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Dynatrace vs New Relic vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Dynatrace is 8.9%, down from 12.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of New Relic is 5.1%, down from 8.8% 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 (%)
Dynatrace8.9%
New Relic5.1%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
Other84.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
Provides a comprehensive view by integrating with other monitoring systems
There may be an issue since there are many tools like Splunk involved in network monitoring. From an IP perspective, Dynatrace is performing well. If they want to develop in network monitoring, they can, as it's part of their product line. It's not rocketry, so they can accomplish it. If I, as an SI, look at it from an enterprise perspective, considering the cost from the client, I prefer not to go with multiple systems, as they don't provide a complete 360-degree view. They need to improve on claims about being an enterprise system. The definition of enterprise is loosely used, however, from a holistic security perspective, including infrastructure, network, ports, software, applications, transactions, and databases, there are areas lacking, especially in network monitoring tools.
Rahul -Jain - PeerSpot reviewer
Good for application Performance Monitoring but not stable
There are two types of teams we have in every organization. One is for DevOps, and the second one is for performance testing. Those who are using these tools, like AppDynamics, Dynatrace, or whatever tool we have on the APM side. These tools are used by two teams: one is the performance team, and another one is the DevOps team. So, the setup and the alert system belong to the DevOps team, not for performance. So, I don't use any alerts in AppDynamics, Dynatrace, or any of the tools.
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

"Provides more insight into detecting what the problem is with some of our applications."
"The most valuable function is the ability to replay a customer session."
"It is nice to be able to deep dive and pull historical data."
"It is a robust solution that would help anyone get to the solution and resolution pretty fast.​"
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, UI, and collected data. Its deployment is really easy. In just a few hours, you can have a very good outcome, and you can see everything, which is very valuable. It collects a good amount of data."
"It provides us a reference for being able to go back and look at data at a certain point, analyze it, then determine if something was the root cause."
"We use Dynatrace for performance testing. We use it to dig down for application layer or slowness issues, getting a clear idea of what is causing the issues, then reporting back to the engineering team."
"The real user experience monitoring is very helpful. We can see what real users are seeing, what JavaScript errors, what pages are very slow for them. As well, it helps to correlate the front-end users to the back-end application components, and the corresponding Method which is failing, as well. We are able to go to the correct spot and fix the issue."
"The simplicity of the dashboard is very good."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"Their technical support is pretty good and responsive. We have a real good relationship with them."
"It has prevented failures from occurring in our production environment."
"The deep insights, which will give you the metrics (not a high level), so we can build out at the database level where the bottleneck is. This has been pretty helpful."
"New Relic has helped us in terms of the optimizing our print and loading times."
"As soon as it monitors all our systems and is integrated with PagerDuty, the operations team just needs to wait for alerts on their cellphones to fix things."
"We are able to drill down and see what is going on in the system."
"The initial setup was relatively easy, and we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor."
"It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."
"Identifying the problem statement is easy."
"SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
 

Cons

"The messaging layer is not really capturable and measurable right now."
"I don't see those monitoring capabilities for NVIDIA chips, NPUs, GPUs, or anything similar, and maybe it has them, but unfortunately, I lack the knowledge to understand where I can view all those things."
"Needs more compatibility of platforms out-of-the-box."
"There are lots of features to share information, but we need to learn to leverage that, both on the web browser and on the mobile app."
"They need to develop how to capture the JDBC and MBeans metrics."
"The reporting could be better."
"If we can gain more insight into older applications, using not-so-recent technologies, then it would be a plus."
"I am unable to use Synthetic to automate user login."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"The older view is much better than the new view that they have. We'd like to go back to that previous version. The user interface just isn't as nice as it used to be."
"Email alert customization is limited."
"We would like a dashboard feature to be created for this product. This would allow us to monitor both the front and back-end of our UIs performance, and then report on it."
"The integration and configuration of this product in our AWS environment needs improvement on the filtering part. I would like it to go more granular on accounts."
"New Relic APM is a good tool, and it has a database of failures, but it could use a list of customer-specific failures. New Relic APM should be able to give my company advanced analytics through AI."
"New Relic needs to improve is the user data schema."
"There are times when you restart the engines and the servers have a unique ID for the host and you need to remove the server. It is difficult because some are on-premise and others are production hosts. Having downtime is not very good when updating. However, it is not a constant issue."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"They are complex to operate; users need to know what they want during setup."
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is time savings. People's times have been cut in half using this solution because we were previously doing a lot of that manual work. Now, it's a lot more automated, and the data is just there."
"The product is superior to others, but it comes with a price tag that is often difficult to position back to clients."
"Its licensing is complicated or not transparent."
"The pricing is a bit on the higher end."
"Dynatrace is the most expensive APM that we sell, compared to competitors' products. The license pricing could be improved. My customers pay for licensing yearly."
"The product is definitely worth taking a look at. Be aware that it is probably more pricey than other options on the market, but there are a lot of capabilities. Dynatrace has an eye toward the future and the computing and monitoring needs that we are gonna need for the cloud. ​"
"Always gives good ROI and total cost of ownership."
"Dynatrace has a place for everybody. How you use it and what your budgetary limitations are will dictate what you do with it. But it's within everybody's reach. If you're a small organization and you have a large infrastructure, you may not be able to monitor the whole thing. You may have to pick and choose what you want to monitor, and you have the ability to do so. Your available funds are going to dictate that."
"Comparatively, the pricing is expensive."
"Cost is significant with a lot of extras."
"The product is neither cheap nor expensive, and I believe that it is a competitively-priced tool."
"The monthly cost os $1000 per server per month, but it could be even more. We pay about $250 for the server, and then New Relic wants over $1000 to give us statistics on those servers."
"The detection piece of it brings us a big return on investment."
"The price of the solution could be less expensive. You have to pay a lot for each user. There is an additional cost for extra features."
"We're paying for the New Relic APM license annually."
"We feel it's a little bit pricey."
"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."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Retailer
6%
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 Business77
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise289
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business65
Midsize Enterprise50
Large Enterprise61
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

Any advice about APM solutions?
The key is to have a holistic view over the complete infrastructure, the ones you have listed are great for APM if yo...
What cloud monitoring software did you choose and why?
While the environment does matter in the selection of an APM tool, I prefer to use Dynatrace to manage the entire sta...
Any advice about APM solutions?
There are many factors and we know little about your requirements (size of org, technology stack, management systems,...
What do you like most about New Relic Insights?
The product's initial setup phase was very easy.
What needs improvement with New Relic Insights?
New Relic can be improved by incorporating an automated incident analysis solution. They have comprehensive enterpris...
What is your primary use case for New Relic Insights?
I have worked with New Relic for approximately three to four years.
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 App...
 

Also Known As

No data available
New Relic Browser, New Relic Applied Intelligence, New Relic Insights, New Relic Synthetics, New Relic Servers, New Relic APM
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Audi, Best Buy, LinkedIn, CISCO, Intuit, KRONOS, Scottrade, Wells Fargo, ULTA Beauty, Lenovo, Swarovsk, Nike, Whirlpool, American Express
World Fuel Services, Verizon, FootLocker, McDonald's, Trainline, Mondia Media, Confused, Costa Coffee, Ryanair, Marks & Spencer, William Hill, Delivery Hero, Skyscanner, BASF, DAZN, Veygo, Virtuo, movingimage, talabat, Australia Post, Tokopedia, Seven Network, Virgin Australia, Zomato, BigBasket, Mercado Libre, Lending Club
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Datadog, Dynatrace, Splunk and others in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability. Updated: September 2025.
870,701 professionals have used our research since 2012.