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Cribl vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 29, 2026

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

Cribl
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
8th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
55
Ranking in other categories
Log Management (3rd), Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) (7th), Observability Pipeline Software (1st)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
22nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (8th), Active Directory Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Cribl is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.3%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cribl1.2%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
Other97.5%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Aman Verma - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Software Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees
Has helped reduce daily log volume significantly and streamline data routing across multiple destinations
Regarding complexity, as I mentioned before, Cribl is very simple to use. When I started 2.5 years ago, it was very easy to learn. I learned Cribl within a week, and even though I was a fresher at the time, it was easy to understand and not complex enough that someone would need to spend money on labs. It's not that complex to learn. Regarding cost efficiency, it's very good because nowadays the SIEM tools we use are too expensive on license, and SIEM tools base their license on how many logs get ingested. The unwanted logs, particularly firewall logs, represent a significant portion of unnecessary ingestion. Cribl saves our license by filtering out half of the firewall logs that are unwanted. Our main purpose for using Cribl is to save our license and save money. Currently, everyone is moving toward AI agents. We currently use regex, and AI agents could help us create those regex patterns to drop events or add raw data to events. Currently, we sit down, review the logs, and create regex patterns manually, which can be time-consuming. An AI agent could reduce this time. I read some articles indicating that Cribl Cloud has started using AI and considering MCPs and model context, but I'm not certain how far along they are. If Cribl asked me what they could improve, that would be my suggestion. The support is very good, and I had a few issues with Cribl where I raised support cases and received good responses, which is better than the quick response I didn't get from other SIEM tools and vendor tools I use. Compared to other SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper than Splunk and DataDogs. However, it's still a bit expensive from my point of view, though I won't call it expensive. Overall, I think 99% of companies use Cribl before their SIEM tools, and compared to SIEM tools, Cribl is cheaper. Companies can use any SIEM tool such as Google, Splunk, or Cisco, and Cribl is cheaper than those SIEM tools. They might have a slight chance to reduce costs further, but I'm not the correct person to evaluate that since I'm more focused on the operational side. Regarding training, it was quite easy to grasp. It took me almost a week to understand the basic functionalities and what Cribl does. Getting more expertise took additional time, but basic functionalities and understanding what Cribl does took around four to five days. One point I want to mention is that Cribl could improve their labs or training materials in their Cribl Cloud or whatever portal they have.
NikhilKalwint - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The feature I appreciate most about Cribl is the interface and how you're able to interact with the data, see the data both live on the ingest side as well as on the side where it goes out to the destination, which is a feature that was lacking in the previous solution I was using."
"What I like most about Cribl is the overall pipeline structure and easiness."
"Cribl's ability to handle high volumes of diverse data types is exactly the purpose that we took it for, and as far as I have seen for the last nine months, it is handling well without issues."
"Cribl offers other valuable features. For instance, you can replay data from an edge device, store your daily data in a stream, and replay specific event data into Splunk if a security incident occurs"
"Cribl acts as a super product because it enables one source to send to multiple destinations using only one copy."
"Cribl brings significant benefits like cost-effectiveness, reducing CM costs, and making our data vendor-agnostic since data flows through Cribl."
"The deployment was smooth across all seven projects I have, everything was in place with documents and step-by-step guidance readily available, and Cribl support is very good because whenever we got stuck, we just needed to open a ticket and the support team was very responsive and helped us get the deployment done quickly."
"Cribl has been instrumental in containing our data costs, especially as we use leading log aggregation and SIEM tools known for their heavy licensing costs by ingest."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"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."
"SolarWinds allows network administrators to easily monitor the network by customizing the pages to see what exactly is needed, in addition to the deep statistics shown for nodes and interfaces like response time, packet loss, interface CRC, interface errors, as well as the rich graphs for all network elements."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business."
"The recommendations are a life saver."
"This feature from Solarwinds SAM helped us to monitor and alert whenever the SSL cert is going to expire on the server to avoid any downtime of the services running on the server specially on ADFS platform where we have Video conference, Webex, Office 365 and single sign-on services."
"The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities."
 

Cons

"I think the pricing for Cribl is acceptable, but it may not be feasible for a lot of companies in the Netherlands since you need a huge starting license."
"Some of the integrations such as SNMP need improvement, and I feel Cribl should improve on SNMP integration and also on the database monitoring space."
"Optimizing CPU utilization on the edge side is something that could be improved; we see, particularly on older hardware and older OSes, Cribl Edge service can eat up quite a bit of CPU resources compared to some other products we've used in the past, indicating there's room for improvement."
"To develop user skills in Cribl, it needs to improve some certifications, as the ones I have taken are not entirely helpful in the main projects for the clients."
"The only area that Cribl should focus on is cost-effectiveness."
"Currently, we sit down, review the logs, and create regex patterns manually, which can be time-consuming."
"Currently, Cribl Search is dedicated to one bucket at a time in the case of S3 buckets. The ability to search for multiple buckets would be awesome."
"Cribl is a very costly product. People nowadays have started considering alternative solutions."
"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."
"I would like to see support for non-Windows or non-Microsoft domains, especially Apache and other non-Windows servers."
"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."
"MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking; without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, and I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"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."
"The technical support was better in previous years. With the launch of the premium support service, the normal support has declined."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would not say it is a cheaply priced tool as it has been doing wonders in the market. The tool has been budget-friendly for organizations."
"The product pricing is reasonable compared to other solutions."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"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."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"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."
"Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
"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."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
20%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
6%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business25
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise34
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cribl?
Regarding current pricing, it was based on an ingress-based model that we used, and it was favorable. It was cheaper than the Splunk license. We didn't have a problem with the purchase.
What needs improvement with Cribl?
Some downsides of Cribl include that it was quite a long sales cycle for us, but that was probably partly my fault as well. There weren't really any negatives on the product itself. Cribl can do be...
What is your primary use case for Cribl?
My use cases for Cribl basically involve being part of a Splunk theme organization where I was brought in to do a soft confirmation program, and I was onboarding more and more logs into Cribl as my...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Cribl vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,667 professionals have used our research since 2012.