SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

I am working in the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan as part of the Pakistan Education Research Network, which provides services to universities. We have three data centers in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi, with multiple servers. I perform monitoring using SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor (SAM). This solution allows me to monitor different alerts.

We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services. The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive. For SAM, monitoring the hard disk and utilization of different services is beneficial. Customizing alerts, creating different groups of alerts, and setting escalation levels within alerts are crucial features. The ability to know which service is running or down is vital for our operations.

We use the product to monitor our customers' critical services and applications. This tool has provided invaluable insights into capacity and application usage, which has been instrumental in managing bandwidth efficiently and controlling costs for our clients.

SolarWinds SAM has significantly improved our workflow by allowing us to develop a comprehensive knowledge base of known errors and automate responses to specific alerts. We have implemented automated scripts that preemptively address potential incidents and optimize server performance, particularly during peak usage. This level of automation has helped us adapt to customer service behavior more effectively and substantially reduced the incidence of human errors.

I use the solution to monitor devices.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring.

I use the solution in my company for our network and network monitoring purposes.

The most valuable features of the solution revolve around areas like SNMP polling and availability. My company doesn't use APM-related features of the product. I have an understanding related to network monitoring, but I want to understand what other features SolarWinds provides and to figure out what benefits customers will get from using it. I wanted to know if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor are cheaper or costlier than Riverbed.

Recently, I have been using it to oversee the performance of audio-video equipment within the university setting. In a broader sense, it serves as a versatile tool for general system and application monitoring.

I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool.

We mainly use SolarWinds for reporting on server utilization. It gives alerts based on a defined threshold. For example, if utilization exceeds 80 or 90 percent, it gives us a critical warning. 

The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up. 

We use the product to monitor issues with certificates and VMs in our environment.

It's a good product. The ability to create tickets with our infrastructure team for them to be aware of immediate issues and be able to triage those quickly is valuable to us. The product integrates with Remedy. It's probably one of the biggest things.