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Alluvio Aternity vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

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

Alluvio Aternity
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
33rd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Mobile APM (4th), Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) (6th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Alluvio Aternity is 0.5%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.6%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Caillin Peacock - PeerSpot reviewer
Enables us to be a lot more agile and proactive in troubleshooting endpoint issues thanks to accurate UX scoring
There are many valuable features. If I had to single out one, it would be the UXI score. That's a proprietary Aternity score that tells you how good or bad the experience is for a user on that particular machine, for a particular app. It neatly encapsulates the pain of the user in a single score. It's very easy to find issues and then drill down further into those issues, based on that score. A lot of tools will do a similar thing, but they will do it indirectly and it's not always relevant. The Aternity score is on the money pretty much every time. The Digital Experience Index (DXI) feature is also very valuable. We've incorporated it into the KPIs for our endpoint team. We can use that as a benchmark to improve our goals and our environment, and for ongoing life cycle improvement.
Subhajit Nag - PeerSpot reviewer
The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow
SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. It should also be easier to upgrade SolarWinds. AppDynamics is harder to deploy but easier to upgrade. So AppDynamics takes a lot of time and effort to install, but you can upgrade it in minutes. SolarWinds is the opposite. It's easy to deploy, but upgrades take forever. To date, nobody can complete it on time, so the production environment is sitting idle. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The dashboard is very effective."
"As a financial institution, we have a lot of applications that are either written internally or bought from a vendor and customized for us. Having a tool that lets us monitor specific transactions in those applications allows us to focus on the transactions that are important to the business."
"The most valuable thing that you get from Aternity is very broad visibility. You get visibility of your network, of your endpoints, of your software usage, your application performance, capacity, in one pane of glass. We had 20 to 30 IT tools, including application performance monitoring, network monitoring, security, endpoint detection, network protection, capacity management, service management — every kind of monitoring you can imagine. But Aternity was always the first place that I turned for anything, because you can see everything in it."
"The item we use the most and what upper management wants is the SLA reports. It's a good summary of how the applications are performing over time from month to month."
"We've looked at the Digital Experience Management Quadrant (DEM-Q) to see how our digital experience compares to others who use the solution. We have used that to see how we are trending and it gives us some insight into areas that we might need to focus more on. That's helpful."
"The infrastructure data, especially the CPU and memory data, is per second, which makes it outstanding as compared to other solutions. Its licensing cost is very low for us."
"It is useful for working out whether there are any issues in the network or between the endpoints. It is also useful for working out any performance issues. It has been useful for a lot of stuff around Teams. Our customers like to know what's happening with Teams when they call in. It is helpful for easily profiling users. It records all the applications that are being used for each user, and you can see what users are doing. It is very good in terms of performance. You don't have to wait forever to try and get reports or results. It is quite quick to get everything that you need out of the software."
"We could resolve issues that they had been facing for months or years. They had been having the same issues, the same performance problems, whether it was Excel taking a long time to load, or network instability, or voice call problems, and we would fix it in minutes, in front of them in a meeting, with absolute confidence. It would just blow their minds."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"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."
"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."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"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."
"It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
"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."
 

Cons

"I want more reporting around asset management, with greater flexibility and customization ability."
"Some of the dashboarding and reporting on the analytics side could be improved. I think they realize it. Obviously, some of the desktop monitoring metrics always can be improved."
"When it comes to a lot of the features that I would want, they will tell you they are in their SaaS version, which we don't use... They put all the new features on the SaaS solution and that's where you get the latest and greatest stuff... Why not have those features available for on-prem users?"
"When it comes to what is called creating signatures, it's not easy for a non-coding person for desktop applications. You need to run the recording and you need to have some exposure and knowledge. That is an area where they can improve. For web applications, they have the Web Activity Creator and that's an awesome and easy tool. Anybody can use it and capture the signatures. With the desktop applications it's a little more cumbersome and difficult."
"Reports were a lot easier in the older versions"
"The dashboards and navigatability of the platform could use improvement. It often takes five or six clicks to drill down to exactly what you want to see."
"They've additionally added some great color coding, but they need to explain better and drive down further on the meanings of this workflow."
"I think the workflow needs improvement"
"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."
"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."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is fair."
"Our management squeezed Aternity pretty hard on the pricing, in my opinion a little too much. I advise negotiating for sure, but I do think it left kind of a sour taste in Aternity’s mouth that we were being so pushy despite the fact that we were only purchasing a small number of licenses."
"It’s a little on the costly side, but if you license intelligently, accounting for your various hosts connecting in through VDI or terminal servers, you can make it well worth your money."
"Pricing is a bit high. Don't take that as the "be all, end all"."
"I thought the price for Alluvio Aternity was reasonable, but we had difficulty selling it in our market due to the minimum number of agents required for deployment, which I believe was around 500."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"We always try to reduce costs and purchase the Alluvio Aternity Essentials license."
"The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"Pricing is inexpensive, starting at 2440 euros. For that, you get the ability to monitor a couple of nodes and one year of maintenance and support."
"I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
"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."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Educational Organization
36%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

APM tools for a Managed Service Provider - Dynatrace vs. AppDynamics vs. Aternity vs. Ruxit
Hi Avi! It's great to see your thorough approach to selecting an APM package for your MSP company. Considering your focus on SMBs and enterprises in Israel, Dynatrace seems like a solid choice with...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
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

Aternity, Workforce APM, Aternity Frontline, Riverbed SteelCenter Aternity
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Maersk, SwissRe, Travis Perkins, Michelin, National Instruments, Simmons & Simmons, Lighthouse Guild
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Alluvio Aternity vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.