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ServiceNow Discovery 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

ServiceNow Discovery
Ranking in Server Monitoring
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
IT Asset Management (4th), Cloud Resource Discovery Services (1st)
SolarWinds Server and Appli...
Ranking in Server Monitoring
11th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.0
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability (20th), Active Directory Management (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Server Monitoring category, the mindshare of ServiceNow Discovery is 3.6%, down from 6.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is 2.7%, down from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Server Monitoring Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ServiceNow Discovery3.6%
SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor2.7%
Other93.7%
Server Monitoring
 

Featured Reviews

Ayobanji Iluyomade - PeerSpot reviewer
Service helps organizations with network discovery and IT infrastructure management but troubleshooting challenges remain
ServiceNow Discovery was adopted by my organization. We use ServiceNow Discovery for discovery and ITSM The most beneficial features of ServiceNow Discovery for maintaining my IT infrastructure are the CMDB top and discovery of network switches. The areas of ServiceNow Discovery that have room…
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 best thing about Discovery is maintaining all the CIs in one place. I can sort the data, export it to Excel for manipulation, and build reports like how many computers or servers we have and their capacity."
"I am impressed with the tool's incident problem change management."
"We can find servers or services we were unaware of and stumble on vulnerabilities from those devices."
"In the past, I found troubleshooting difficult in ServiceNow Discovery because I didn't have much exposure to the platform during that time, but then I explored some troubleshooting features, and I found that it wasn't that tough, so this is one of the qualities I like about ServiceNow Discovery. I also like that log reading in ServiceNow Discovery is much better than other tools. Another valuable feature of the tool is that you don't need to install many tools to deploy ITSM. You only need to subscribe to the modules to deploy the proper ITSM in your organization."
"Most fields on our forms are auto-filled, reducing manual maintenance for our infrastructure team. Post Discovery implementation there is hardly any maintenance."
"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow Discovery is its performance."
"I believe one of the great functionalities or improvements in ServiceNow Discovery is its ability to gather information about any Configuration Items (CIs)."
"The solution finds public cloud infrastructures globally and updates the integration management database, service catalogs, and asset management details."
"We use the solution as a central monitoring tool. We use it to monitor every transaction that has a relation to the organization’s infrastructure."
"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."
"Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us."
"There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager."
"SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting"
"The most valuable feature is application monitoring."
"The solution has good alerts. Notifications are sent via email to technicians. You can filter the kinds of alerts you want to receive as well. It's excellent."
"I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool."
 

Cons

"The solution should improve the classes of discovery assets to disregard more junk data."
"It creates quite a bit of duplication, so that needs to be fixed."
"ServiceNow is very costly."
"The solution is too high priced."
"The continuous improvement in the quality and customization of the product features would be beneficial, particularly as more customers rely heavily on its capabilities."
"When you switch versions, for example, when you go from Paris to Quebec they will introduce many new things and occasionally things break when they do that."
"ServiceNow Discovery should improve its cloud capabilities."
"They can expand on the plugins for some of the other tools."
"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."
"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."
"Currently SolarWinds SAM offers AppInsight for modern versions of: IIS, Exchange, SQL Server. They have shown to be powerful and insightful tools. However, AppInsight needs to be offered for more applications: Citrix, SharePoint, AX, etc."
"Downside of the tools is the web console are hung or crash. It need to improve the performance."
"Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL."
"SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved."
"It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This solution is a paid option within the ServiceNow framework."
"If the product is not deployed properly, it can be very expensive."
"There is a need to make payments every quarter of a year towards the licensing costs of the solution. ServiceNow Discovery is an expensive tool."
"ServiceNow Discovery's licensing is not a very small investment, but it definitely pays off."
"The solution is very expensive."
"You need a subscription to ServiceNow Discovery, so you can use its features. You can also use specific plugins with the tool, and some of the plugins are free. I don't have information on how much my company pays for the subscription to ServiceNow Discovery."
"This is expensive, but it meets our needs."
"The pricing is determined based on the CIs."
"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."
"The price is too high."
"Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
"Its licensing is on a yearly basis. It is just the standard price, but it can vary depending on the current rate of the dollar."
"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."
"We pay around $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 yearly for the solution."
"The solution is overpriced in terms of application management."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Healthcare Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business15
Midsize Enterprise5
Large Enterprise23
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise20
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ServiceNow Discovery?
The solution can prioritize the discovery of IP ranges. The product automatically places all Discovery CIs into the correct class within the CMDB.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ServiceNow Discovery?
I think the price of ServiceNow Discovery is cheaper than BMC.
What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?
The areas of ServiceNow Discovery that have room for improvement are getting custom reports on the relationship between CIs that are not on the same table.
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

York, National Grid, DXC Technology, experian, BEACHBODY
Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
Find out what your peers are saying about ServiceNow Discovery vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
867,370 professionals have used our research since 2012.