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Prometheus-AI Platform vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

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

Prometheus-AI Platform
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
34
Ranking in other categories
Data Scrubbing Software (6th), ERP (24th), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) (7th)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
4.5
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (17th), Server Monitoring (7th), Active Directory Management (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

Prometheus-AI Platform and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Prometheus-AI Platform is designed for Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and holds a mindshare of 1.9%.
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, on the other hand, focuses on Server Monitoring, holds 2.9% mindshare, up 2.5% since last year.
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Prometheus-AI Platform1.9%
IBM Maximo11.9%
Oracle Enterprise Asset Management6.7%
Other79.5%
Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)
Server Monitoring Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor2.9%
Zabbix10.3%
Nagios XI6.1%
Other80.7%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

MuhammadAzhar Khan - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior DevOps Engineer at Alibaba Group
Free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities
Prometheus is a scalable and flexible tool that I can deploy on any cloud platform. It is free to use and provides valuable monitoring capabilities. It allows me to save money by avoiding costs associated with AWS native services like CloudWatch or Amazon Prometheus. The ability to deploy on any cloud platform or environment, including Kubernetes, is a major advantage.
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

"The dashboard is very valuable."
"The most valuable features of Prometheus are the many functions available. The functions are helpful for understanding the behavior of applications and infrastructure."
"Prometheus is a great solution for monitoring."
"The feature I found most valuable is the number of integrations. It is the industry standard for metrics."
"The best thing about Prometheus is its integration."
"The product is easy to maintain."
"The good thing is it integrates well with the Grafana dashboard. It comes with a UI where you see everything as a graph."
"It is highly valuable as it serves as the foundation for our infrastructure monitoring tools."
"The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause."
"It is scalable."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
"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, as we can go in-depth into services and processes."
"Management Console - Managing service to each server enrolled in the Solarwinds is much easier. Using a web base console, you can control your service much convenient way. There is no need to login remotely. It save a lot of time and effort."
"The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly."
"The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature."
 

Cons

"One potential area for improvement would be fixing the occasional glitches and bugs."
"The UI and GUI are areas of concern in the product."
"The scalability must be improved."
"The solution's error handling part could be improved."
"Prometheus' UI color can improve. Using the Prometheus UI for configuration or analyzing queries is a horrible experience."
"Its stability could be even better."
"Setting up the rules in Prometheus can be confusing, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The query language in Prometheus is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"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."
"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."
"Application-based monitoring, such as monitoring within servers like Apache and IIS, has room for improvement."
"A lot of times, we have to do a lot of manual cleanups."
"Having two places to build and manage alerts is not efficient and not all alerting tools are available in the trap manager."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
"For each poller, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor can only monitor up to ten thousand components, which restricts scalability."
"From an integration point of view, if you want to have a manager of manager kind of layer, that is currently lacking in SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Prometheus is an open-source tool."
"The tool is open-sourced."
"The solution is free of cost."
"The price of Prometheus is good, it is affordable because it is open source and there is no cost to it. You put it on your own server and the costs incurred completely depend on how you set it up."
"We use the solution's open-source version."
"This is an open-source solution."
"It is an open-source tool."
"The product is expensive compared to Datadog."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"Price can always be lower. It is neither on the expensive side nor on the cheap side. We have worked with them for a lot of years, so we get a discount due to the size of the installation."
"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."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
7%
Educational Organization
13%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise13
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise21
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Prometheus?
Prometheus is cost-effective for me as it is free. Using cloud-native alternatives like Amazon Prometheus would incur charges.
What is your primary use case for Prometheus?
I use Prometheus for monitoring purposes in IT infrastructure. It is particularly useful for environments using Kubernetes, as it monitors ports, containers, instances, and applications effectively.
What advice do you have for others considering Prometheus?
As a new user, I should be familiar with syntax and commands. Online resources like Google and ChatGPT can be helpful. I should consider using cloud-native tools for ease of management if not using...
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 ...
What is your primary use case for SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor?
I am doing research as we currently have both solutions, and I am looking to see if we need both or can manage with one. Currently, the outcome indicates that we need both. The focus point is diffe...
 

Also Known As

Utopia Data Quality
SolarWinds SAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Harley-Davidson Motor Company, Roche Diagnostics Corporation, Harman International Industries Inc., Hilmar Cheese Company, International Rectifier Corporation, Electrolux USA, GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms, Rio Tinto Limited, Pertamina Pusat, Petrofac International Ltd, Cintas Corporation, Diyar United Company, Nortel Networks, Verizon
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Infor, IFS and others in Enterprise Asset Management (EAM). Updated: June 2026.
902,456 professionals have used our research since 2012.