SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

We mainly use SolarWinds for reporting on server utilization. It gives alerts based on a defined threshold. For example, if utilization exceeds 80 or 90 percent, it gives us a critical warning. 

The component and cable monitoring are good. SolarWinds is more intuitive and user-friendly than AppDynamics. The AppDynamics console is more complex because it's a more feature-rich solution, so it's not easy for somebody to pick it up. 

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. 

We've been using SolarWinds for about five years.

SolarWinds is stable in the latest versions. 

SolarWinds is scalable if we procure more licenses. The scalable engine concept allows us to add polling engines for the new clients, so it's scalable in that sense. We have 400 users. 

We haven't used any other server monitoring solution extensively. Two years ago, we used Datadog briefly. I was asked to determine whether Datadog would be better for us because it was less expensive than other tools. We did a test run FOR six months period of knowledge. We mainly tested it, and I handed it over to another team after giving the tool the go-ahead.

The initial deployment isn't a challenge. It takes two or three hours if you have multiple polling engines. However, upgrades can be problematic. Let's say we have 12 to 14 additional polling engines. It takes about a month because we have to do it one at a time on the weekend during non-business hours. This is a considerable limitation because a centralized upgrade doesn't work correctly in an offline environment.

For security reasons, we don't have permission to upgrade all the engines at once online. The SolarWinds team is also clueless about helping us. Their documentation is inadequate. Upgrading SolarWinds is a time-consuming process, posing a significant problem for us. We have an eight-person team deploying and maintaining SolarWinds.

SolarWinds' tech support is fantastic overall, but the level 1 support often misses the problem. They start by collecting the diagnostics. They are cooperative, but level one is usually lacking in knowledge. 

We pay for licenses. It's less expensive than AppDynamics, which requires you to pay for each node.

I rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor six out of 10.

We are using it for the monitoring of servers and applications. Currently, we are using version 2020.2.5.

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.

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 has been close to six years now.

It is really stable. We're making use of a polling engine. When the customer site is experiencing some slowness of the console or the server, they'll know that they have overutilized the resources. So, we'll try to give them recommendations on what to do to make it better.

Its scalability is pretty good. There are a lot of users using SolarWinds. They are mostly financial institutions. We are trying to bring in more people to make use of the product. So, we try to do a comparison to what they have presently and how we can optimize for them.

It was pretty much straightforward. Anybody who doesn't understand the basics of SQL can make use of the backend, but you need to have a little bit of experience with SQL before you can use the frontend for the reports.

The deployment takes up to an hour. Normally, the installation part will take around 45 minutes to complete. When it comes to the configuration part, it takes time depending on the devices you want to onboard to SolarWinds.

I am a consultant, so I did the deployment. Its deployment and maintenance can be done by one person.

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.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 so that they improve on the report.

I mainly use SolarWinds SAM for server and application monitoring, web URL monitoring, and performance and fault monitoring.

SolarWinds SAM has provided us with dynamic thresholds based on historical trends and requirements. The threshold gets configured automatically, so it's no longer necessary to configure it manually every time. Based on the historical data, and with the help of ML algorithms, the device is smart enough to find out when to add a CPU to the device and when to reallocate those resources again. For example, if the utilization always goes up on a particular day in the week, the system knows from historical data that this is happening, and it automatically increases the threshold or schedules the threshold accordingly.

SAM is missing code-level monitoring of applications and could be improved by adding detailed metrics in that area. SAM's software-defined network monitoring capability is also low and could be improved. In the future, I would like SolarWinds to add IoT functionalities.

I've been using this solution for five years.

SolarWinds SAM is stable and performs well.

SolarWinds SAM is easy to scale.

SolarWinds' technical support is good, but they could improve their turnaround time and the ease of their escalation points.

Positive

I previously used Zabbix, which is a freeware tool and therefore has limited functionalities compared to SolarWinds. It also does not have any vendor support or a proper channel to communicate to the vendor if something goes wrong.

The initial setup was complex as it was all a manual process. It had to be built from scratch, then all the devices needed to be onboarded and monitored before the matrices had to be configured on those devices. The amount of time taken would depend on the size of the infrastructure, including the number of devices that need to be monitored and what matrices are involved. A minimum of two months would be required to get everything installed and running well.

I used a vendor team.

SolarWinds have marketized their pricing, so it depends on the number of devices you have. For example, there's a specific price for zero to 100 devices, then another price for 100 to 300. There are also differences in pricing depending on which modules you want to include. I think SolarWinds' pricing is very decent compared to other competitors in the market.

SolarWinds SAM is suitable for small to medium enterprises but not for large ones. I'd advise those implementing it to ensure things are configured properly and keep only what you require on the dashboards. I would rate SolarWinds SAM as seven out of ten.

I use SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for network device monitoring and server monitoring.

The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best. 

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.

In a future release of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, they should add some additional features.

I have been using SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor for six years.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is a stable solution.

The scalability of the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is good. However, if we consider the resources that are required to monitor the servers at times it can be too much.

SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor could improve their customer service. The escalation procedure when raising a support case takes a very long time to respond. The engineer who is assigned to me for troubleshooting any issue does not give the required knowledge at the initial level. They will investigate for one to five days minimum. If they don't know the answer, they will escalate to the second-level support. This takes a lot of time. If an engineer or technical expert was in the first level of support he can troubleshoot the issue quickly.

I rate the support from SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor a two out of five.

Neutral

I have previously used Microsoft SCOM.

The initial setup of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is straightforward. We only need to make a design based on the infrastructure and applications we have. Then once we design the setup, we can deploy it.

We did the implementation ourselves. We need a lot of staff members for the maintenance of the SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor.

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.

I rate the cost of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor a one out of five.

I rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor an eight out of ten.

The solution is used more or less for the servers for the network including monitoring the logs and all of those tasks.

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.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

In terms of the dashboards on offer, they should work to improve them. The types of dashboards that you get in terms of the graphs on offer aren't ideal right now.

The pricing of the solution should be adjusted.

We've been using the solution for two years now.

The solution has been working quite well. We haven't seen any problems so far. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The product has good stability.

We haven't seen any restrictions on scaling. If a company needs to scale with this solution, they can do so.

We have yet to contact technical support. Most of the time the troubleshooting is done online, and therefore we haven't had the necessity to go through them yet. This is due to the fact that the department is not at that big of a scale yet, and therefore we've just set it up and started using it. We haven't found the need to contact technical support yet.

The solution isn't complex to set up. It's pretty straightforward.

The deployment takes about a week. It doesn't take too long.

We have one person, more or less, that's handling the solution and can handle maintenance as required. 

The cost should be a bit less. It's high right now, or higher than it should be.

We're just a customer. We don't have a business relationship with the company.

We're using the latest version of the solution.

For small, small businesses, this solution will be good. However, if you want to go more complex, I would advise you to potentially explore other options.

So far, I would rate the solution at an eight on a scale from one to ten. We are still exploring its capabilities. It's still pretty new to us. 

It's good at monitoring system-specific things like ports, services. 

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. 

I have been using this solution for a few years. We installed it on a customer site when we first got the contract. We haven't done any upgrades.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. We have set up a lot of things, like 300 VMs and 10 to 15 different monitors. So, we are talking about a small number of monitors and a lot of VMs. It's kind of a big one.

I am not sure. I'm not the person who tries to troubleshoot it. I don't think we needed much support. Only once there was a corruption in some kind of database, and a colleague of mine asked about how to solve it. Otherwise, we didn't need any technical support from them.

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. 

A customer is trying to move some of the VMs to Azure. It is the latest trend, and people are moving from on-premises VMs to cloud-based VMs.

Azure Monitor seems to be more powerful on the log analytics and the application level side, but it is less powerful on the systems side, for example, listening port or service.

It's a decent solution for on-premises servers.

I would rate SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor an eight out of ten. It needs application-level monitoring and performance output. 

The initial setup was relatively easy.

We didn't go into very much depth, as in application monitoring and services monitoring, but I believe it can do both.

The stability, flexibility, and ease of use could be improved. The performance, integration, and pricing could be better as well.

We used it for about four years. It's a cloud solution.

The stability needs to be improved.

The initial setup is relatively easy. Because it's a cloud solution, we didn't have to install anything. All we had to do was put on the devices we wanted to monitor.

We had a yearly license, and the pricing could be improved.

We looked into Zabbix and decided to switch to it.

I would not recommend SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and would rate it at six on a scale from one to ten.