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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
32nd
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
4.3
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 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 1.3%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
Alluvio Aternity0.5%
Other98.2%
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.
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

"Alluvio Aternity is stable."
"The data collected by the agents on each end point is the most valuable feature for us."
"The ability to quickly utilize the dashboard to gather information is valuable from a DXI perspective."
"The most valuable feature of Alluvio Aternity is the compiling and displaying of end-user data so that we can utilize it to troubleshoot proactively."
"Aternity provides metrics about actual employee experience of all business-critical apps, rather than just a few. It does some out-of-the-box monitoring for the Office suite, but you can create custom monitoring for any of your applications, whether a web client or a desktop application."
"It is a tool that helps me check users' computers really quickly without having a help desk administrator logging in and doing analysis. Anyone who has access to Aternity, including our support team, can log onto Aternity and do a quick, basic analysis."
"The two most valuable features for us are its abilities to validate the customer experience and to measure performance before and after upgrades."
"The most valuable feature is the alerting. As soon as we click on an incident, it takes us directly to the problematic PC. It's a direct solution. We click on an alert and it takes us to the incident details. The details show in different colors, in a graphical representation, and I like that the most."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"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."
"Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)"
 

Cons

"Signature development process requires deep technical expertise in the application and in the use of their studio tools that help you create it."
"Reliability: Issues interfering with the deployment and use of the product has made its use reduced in scope."
"Its user interface and features should be improved. They don't support new versions of certain Linux editions. That is one of the reasons why we have to move to another solution."
"In terms of a new feature, it would be good if we could restrict a user to a specific application or server. We have several customers, and we have to set up one or two servers for each customer. We have to set up one server for production and one for the test environment. Each user at the customer level can see all applications and the data of all applications, which is not really useful and good. We should be able to restrict user access at the application level or server level."
"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."
"I would like to see more granular performance counters collected and viewable from the endpoints. That would be great."
"To monitor these transactions, you need to look at it, analyze it and capture it. It requires a little bit of work, but in an environment like ours, you need it to be easier."
"The thing that I think most companies like ourselves would want would be an easier way to customize custom scripts."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"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."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."
"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."
"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."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is definitely a premium solution; it is not an inexpensive product. We have to ensure that we are getting the most out of it in order to justify the cost. However, it is not cheap, especially when you want to install it on all your endpoints."
"Its licensing cost is very low. That's one of the reasons why we have kept it for so long. We get more than a 70% discount on the maintenance licenses. Its cost is very low for us, but if you buy it new, it would be much more expensive at the retail price."
"You have to purchase it for 12 months, which is an issue because a lot of our customers are on a per-user-per-month type billing. There are a few additional costs. A lot of customers only get the essential licenses, and then they get what they call the application add-ons on top. They have to pay depending on how many customers and applications they want to monitor."
"The pricing is fair."
"In my opinion they are asking a lot for their SaaS solution, but I also know that that's the direction they're going... The current, on-prem solution is probably a fair price."
"Regarding cost, compared to other solutions, Aternity is pretty low. It's definitely lower-cost than others that we looked at, like Nexthink."
"If the scale of your monitoring will be to go everywhere in an organization, a site license is key."
"The pricing is reasonable for the value that it gives because it does allow you to measure the cost ramifications of direct productivity loss for spends in both your infrastructure and on endpoints."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"The licenses start from USD 3000.00 and go up to USD 20,000.00 for the year. It's a perpetual license. Nothing is free in SolarWinds, anything that you need is an additional cost."
"The price is too high."
"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."
"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."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Government
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
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 Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Aternity?
The solution's price is pretty comparable to the industry.
What needs improvement with Aternity?
Technology changes every six months, and improvements are necessary. The integration of AI agents could enhance these tools further, replacing traditional agents and plugins.
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: September 2025.
871,688 professionals have used our research since 2012.