Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

LogicMonitor 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:
 

Categories and Ranking

LogicMonitor
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Network Monitoring Software (9th), IT Infrastructure Monitoring (11th), Container Monitoring (5th), Cloud Monitoring Software (13th), AIOps (6th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (19th), Server Monitoring (10th), Active Directory Management (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Systems Management solutions, they serve different purposes. LogicMonitor is designed for IT Infrastructure Monitoring and holds a mindshare of 2.2%, down 2.4% compared to last year.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, on the other hand, focuses on Server Monitoring, holds 2.6% mindshare, down 3.4% since last year.
IT Infrastructure Monitoring
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Henry-Steinhauer - PeerSpot reviewer
They have an active community of users who are willing to share their experiences and how they have extended the solution to do unusual things.
I'm a learn-by-example person, so it would be nice to have a cookbook for enterprise management. They have a rich API process, but there aren't many examples of how to do enterprise-style work. It is peculiar about how to do it for one device, but not necessarily thousands. LogicMonitor can effortlessly pull data from one item at a time. I have yet to find an excellent way to get LogicMonitor to show me all the WAN devices and how they're doing in terms of capacity.
Subhajit Nag - PeerSpot reviewer
The component and cable monitoring features are good, but the interface is slow
SolarWinds' interface is slow, and this is a global concern. Every SolarWinds user complains about the sluggishness. The response is slow. If you browse from one page to another, you have to wait. Our company is a massive user with plenty of licenses, so the performance issues could be due to the load per license. Ten thousand components can be mapped under one license. So SolarWinds needs to take care of the speed problem. It cannot be this slow. That is a huge complaint. Otherwise, the tool is good. 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. The upgrade time matters because you only install the solution once, but you'll need to upgrade the solution repeatedly over the life of the product. A complex installation isn't an issue, but I mind if the upgrade takes too long because it's already in production.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The alerting would be number one in my book. The thresholds for getting alerts for different criteria are pretty well-thought-out. We don't get many false positives or negatives on the alerting side. If we do get an email alert or some similar alert, we know that it is something that has to be looked at."
"I really appreciate the reporting function because it allows me to create dashboards that will be emailed to me during the morning so that I have a complete overview of my client's health, within a specific time frame."
"The breadth of its ability to monitor all our environments, putting it in one place, has been helpful. This way, we don't have to manage multiple tools and try to juggle multiple balls to keep our environment monitored. It presents a clear picture to us of what is going on."
"One thing that's very valuable for us is the technical knowledge of the people who work with LogicMonitor. We looked at several products before we decided to use LogicMonitor, and one of the key decision-making points was the knowledge of the things that they put in the product. It provides real intelligence regarding the numbers that you see on the product, which makes it easy for us technical people to troubleshoot. Other products don't provide you with such information. You see a value going up, but you don't know what it means. LogicMonitor provides such information. For instance, if a value goes up, it says that it is probably because your disk area was too low."
"The most valuable feature is the visualization of the data that it is collecting. I have used many products in the past and they tend to roll up the data. So, if you're looking at data over long periods of time, they start averaging the data, which can skew the figures that you're looking at. With LogicMonitor, they have the raw data there for two years, if you are an enterprise customer. If you are looking at that long duration of data, you're seeing exactly what happened during that time."
"LogicMonitor improved on-premises infrastructure monitoring in several ways. One key feature was dynamic resource allocation, although we didn't utilize it much in our system. The main functionalities we benefited from were email alerts, network mapping, and dashboards."
"The solution’s overall reporting capabilities are pretty powerful compared to ones that I have used previously. It seems like it has a lot of customizations that you can put in, but some of the out-of-the-box reports are useful too, like user logon duration and website latency. Those type of things have been helpful and don't require a lot of, if any, changes to get useful content out of them. They have also been pretty easy to implement and use."
"LogicMonitor is good for getting a full view of your topologies. They have LiveMaps, which give you a visual representation of your infrastructure."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"This product can monitor application environments no matter where they reside and provides capabilities for deep insight into infrastructure."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues."
"Manage Groups: The capability to group appropriate devices gives better visibility of sites, categories, or critical regions. The same can be used to represent a dashboard for higher management."
"Monitoring of processes and services is the most valuable feature. It is not necessarily just the server alone in terms of the CPU or the memory. We can go in-depth into services and processes."
"Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer."
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
 

Cons

"Some more application performance type monitoring would be nice. For example, an APM type solution, which would not necessarily completely replace it, but be able to tie into to what we're seeing on the application performance side so we can correlate what's going on with the application versus the underlying infrastructure."
"Their Logs feature is quite new. It is not as feature-rich as we would like it to be. There have been a couple of conversations internally around other log management tools, like Splunk, which may do more for us than LM Logs. The benefit of LogicMonitor is that our staff know how to use it, so we don't really want to move away from it, if we don't have to. I fully expect there to be more development in this area. It is their newest feature, so it is understandable that it hasn't evolved as some of the other stuff. It would be good to see a bit more development in this area, but I think the monitoring side of things is spot on."
"There are some very specific things that need improvement in LogicMonitor. One is the lack of formatting for customized alerts, particularly the delivery of them to our email channel. We'd also like to see further customization of dashboards. Finally, something that is specific to us as an MSP that uses LogicMonitor, is white-labeling or skinning of the product, so we can make it look more customer-focused for our customers."
"The ease of use with data source tuning could be improved. That can get hairy quickly. When I reach out for help, it's usually around a data source or event source configuration. That can get challenging."
"The topology mapping is all based on the dynamic discovery of devices that could talk to each other. There is no real manual way that you can set up a join between two devices to say, "This is how this network is actually set up." For example, if you have a device, and you're only pinning that device and not getting any real intelligent information from it, then it can't appear on the map with other devices. Or if it can appear, then it won't show you which devices are actually joined to it."
"I'd like to see more automation in the tool, especially around remediation."
"We would like to see more functionality around mapping of topologies, in terms of networks. An improvement that we would like to see is added functionality to get more detail out of mapping. For example, if the LogicMonitor Collector identifies a connection between two network endpoints, it would be great to actually see which ports are connecting the two endpoints together. That functionality is something we greatly desire. It would actually make our documentation more dynamic in the sense that we wouldn't need to manually document. If this is something that the platform could provide, then this would be a great asset."
"The dashboards can be improved. They are good, but there is a pain point. To show things to management, to explain pain points to other customers, to show them exactly where we can do better, the dashboarding could be better. Dashboards need to show the key things. Nobody is going to go into the ample details of Excel sheets or HTML."
"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."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"Mapping interactions between systems."
"I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial."
"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."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"The technical support team's response time could be improved."
"One product area that could benefit from improvement is the synchronization of licensing periods across different modules"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's an enterprise-grade solution and competitively priced compared to the other solutions that are out there... Our organization is not huge, but LogicMonitor is worth every penny that we pay for it. I've never heard anyone say, "I'm not sure that we're getting good value for money from this product." It's integral to our business."
"LogicMonitor is competitively priced at the same level as other vendors, like Datadog."
"The pricing can be a little aggressive. Right now, it's a bit much for smaller organizations to adopt it. But comparatively, it also provides good features."
"The features were very valuable to us because we could consolidate them into one platform and have a good user experience with the platform, our accounts, and the support team. That was the key driver for us. That was what we were looking for. We looked for a comprehensive solution that could provide advanced features all in one platform, and LogicMonitor was the solution that we chose. It definitely has a premium price. However, you are getting what you pay for in a very effective way. That was important in our decision-making.The features were very valuable to us because we could consolidate them into one platform and have a good user experience with the platform, our accounts, and the support team. That was the key driver for us. That was what we were looking for. We looked for a comprehensive solution that could provide advanced features all in one platform, and LogicMonitor was the solution that we chose. It definitely has a premium price. However, you are getting what you pay for in a very effective way. That was important in our decision-making."
"The license is annual, and I'm not fully aware of what it costs. We have a through-cycle that we go through, and they've been generous with us going above our limit. They're not strict on it. At the end of the year, they got us to renew. We always add some cushion for what we expect. Also, if you need custom monitoring or design work, you can pay them for consulting services."
"It can handle scaling. It is like any other cloud service. There is a cost associated with scaling, so we currently don't monitor all of our environments. We monitor just the customer-facing production environments. It would be nice if we could monitor our dominant environments, but we will have to pay a lot more due to the scaling issue. So, there's a balance there between what we would like and what we are willing to pay for."
"I know we are saving at least several hundred thousand dollars in that we're not buying Cisco Prime."
"It definitely pays for itself in the amount of time we're not spending with false errors or things that we haven't quite dealt with monitoring. It has been good cost-wise."
"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 would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
"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."
"The solution's price is reasonable. Though it's on the higher side, the tool is worth the money."
"I like the pricing for this SolarWinds product."
"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."
"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."
"I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which IT Infrastructure Monitoring solutions are best for your needs.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
37%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the best network monitoring software for large enterprises?
It actually depends on the exact purpose or requirements. Some tools are better for only network devices while others are better from a cloud monitoring or APM monitoring perspective. You can check...
What do you like most about LogicMonitor?
LogicMonitor helps us prevent potential downtime. It's pretty good. It generates low-level warnings that aren't necessarily preemptive but can still alert us to issues we should investigate. These ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LogicMonitor?
The pricing can vary yearly or monthly, depending on the clients we're working with and their size and scale. For example, the pricing for a customer with ten thousand licenses versus a hundred lic...
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

Kayak, Zendesk, Ted Baker, Trulia, Sophos, iVision, TekLinks, Siemens
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Zabbix, Datadog, Auvik and others in IT Infrastructure Monitoring. Updated: April 2025.
850,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.