more than seven years, I didn’t refer to the support team as I used to depend on myself to solve any problems. But I have referred to them in a couple of cases and they were very helpful.

We used WhatsUp Gold and ManageEngine OP Manager.

It is very easy to install. There is no need for experience to install it.

I have used other applications. After evaluating SolarWinds, we think it’s a good choice.

Even you have your own monitoring system, you need to try others to judge well and know where you are standing. Just visit the website and download a 30-day trial version.

SolarWinds user community, THWACK, is a very informative one where users share their experience to solve problems and suggests development for all SolarWinds modules.

Usually, the Web/SSL based certificate expires for our UCS servers and we were unable to monitor them on timely manner. This feature from Solarwinds SAM helped us to monitor and alert whenever the SSL cert is going to expire on the server to avoid any downtime of the services running on the server specially on ADFS platform where we have Video conference,Webex, Office 365 and single sign-on services.

SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting

As per my view, Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL. Currently, it can be achieve through script writing but that is tedious and tough task to do due to scarcity of script writer experts.

None

None

Customer Service:

Very good.

Technical Support:

Very good.

The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly.

The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts.

I have been using the product for six years. 

The tool is stable. 

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is scalable. My company has 25 users. If you have more than 25 users, then you need to purchase an enterprise console. 

The level of support provided by SolarWinds is contingent on the type of support plan chosen. The rating would be around seven to eight out of ten for premium support with response times of one to one and a half hours. However, given the faster response times, if a client opts for extended or premium support, the rating can go as high as nine out of ten.

The tool's initial deployment is easy. You can easily use the product with a day's training. 

On the customer portal, two types of training videos are available for users. One type includes pre-recorded videos providing a detailed overview of the platform's features. These videos are divided into three to four parts, each lasting around three to four hours. Users can invest their time in these sessions to understand the system's functions. I rate it an eight out of ten. 

Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business. It is used for EA, capacity management, configuration management, asset management, and others.

• Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer.
• Windows service and event monitoring: It provides an in-depth server OS and application of health monitoring. It allows for automated workflow for the conditioned response to an alert.
• AppInsight for SQL: It provides centralized management and performance monitoring of 100+ SQL installations.

AppInsight needs to include more applications, the current list is very limited.

Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues, scalability has been easy.

I would give the technical support team a 7/10 rating, i.e., slightly better than average.

Previously, we were using Big Brother. It is not as intuitive and support was lacking. Eventually, it reached EOL.

The setup was straightforward, customization requires time and resource investment.

SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in.

We didn't really evaluate other options. By this point, we were committed to the “one monitoring tool” policy. Our goal was to reduce the number of dashboards to as few as possible.

Don’t go with the “dive in and figure it out” approach. You’ll spend months, if not years, straightening SAM out. Take the planned approach; organize your servers and your IT services, identify what you want to monitor such as the Windows services, events, ports, SNMP traps, Syslog messages, etc and create your alerting rules. Understand your dependencies so that you can create your enterprise views and maps. Align the Orion Platform to be more than a monitoring tool. Use it for EA, capacity management, configuration management, asset management, and others.