Google Cloud&#39;s operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

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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

Google Cloud's operations s...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

28th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Log Management (30th), Cloud Monitoring Software (21st)

SolarWinds Server and Appli...

Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

20th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

4.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

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

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) is 1.0%, down from 1.4% 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
Product	Market Share (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor	1.3%
Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)	1.0%
Other	97.7%

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Featured Reviews

Anand_Patel

Senior Technical Architect at T-Systems International GmbH

Offers reliable Ops Agent and logging transport feature with easy third-party integrations

As part of our company, we implemented several changes in our log analytics pattern, including the storage and procurement process. Earlier, before implementing the solution, our company was able to procure only one year of data, but later, we came to the three-year mark. Around 15-20% reduction has been witnessed in the total analytic consumption of our company. The aforementioned result was possible because the solution allowed the creation of a dashboard where factors like storage costs, proportion of logs, and logs presence in a storage bucket or BigQuery can all be checked. Earlier all logs were stored in a raw storage, but currently our company is able to move logs in table bucket that contributes towards cost savings.

Read full review

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

"I like the monitoring feature."

"The most valuable feature is the multi-cloud integration, where there is support for both GCP and AWS."

"Our company has a corporate account for Google Cloud and so our systems and clusters integrate really well."

"Provides visibility into the performance uptime."

"Google's technical support is very good."

"The cloud login enables us to get our logs from the different platforms that we currently use."

"We find the solution to be stable."

"The features that I have found most valuable are its graphs - if I need any statistics, in Kubernetes or Kong level or VPN level, I can quickly get the reports."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) 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."

"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."

"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"

"We manage SolarWinds ourselves without outsourcing its services."

"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's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services."

"The solution can be deployed quickly."

"Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor pros

Cons

"The product provides minimal metrics that are insufficient."

"Lacking sufficient operations documentation."

"This solution could be improved if it offered the ability to analyze charts, such as a solution like Kibana."

"It could be even more automated."

"It could be more stable."

"The logging functionality could be better."

"It is difficult to estimate in advance how much something is going to cost."

"While we are satisfied with the overall performance, in certain cases we must add additional metrics and additional tools like Grafana and Dynatrace."

More Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) cons

"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."

"They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features."

"Support for the IBM Mainframe is needed."

"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."

"The product needs to reduce its price."

"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."

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

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of using Stackdriver depends on usage."

"The cost could be lower."

"We have a basic standard license without any additional costs."

"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 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."

"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."

"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."

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

"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."

"The product is expensive."

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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872,008 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

14%

Media Company

University

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Healthcare Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	8

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

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Google Stackdriver?

If the errors are caught early in the interface, it would be easier for users to manage. The process of logging analytics can be improved.

What is your primary use case for Google Stackdriver?

I use the solution for logging, defining alerts, and monitoring. Our company's Java and Python logging teams mainly use it.

What advice do you have for others considering Google Stackdriver?

The Ops Agent and logging transport feature of the solution have had a major impact on improving application performance. The solution also allows the transport of logs into log buckets, which is h...

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

Identifying the problem statement is easy.

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.

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...

AWS X-Ray vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

Comparisons

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Compared 6% of the time

Amazon CloudWatch vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

Compared 6% of the time

Dynatrace vs Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver)

Compared 5% of the time

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Dynatrace vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 16% of the time

Azure Monitor vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 14% of the time

Splunk AppDynamics vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 8% of the time

Prometheus-AI Platform vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 6% of the time

Zabbix vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Compared 5% of the time

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Competitors

Product Reports

Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability

Download Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) product report

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) report

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor

Download SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor product report

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report

Also Known As

Google Stackdriver, Stackdriver Monitoring, Stackdriver Logging, Google Cloud Monitoring

SolarWinds SAM

Overview

Real-time log management and analysis

Cloud Logging is a fully managed service that performs at scale and can ingest application and platform log data, as well as custom log data from GKE environments, VMs, and other services inside and outside of Google Cloud. Get advanced performance, troubleshooting, security, and business insights with Log Analytics, integrating the power of BigQuery into Cloud Logging.

Built-in metrics observability at scale

Cloud Monitoring provides visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of cloud-powered applications. Collect metrics, events, and metadata from Google Cloud services, hosted uptime probes, application instrumentation, and a variety of common application components. Visualize this data on charts and dashboards and create alerts so you are notified when metrics are outside of expected ranges.

Stand-alone managed service for running and scaling Prometheus

Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed Prometheus-compatible monitoring solution, built on top of the same globally scalable data store as Cloud Monitoring. Keep your existing visualization, analysis, and alerting services, as this data can be queried with PromQL or Cloud Monitoring.

Monitor and improve your application's performance

Application Performance Management (APM) combines the monitoring and troubleshooting capabilities of Cloud Logging and Cloud Monitoring with Cloud Trace and Cloud Profiler to help you reduce latency and cost so you can run more efficient applications.

Google

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

Uber, Batterii, Q42, Dovetail Games

Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite

Google Cloud's operations suite (formerly Stackdriver) vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor