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Elastic Observability 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

Elastic Observability
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th), Log Management (16th), Container Monitoring (4th), Cloud Monitoring Software (6th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
20th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Server Monitoring (11th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Elastic Observability is 3.9%, down from 6.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 1.4%, 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 (%)
Elastic Observability3.9%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.4%
Other94.7%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Adelina Craciun - PeerSpot reviewer
Customization enables tailored monitoring and alerting across departments
The possibility to customize it has been quite useful. Whatever the other departments want to dream up, we implement. Whatever they want to monitor, the granularity of it, the changes in the threshold, and the anomalies that they want reported all require some development. So far, every single request has been fulfilled.
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

"I recommend Elastic Observability for its completeness of vision and wide ecosystem."
"I have built a mini business intelligence system based on Elastic Observability."
"It is a powerful tool that allows users to collect and transform logs as needed, enabling flexible visualization and analysis."
"The ability to ensure that the data is searchable and maintainable is highly valuable for our purposes."
"The most valuable feature of Elastic Observability is the text search."
"It is very stable, and I would rate it ten out of ten based on my interaction with it."
"The tool's most valuable feature is centralized logging. Elastic Common Search helps us to search for the logs across the organization."
"It's easy to deploy, and it's very flexible."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The product integrates with Remedy."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."
"SolarWinds is a very stable platform compared to others on the market."
 

Cons

"Elastic Observability needs to have better standardization, logging, and schema."
"Elastic APM's visualization is not that great compared to other tools. It's number of metrics is very low."
"Simplifying the parsing of logs and manual efforts would also be beneficial."
"There is room for improvement regarding its APM capabilities."
"Elastic Observability is reactive rather than proactive. It should act as an ITSM tool and be able to create tickets and alerts on Jira."
"The solution needs to use more AI. Once the product onboards AI, users would more effectively be able to track endpoints for specific messages."
"It lacked some capabilities when handling on-prem devices, like network observability, package flow analysis, and device performance data on the infrastructure side."
"The interface could be improved."
"Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve the server monitoring and the web application monitoring features are not good. Microsoft SCOM has better server monitoring."
"The current script monitoring feature has limitations, especially when dealing with custom scripts."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are two types: cloud and SaaS. They charge based on data ingestion, ingest rate, hard retention, and warm retention. I believe it costs around $25,000 annually to ingest 30GB of data daily. That is the SaaS version. There is also a self-managed license where the customer manages their own infrastructure on-prem. In such cases, there are three license tiers that respectively cost $5,000 annually per node, $7,000 per node, and $12,500 per node."
"The price of Elastic Observability is expensive."
"Pricing is one of those situations where the more you use it, the more you pay."
"The product is not that cheap."
"Elastic Observability is cheaper than other similar solutions, such as Dynatrace. Its license calculation is based on various factors like data volume and physical infrastructure, particularly related to RAM capacity."
"Users have to pay for some features, like the alerts on different channels, because they are unavailable in different source versions."
"So far, there are just the standard licensing fees. Several of the components are embedded in the license or are even open source. They're even free depending on what you use, which makes it even more appealing to someone that is discussing pricing of the solution."
"One needs to pay for the licenses, and it is an annual subscription model right now."
"The price is too high."
"When compared to other licensed models in the market, it stands out as one of the more cost-effective options."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"The product is expensive."
"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."
"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
17%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Elastic Observability?
Elastic Observability significantly improves incident response time by providing quick access to logs and data across various sources. For instance, searching for specific keywords in logs spanning...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Elastic Observability?
The license for Elastic Observability is the same as for other uses; you pay for Elastic, and you can use it for various cases. Observability is actually cheaper compared to logs because you're not...
What needs improvement with Elastic Observability?
I think they are working on the AI-based features, which are currently in technical preview. The only challenging aspect for new users is often writing the query language. Basic searching is very e...
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

PSCU, Entel, VITAS, Mimecast, Barrett Steel, Butterfield Bank
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Elastic Observability vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.