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Icinga vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 6, 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

Icinga
Ranking in Server Monitoring
14th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (26th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (30th), Cloud Monitoring Software (24th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Server Monitoring
8th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (22nd), Active Directory Management (9th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of Icinga is 5.3%, down from 9.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 3.3%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor3.3%
Icinga5.3%
Other91.4%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Harrison Bulley - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Net Consulting
A stable, scalable and cost-effective solution that helps with inbuilt scripts for easy modification
I think the software is quite good, but we have had problems with getting it to recognize certain areas and amend certain checks, where we needed so we would have to create backend scripts for those checks. Though, being open source, it has the support to create backend scripts, it would be better to have these scripts in-built.
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

"If you have a small infrastructure or a small number of devices that you want to monitor, then I think it's a good solution."
"We monitor all, starting from UPS to international mail chains."
"The drafts are easy but what I like about Icinga is that there are many add-ons that you can download."
"The ability to customize scripts and build your own queries to request information from the infrastructure elements you want to monitor. This level of personalization and customization is highly appreciated."
"I would recommend Icinga; it's an open-source solution, it's quite easy and simple to use, and checks can be run with Python code and Shell Script code."
"I like the ability to amend and adjust things really easily, which is useful in a case where you could make it auto-discover and then set a template to say all of these applications or servers under this template have an automatic threshold set that you’d set up manually."
"The apply rules feature saves a lot of time."
"It is really easy in Icinga to create your own plugin and integrate it without any fuss. And it works just perfectly fine."
"The solution has good alerts; notifications are sent via email to technicians, and you can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well, which is excellent."
"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."
"If you are looking for a single pane of glass to monitor Windows products then SolarWinds is your product."
"SolarWinds SAM is very stable, and we are using it with hundreds or thousands of customers and there are no stability issues."
"It is scalable."
"One of the most valuable features are the reports, they're pretty good, and the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value."
"AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters."
"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."
 

Cons

"In general, the product does not look good. However, it does what it is supposed to do. So, the improvements should focus on usability and UI."
"The connection between Icinga and Icinga Web."
"Sometimes, it is very hard to keep an overview of what's happening."
"We have found some problems with Nagios, and support isn't very responsive."
"The solution lacks many features important to higher-level IT management and network support."
"It needs Trap SNMP. I saw the documentation for Zabbix, that it has its own built-in product which handles SNMP traps, and there's nothing similar in Icinga or Nagios. I think this feature is most important for me."
"The tool currently fails to provide notifications to users."
"One of the areas that are frustrating is remote monitoring for more than one machine."
"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."
"One area that could benefit from improvement is its performance"
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve by having a cloud version. They have an observability platform but it still needs to be maintained by us."
"It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc."
"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."
"The product needs to reduce its price."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is cheap."
"The solution is free to use."
"This is an open-source solution with paid support."
"Even though Icinga's financial cost is low, it is an expensive product regarding the resources required to maintain and operate it."
"It's an open-source solution."
"It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low."
"We're using the free version of Icinga."
"The product is inexpensive compared to other DBM products."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The product is expensive."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
"I would rate the pricing for this solution a three out of five."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
15%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Educational Organization
12%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Icinga?
It is cost-effective, and the return on investment can be very interesting because the price is low. If you want to include this product in the services you offer to your customers, the return on i...
What needs improvement with Icinga?
There is room for improvement in multi-tenancy. It's not perfect, not even really good. It's average, but it should be improved. For instance, multi-tenancy for monitoring the virtual infrastructur...
What is your primary use case for Icinga?
We use Icinga as a monitoring solution to monitor customers' infrastructures. We work as a managed service provider, so we offer monitoring and many other services to our customers. So we use it in...
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

Icinga Cloud Monitoring
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Puppet Labs, Audi, Spacex, Debian, Snapdeal, McGill, RIPE Network Coordination Centre
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Icinga vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,976 professionals have used our research since 2012.