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SCOM vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

SCOM
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
83
Ranking in other categories
Event Monitoring (4th), Network Monitoring Software (13th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

SCOM and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. SCOM is designed for Event Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 9.6%, up 7.5% compared to last year.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, on the other hand, focuses on Server Monitoring, holds 2.8% mindshare, down 3.3% since last year.
Event Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SCOM9.6%
ServiceNow IT Operations Management17.2%
OpsRamp14.0%
Other59.2%
Event Monitoring
Server Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor2.8%
Zabbix25.1%
Checkmk10.1%
Other62.0%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

MarcMermuys - PeerSpot reviewer
Has efficient monitoring with robust integration capabilities
We use SCOM to configure different monitors using several management packs. It integrates systems like Active Directory and correlates them, and it is used for monitoring and managing systems SCOM allows integration of several systems, providing correlation between different systems such as…
VIVEK PATHAK - PeerSpot reviewer
Offering reasonably good dashboarding features but needs to improve the application performance monitoring
My company uses Riverbed for application performance monitoring. I was doing research so that I could understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provide APM capabilities similar to Riverbed, which allows our company to get a packet capture of an entire session, and on the basis of it, we look at the application performance monitoring part. With SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, my company does SNMP polling, so it can drag an entire session, but it focuses more on availability, CPU memory, and server connection status. In Riverbed, my company catches an entire system, so when we deal with two applications, we have end-to-end app visibility. All the application monitoring happens through Riverbed. Our company's main problem is that, as of now, we have two different products in our organization, and we don't want to continue with the multiple products currently. I wanted to understand if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor already have capabilities like Riverbed, and if they do, then I wanted to figure out why our company should not go with SolarWinds and why we are using products from multiple vendors. My company needs to continue with either Riverbed or SolarWinds. I wanted to see which products are good for the organization and how much I want to continue with Riverbed.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a user-friendly product that requires almost no maintenance."
"The ease of deployment, especially on Windows platforms, is valuable."
"Setting up SCOM is straightforward and takes about an hour as long as you have all your firewalls and DNS settings in place."
"The solution is scalable. If you want to monitor more you have to buy more licenses, but you can add on. We don't plan to increase usage."
"The advantages of SCOM are that it is definitely user friendly and a more appropriate solution for what we need."
"The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location."
"Availability monitoring is the feature I have found most valuable, as well as the capacity and ability to send notifications."
"This is a product that does more generally than any of the competing solutions."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring."
"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
 

Cons

"The dashboard features are not user-friendly for our management team, only for the technical department."
"It lacks certain details that other products do better, like granular access and better application monitoring."
"The solution should be more user-friendly and offer a better user interface."
"I would like more customized reports. People should have some customization option on the dashboards for whenever they put multiple lists into it. Beyond customizing the content, there should be the ability to customize the colors so that they can engage some priority and mark challenges separately."
"Third-party tools have had to be created to make SCOM management pack creation more efficient and effective. However, this weighs down the application as it just adds a resource requirement, which is ballooning the size of the necessary storage and all that for essentially substandard components."
"I would like to see them improve their network monitoring."
"There could be more integration of SIM in the solution."
"The end-user components, including the dashboards, the administration console, and the web console, need to be improved."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"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."
"The technical support was better in previous years. With the launch of the premium support service, the normal support has declined."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"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."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SCOM is part of the System Center suite and I am satisfied with the pricing."
"The pricing and licensing are fair."
"We have an enterprise agreement that includes this product as part of it."
"Our Enterprise Agreement includes the price."
"It is the cheapest product available in the market."
"Two customers bought the enterprise agreement with Microsoft and paid for Software Assurance. But few customers don't buy it for Software Assurance. They just buy it and deploy it, and they think that we will be using it for the next five years."
"The platform is cost-effective due to our existing Microsoft support."
"There is a license needed to use this solution and it is paid annually."
"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."
"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."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise54
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SCOM?
The tool helps to monitor Windows servers. It offers alerts from a central location.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SCOM?
I am not aware of the exact pricing as it is managed by my supervisor. As an academic institution, we receive substantial discounts.
What needs improvement with SCOM?
We believe that the dashboarding in SCOM needs to be improved or enhanced because it is not too expressive in reporting. We can work on deploying new ways of viewing things and modifying visualizat...
What needs improvement with SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
There are no specific features or functionality I would like to see improved or enhanced in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor at this time. I have not encountered any missing features or fu...
 

Also Known As

System Center Operations Manager, SCOM 2012
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Dialog Telekom
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
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