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Sentry 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

Sentry
Ranking in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
11th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Debugging (1st)
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 (10th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability category, the mindshare of Sentry is 5.8%, up from 5.6% 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
ProductMarket Share (%)
Sentry5.8%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor1.3%
Other92.9%
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability
 

Featured Reviews

Abdullah Baig - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-use solution that has a good dashboard, performs well, and provides flexible pricing
Sentry was easy to learn compared to New Relic and Azure Monitor. I saw some valuable input. It took us the least amount of time to see how Sentry is valuable. It took just a few minutes. Session Replay provides a replay of the recorded errors. It is a good feature. Azure Monitor does not have this feature. The error reporting is straightforward. We can see everything that we need to see. The dashboard seems pretty fine. The product performs well. We can see the user's IP addresses.
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

"The product performs well."
"The most valuable feature we have found with Sentry is the security that it provides."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"Sentry's performance monitoring has helped us understand where the bottlenecks are in our application and allowed us to optimize critical transactions for a faster user experience."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to create and assign rules and give access to particular users."
"It's a great visibility tool for the developer team."
"I would rate the stability of Sentry as eight out of ten."
"Sentry breaks everything down in real time."
"The graphical interfaces, GUI customizations, and alert configurations are impressive."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its interface, which is used for monitoring."
"The solution can be deployed quickly."
 

Cons

"We cannot restrict particular columns on particular data. It would be helpful if that feature was improved."
"It should be easier to integrate Sentry with other tools, and the end-to-end tracing capabilities could be improved."
"Lacks user metric tracking and the ability to create more dashboards."
"I would like to have alert policies and alert conditions enhanced in the next release."
"To deal with its shortcomings, Sentry needs to continuously improve in areas like the user interface and documentation, apart from its other features."
"I would like to see a role registration feature added."
"The settings for an administrator are complex."
"One area where I think Sentry can improve is in the granularity of its alerting system, as it sometimes feels too sensitive or not customizable enough."
"SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes."
"The major concern in the product revolves around application performance monitoring since end-to-end application monitoring is not possible with the tool."
"Reporting is the only thing with which we currently have challenges. They have this in two ways. There is the report writer, which is the backend, and we also have web reports, which are on the console. So, they have removed the report writer for the backend reports, and we are making use of the web console, but most of the users are not finding it very interesting to use the frontend reports. I would like them to bring back the report writer. That's the key area within it to improve on the reporting. If they can bring back the report writer, then most users will actually be comfortable. I have some customers who are trying to export their report to an Excel format, but it is not possible because they said any report that has been done from the web console cannot be exported to Excel, but most of the customers need to export their reports to Excel. That's one area they need to work on."
"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."
"When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed."
"The product does not explain why a problem occurred."
"An additional feature that would improve this solution is the ability to complete root cause analysis."
"PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Currently, we are in the production phase of our project and we are on free plans to use Sentry. Once we go live we will have to be on a subscription-based plan."
"We can adjust the price a little bit based on our needs."
"I am currently using a self-hosted open version."
"We are currently paying through Cloudera for the Sentry service."
"The tool is available for my company at a good price point."
"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."
"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."
"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 price is too high."
"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 think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Sentry?
Do you know anything about the pricing aspect, the licensing costs, setup cost of Sentry product?
What needs improvement with Sentry?
What would you like to see improved or enhanced in Sentry in the future? Are there any specific features that you would like to see included in the next releases of Sentry?
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

Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Uber
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about Sentry vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,760 professionals have used our research since 2012.