Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Microsoft and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Microsoft is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.8, while SolarWinds is ranked #20 with an average rating of 7.4. Microsoft holds a 6.0% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.5% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Azure Monitor

Read 55 Azure Monitor reviews

12,653 Views
12,020 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 42 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

3,787 Views
2,727 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Azure Monitor

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and Azure Monitor compete in the server and application monitoring category. SolarWinds has an upper hand in pricing and customer support, while Azure Monitor is preferred for its integration and advanced features.

Features: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor offers comprehensive monitoring, robust alerting capabilities, and easy configuration. Azure Monitor provides advanced analytics, scalability, and seamless integration with other Azure services.

Room for Improvement: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could enhance scalability and simplify reporting. Azure Monitor could improve its intuitive setup processes and integration documentation. SolarWinds needs better support for large-scale deployments, and Azure Monitor could benefit from improved initial setup support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor has a straightforward on-premises deployment model and responsive customer service. Azure Monitor offers cloud-based deployment, but its customer service is sometimes perceived as less proactive.

Pricing and ROI: SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is considered cost-effective with a positive ROI due to robust features at a reasonable price. Azure Monitor's pricing is higher but offers substantial ROI through its advanced functionalities and integration with Azure services.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure Monitor vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

July 2025

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Helped 866,088 peers since 2012

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

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Monitoring Software (3rd)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (11th), Active Directory Management (10th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Azure Monitor is 6.0%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.5%, 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
Product	Market Share (%)
Azure Monitor	6.0%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.5%
Other	92.5%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Muhammad Usman Khawar

Software Engineer (DevOps/ SRE) at Sensys LLC

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.

Read full review

VIVEK PATHAK

Solutions Architect at Airtel

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Azure Monitor is really just a source for Dynatrace. It's just collecting data and monitoring the environment and the infrastructure. It is fairly good at that."

"The security and support are good."

"In the last company where I worked about a year ago, it looked very simple."

"Azure Monitor's best features are its graphs and charts, the different visibility options, and reporting."

"One of the most useful aspects of this solution is the out-of-the-box functionality on all areas, especially on Application Insights, zero instrumentation, and artificial intelligence for event correlation."

"It's a service from Microsoft, so it will scale."

"The most valuable feature is that it's stable. It hasn't crossed any thresholds."

"Log analytics and log queries are the most valuable features of Azure Monitor."

More Azure Monitor pros

"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."

"The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value."

"Identifying the problem statement is easy."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"

"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"Automation related to gathering metrics from more applications could be improved."

"The default interface should be improved."

"As a younger product it still has room for feature improvement and enhancement."

"Azure Monitor is not user-friendly, and the interface is not exciting. Switching between the dashboards is not easy."

"There are a lot of things that take more time to do, such as charting, alerting, and correlation of data, and things like that. Azure Monitor doesn't tell you why something happened. It just tells you that it happened. It should also have some type of AI. Environments and applications are becoming more and more complex every day with hundreds or thousands of microservices. Therefore, having to do a lot of the stuff manually takes a lot of time, and on top of that, troubleshooting issues takes a lot of time. The traditional method of troubleshooting doesn't really work for or apply to this environment we're in. So, having an AI-based system and the ability to automate deployments of your monitoring and configurations makes it much easier."

"We cannot use AI services with the solution."

"If I contact the First Line Support, they seem disconnected and lack technical information."

"This solution could be improved with more out-of-the-box functionalities and artificial intelligence to complete event correlation."

More Azure Monitor cons

"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 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."

"The product needs to reduce its price."

"The technical support team's response time could be improved."

"The technical support was better in previous years. With the launch of the premium support service, the normal support has declined."

"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."

"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."

"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of the solution is reasonable."

"Azure Monitor is cheaper compared to other third-party monitoring tools."

"Regarding pricing, Azure Monitor is free with Azure license, so there are no additional costs for using it."

"The tool's pricing is very good. I could say that Microsoft offers different cost models, which are listed on the product's website."

"The solution is a pay-as-you-go consumption service and is the least expensive in the market."

"The tool is expensive."

"The Azure Insight is a little bit 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."

More Azure Monitor pricing and cost advice

"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."

"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."

"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."

"The product is expensive."

"The price is too high."

"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."

"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 might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

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866,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	21
Midsize Enterprise	7
Large Enterprise	29

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	15
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	20

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about Azure Monitor?

Azure Monitor is a very easy-to-use product in the cloud environment.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

The initial cost is quite high, but the renewal cost is reasonable.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Compared 17% of the time

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Compared 9% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor

August 2025

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Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

August 2025

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Azure Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution offered by Microsoft Azure. It provides a centralized platform for monitoring the performance and health of various Azure resources, applications, and infrastructure.

With Azure Monitor, users can gain insights into the availability, performance, and usage of their applications and infrastructure. The key features of Azure Monitor include metrics, logs, alerts, and dashboards. Metrics allow users to collect and analyze performance data from various Azure resources, such as virtual machines, databases, and storage accounts.

Logs enable users to collect and analyze log data from different sources, including Azure resources, applications, and operating systems. Azure Monitor also provides a robust alerting mechanism that allows users to set up alerts based on specific conditions or thresholds. These alerts can be configured to notify users via email, SMS, or other notification channels. Additionally, Azure Monitor offers customizable dashboards that allow users to visualize and analyze their monitoring data in a personalized and intuitive manner.

Azure Monitor integrates seamlessly with other Azure services, such as Azure Automation and Azure Logic Apps, enabling users to automate actions based on monitoring data. It also supports integration with third-party monitoring tools and services, providing flexibility and extensibility.

Overall, Azure Monitor is a powerful and versatile monitoring solution that helps users gain deep insights into the performance and health of their Azure resources and applications. It offers a wide range of features and integrations, making it a comprehensive solution for monitoring and managing Azure environments.

Microsoft

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

Rackspace, First Gas, Allscripts, ABB Group

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

Azure Monitor vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

July 2025

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