Chronosphere vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Chronosphere and SolarWinds are both solutions in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category. Chronosphere is ranked #35 with an average rating of 8.5, while SolarWinds is ranked #19 with an average rating of 8.0. Chronosphere holds a 0.7% mindshare in APM, compared to SolarWinds’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Chronosphere users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 89% of SolarWinds users who would recommend it.

Chronosphere

Read 2 Chronosphere reviews

3,057 Views
2,079 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Read 44 SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor reviews

7,596 Views
4,330 Comparison Views

89% willing to recommend

Chronosphere

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Chronosphere and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Chronosphere vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Report (Updated: July 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Chronosphere vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

July 2026

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Helped 909,948 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

Chronosphere

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

35th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (35th), AIOps (20th)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

19th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Server Monitoring (6th), Active Directory Management (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Chronosphere is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.0%, down from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.0%
Chronosphere	0.7%
Other	98.3%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Karthik Doreswamy

Dev Ops Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

Centralized monitoring has unified alerts and dashboards for critical cloud applications

We can improve a bit of UI aspects. The UI could be made more user friendly. Sometimes when identifying the specific logs patterns and identifying what metrics and what logs are coming in, going to a specific log explorer and finding it there is a little difficult. It would be very useful if we could group according to projects and have that UI a little more user friendly. The user interface part was a bit confusing in the beginning. To make it better, I believe we would need some more open sourced or freely available courses on Chronosphere which would help us understand the platform a bit more. The team provides detailed walkthroughs whenever you get into that. However, it would be better if we could have proper video sessions or documentation which would help us understand the tool a bit more.

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NikhilKalwint

Technical Specialist at ServiceIO

Monitoring over a thousand systems has improved decision making and operational visibility

From an advantage perspective, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is comparatively cheaper from a commercial point of view. It is easy to install and configure, very user-friendly, and quick to get up and running, allowing you to see the early value adds in your organization. It is compatible with most technologies for monitoring with very few chances of incompatibility. Configuration also allows us to monitor all the technical parameters we are looking for, making it a very good experience for us. The alerting feature in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a main advantage, as it alerts based on threshold breaches and can raise tickets to the ticketing system, send SMS, and email notifications, allowing engineers to work on those tickets to resolve issues and avoid further impact. The visibility into server health is a beneficial feature that I am utilizing. We widely use various application performance metrics in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor such as database monitoring and server monitoring, which are quite good enough for any monitoring solution. We utilize the customizable dashboards in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

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

"Integrating Chronosphere was pretty much easy coming from an open source tool and it helped us to streamline our monitoring and alerting setup across our organization, which directly impacted on the streamlining of the process as well as reducing errors and also keeping our environment uptime to a greater extent by those alerts and quick responses."

"The alerting features are good"

"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"

"I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast."

"The most beneficial aspect of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its ability to monitor at the application level."

"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."

"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements, so the threshold gets configured automatically, and it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."

"If a company would really like insight into its database utilization or performance and why their servers are slow or why the database is not giving a proper response, this solution will help."

"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."

"The recommendations are a life saver."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"Sometimes when identifying the specific logs patterns and identifying what metrics and what logs are coming in, going to a specific log explorer and finding it there is a little difficult."

"It's not easy for everyone."

"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."

"SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern."

"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."

"I had some stability issues. I lost my environment, but with the help of SolarWinds support, I was able to get back to a stable platform."

"From an integration point of view, if you want to have a manager of manager kind of layer, that is currently lacking in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor."

"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."

"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."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available

"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."

"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."

"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."

"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."

"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."

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

"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."

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

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability solutions are best for your needs.

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Transportation Company

13%

Construction Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

13%

University

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	17
Midsize Enterprise	8
Large Enterprise	21

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Chronosphere?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Chronosphere?

Our main use case was to monitor an entire infrastructure as well as the application tech stack which we were having in a cloud environment. We had application telemetry as well, like monitoring tr...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering Chronosphere?

If you want to monitor pipelines and use something like Kafka or any streaming platform, Chronosphere is the best option for monitoring pipelines with real-time alerts. It is loosely coupled with y...

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 is definitely room for improvement besides simplifying its setup. As a non-technical person, I believe the dashboards could be improved. Everything we use appears on video walls, and we need ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?

I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Groundcover Observability Platform vs Chronosphere

Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

Nagios XI vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 4% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

August 2026

Download Chronosphere product report

Buyer's Guide

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

July 2026

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

Also Known As

No data available

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Chronosphere provides a robust platform for managing and monitoring cloud-native applications with features like real-time observability, incident management, and capacity planning. It offers scalable, detailed observability across complex systems, an intuitive interface, and cost-efficient resource management. Users report enhanced productivity, improved collaboration, and better decision-making, bolstering operational capabilities and organizational growth.

Chronosphere

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provides comprehensive server, application, and infrastructure monitoring, focusing on integration, application dependency, and network insights through user-friendly interfaces and detailed dashboards.

With AppStack and AppInsight support, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor offers service management, detailed resource dashboards, and integration capabilities. It monitors hardware metrics and performance parameters, facilitating database and network insights for cloud and virtual environments. Robust alerting, predictive analytics, and capacity planning ensure efficient management of server health and application performance.

What are the key features?

Integration: Seamlessly connects with existing tools.
AppStack: Provides a holistic view of applications.
AppInsight: Supports widely-used applications.
SNMP Polling: Efficient network data collection.
Diagnostics: Real-time troubleshooting.
Customizable Dashboards: Tailored monitoring views.

What benefits should users expect?

Comprehensive Monitoring: Extends from servers to databases.
Transparent Control: Enhances visibility into performance metrics.
User-Friendly: Simplifies proactive monitoring with alerts.
Predictive Features: Supports capacity and trend planning.

Industries implement SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor to enhance server utilization reporting, network configuration, and AV equipment performance tracking. They benefit from monitoring critical services across diverse deployment models, improving management efficiency and decision-making.

SolarWinds

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Buyer's Guide

Chronosphere vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

July 2026

Free Report: Chronosphere vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

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