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Azure Monitor 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

Azure Monitor
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
5th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (12th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 6.7%, down from 8.8% 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

Muhammad Usman Khawar - PeerSpot reviewer
Native integration simplifies monitoring but documentation and cost improvements are needed
The ease of access in Azure is significant since it's native to the platform and easy to integrate. It has no maintenance overhead, and users don't have to navigate to another portal to get their desired result. It's the handiness that it has, rather than the features. The interpretation from the logs and injection requires custom runbooks. While it's complex, many services provide native insights and workbooks. It does the basic job quite efficiently. They added new kinds of metrics with more integrations to send out metrics. They have even added support for third-party tools that can be integrated. Azure Monitor is working on improvements and becoming more mature. Azure Monitor is stable and scalable. Azure Monitor is evolving with new workbooks and dashboards.
Carlos Camargo - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides user-friendly API features and has straightforward deployment process
One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules. The misalignment of licensing terms can present commercial challenges when adding new modules or additional pollers. Additionally, the granularity of polling times for specific components could be enhanced to better meet individual customers' needs without impacting the entire polling pool.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Among the valuable features of this solution, Application Insights stands out as one of the most significant. It provides insights into application performance and helps identify issues and bottlenecks."
"I am monitoring all of my Azure Monitor and getting good reports. I can customize the reports to get the information I need. I am also getting emails about which AAS instances are down and everything in the system related to my services. It is easy to use, scalable, and user-friendly. Microsoft has Many guides and videos to help you understand how to create and use Azure Monitor."
"It allows you to set thresholds on the metrics and receive alerts."
"It is a move-in powerful feature compared to other market-leading tools."
"You can scale the product."
"The initial setup is straightforward."
"Azure Monitor is useful because of the useful application insights and telemetry, such as metrics and logs."
"Azure Monitor is very stable."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"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."
"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."
"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 solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."
 

Cons

"Using Azure Monitor and Azure Arc separately to monitor different environments can be complicated."
"The scalability could be improved as there are some limitations."
"The product should integrate well with other tools or clouds in the future, as it is one of the areas where the product currently has certain shortcomings."
"What I feel is when I open a screen of Azure, some places are very complex to navigate to. It is not very user-friendly when it comes to accessing certain sections."
"Azure Monitor could improve network performance monitoring and make it more advanced."
"Azure Monitor's integration with applications could be improved."
"Azure Monitor can improve by adding some kind of storage for logs."
"The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that the actual cost of the Kubernetes cluster was less than the cost they were incurring for Azure Monitor."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"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 product does not explain why a problem occurred."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate Azure Monitor a two out of five for affordability."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"The tool is expensive."
"Customers of Azure Monitor must pay an amount that depends largely on how many services they need to integrate and the storage space required in terms of logs, etc. If they only have a few small services to monitor, the price won't be too high, but on the opposite side of the spectrum, it can certainly get pricey."
"It's a costly solution"
"It is a pay-as-you-go model. I find it very cost-effective."
"Besides standard licensing fees the customer needs to additionally pay based on the ingested data size"
"Azure Monitor is cheaper compared to other third-party monitoring tools."
"The price is too high."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"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."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Educational Organization
26%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Splunk compare with Azure Monitor?
Splunk handles a high amount of data very well. We use Splunk to capture information and as an aggregator for monitoring information from different sources. Splunk is very good at alerting us if we...
What do you like most about Azure Monitor?
Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.
What needs improvement with Azure Monitor?
The primary challenge is the documentation. The major challenge that remains is the costing factor for the logs ingestion. The cost skyrockets once you start using it, and there are complaints that...
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

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Monitor vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.