SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

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.

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.

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Customer Service:

Very good.

Technical Support:

Very good.

We are a solution integrator, and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We also supply this as a service.

The primary use case for this solution is application monitoring, in an on-premises deployment model.

The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature.

The custom reporting needs to be improved.

Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included. The supported list of applications is very limited. For example, it supports the Windows version of JD Edwards, but not the Linux version of the same solution. Since it is the same application running on a different platform, it should work.

The price of scaling this solution needs to be improved.

I would like to have better support for Linux, and not be as dependent on Windows Servers. Even for non-Windows applications, it uses a Windows Server.

This solution is quite stable.

It is expensive to scale this solution, simply because of the cost of the polling engine. You can purchase unlimited IPs, but the price of an additional polling engine is $20,000 USD. That is quite a lot. We are looking into other solutions because it is just too expensive to keep scaling.

We have approximately eighty users and four hundred servers.

There is no in-country support for this solution. There are local numbers available but the call quality isn't great. I would rate technical support a five out of ten.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

The deployment took four weeks.

We provide the consultants for integrating this solution.

The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each.

The high price of this solution has us looking into other solutions, rather than scale.

If you are looking for a single pane of glass to monitor Windows products then SolarWinds is your product. However, it is not best of breed. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

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.

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 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. 

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.

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.