SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

The primary use case of this solution is for centralized monitoring of the server performance to ensure that the servers have proactive monitoring, CPU utilization, memory, and performance across the monitoring. 

SolarWinds was suggested to our clients running a mid-size infrastructure, with budget constraints and can't afford IBM, Broadcom, or Microsoft.

The customer's requirements are met with SolarWinds.

It helps with server monitoring and not only to monitor the physical servers, but it can also control the virtual environment. It has good monitoring in VM integration by VMware or Citrix.

SolarWinds is not just a monitoring tool, it can provide you with a capacity planning giving you complete a server inventory and helps you fulfill your commitment to the business. 

You will know your plan and what you will need in the next two years to achieve your capacity planning.

You are aware of what is happening in your servers, what their performance is, how the applications are behaving, and it helps you build your CMDB as well.

Our clients like the nice dashboard where they can see the active monitoring and includes performance, CPU usage, memory usage, and files. 

Solarwinds has an open database that allows you to do serious integrations. It doesn't matter which service desk you have, you can implement and integrate it with SolarWinds.

When you implement SolarWinds on a larger scale my customers complain about the speed. It's slow. This is an issue that has been going on for a long time that hasn't been properly addressed by SolarWinds. In a bigger architecture, the portal is still slow. They will have to look into it and see how they can improve it because this is the biggest complaint the customers have.

In the next release, I would like to see improvements made to the reliability and the issue with the speed, especially the slowness with their browser-based solution.

This solution is stable but when the product has a lot of data in the databases, the speed is an issue.

The solution is scalable, but not for large infrastructures. I can recommend SolarWinds for a mid to large scale organization. I am not convinced that customers who have two to four thousand devices and two thousand servers can implement SolarWinds on such a large scale.

The technical support is good, it's above average.

Previously we implemented the CA UIM solution, CA Spectrum, and Microsoft Monitoring.

SolarWinds is much easier than any of them.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's easy to implement, but when you implement it in a huge environment you will have some complexity. Also if you implement it in a single box, it can be complex.

If it is a mid-scale customer they can implement this solution on their own. They will need only two or three bars and a maximum of two servers are more than enough to implement.

If it's a small solution, you can implement it. It keeps the database separate. It's straightforward, it is not difficult.

Overall it is a very simple implementation.

The length of deployment depends on the infrastructure, the customer that I am referring to took a month and a half to implement most of the requirements. 

From a vendor's point of view when implementing this solution, SolarWinds will gives me paid access. 

From a customers point of view, they get a good return on investment because they are not paying a lot of money when you compare to what they used to pay for IBM and other large vendors.

It is clearly a good return on investment for any customer when they implement SolarWinds.

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.

When you compare SolarWinds to Broadcom, Broadcom has a simpler policy, you can install it and you don't have the complex licensing where you need a separate license for every little thing. 

Customers don't understand the complexity of the licensing when you need a separate license for the application and storage as an example. With SolarWinds, you have to pay for every feature.

Improvements come as we are moving forward. Requirements also change with time.

There were times when we used to be a complete physical infrastructure. Most of the customers have now moved to a virtual infrastructure.

The requirements are also changing. In the last ten years, what I have seen is that SolarWinds is improving its product as per the demand of the customer.

SolarWinds is easy to implement and it has most of the information the customer is looking for, and the dashboard has the wow factor.

I think that every IT team should have to courage to try to implement it by themselves because it is not difficult.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for network monitoring.

The most valuable features of the solution are its real-time node monitoring and Help Desk's feedback.

It's a very powerful application that covers all areas.

It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable. It's a license based scalability, but it is scalable. 

I'd rate technical support at eight out of ten. They are helpful and fast.

I didn't previously use another solution.

The initial setup is very straightforward. We have five to six administrators.

We had a consultant assist us with the implementation.

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would recommend the solution. It needs the proper sizing before implementation, and if you have done the proper sizing then you're all good.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We are a solution integrator, and this is one of the products that we implement for our clients. We also supply this as a service.

The primary use case for this solution is application monitoring, in an on-premises deployment model.

The more valuable feature of this solution is the Exchange feature.

The custom reporting needs to be improved.

Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included. The supported list of applications is very limited. For example, it supports the Windows version of JD Edwards, but not the Linux version of the same solution. Since it is the same application running on a different platform, it should work.

The price of scaling this solution needs to be improved.

I would like to have better support for Linux, and not be as dependent on Windows Servers. Even for non-Windows applications, it uses a Windows Server.

This solution is quite stable.

It is expensive to scale this solution, simply because of the cost of the polling engine. You can purchase unlimited IPs, but the price of an additional polling engine is $20,000 USD. That is quite a lot. We are looking into other solutions because it is just too expensive to keep scaling.

We have approximately eighty users and four hundred servers.

There is no in-country support for this solution. There are local numbers available but the call quality isn't great. I would rate technical support a five out of ten.

The initial setup of this solution is complex.

The deployment took four weeks.

We provide the consultants for integrating this solution.

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 high price of this solution has us looking into other solutions, rather than scale.

If you are looking for a single pane of glass to monitor Windows products then SolarWinds is your product. However, it is not best of breed. 

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We implement solutions and make comparative analysis for customers. I'm a consultant and we help clients choose ITSM solutions. 

We use a hybrid version of this solution. 

One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset. 

I had a problem with the price for a client. It was hard to understand the infrastructure and how many devices and how much storage they could get. In the end, we found a different license model for them. 

They should incorporate more artificial intelligence. There should also be more predictive features. 

It's very scalable. I installed it in a lot of companies. One had more than 1,000 users. There were no problems with it. We showed an internal team how to configure it for 100 devices and then they configured the rest of the 900.

Their technical support was okay. We only needed to contact them once. 

The initial setup took four hours. Including configuring a network for 300 Cisco switches and 32 cloud servers including database servers.  

The price is reasonable. The price of the package we bought was a differentiating factor in choosing this solution. 

I would rate this solution a 9.5 out of ten. My clients are satisfied. 

We primarily use the solution for network configuration and managing network performance.

There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager.

We don't need additional features. The network performance monitors and configuration monitors work well for our company. We also use different software for server monitoring. So far, the solution works well for us as-is.

Local technical support is okay. I would rate them seven out of ten. They're not bad, but they're not good either.

We didn't previously have another solution before implementing SolarWinds.

The setup was complex. We had local support to assist us.

I can't say what the exact pricing is, but I know it's not too expensive. 

We have about 1,000 users on the solution.

The primary use case varies since we deploy for clients. The use case will depend on their use case, each case is different depending on the customer's need. We look for solutions to suit their needs.

The solution is end-to-end from the network and the application to the processes. Everything about the enterprise infrastructure is being covered by the solution. It's easy to use and easy to navigate and one of the leaders among monitoring solutions.

We cater to all organizations in Nigeria. Most of the financial institutions in Nigeria are currently using this solution. Cellphone companies and telecommunication are also using it.

The beautiful thing about the solution is, the OEM listens to customer reviews. The updates come very frequently, and most of the feedback that customers give is integrated within the upgrade or the update. I think that whatever concerns were have already been treated by the OEM.

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.

The environment of the solution is always stable.

Scalability is good. It's modular, so you can just keep adding as you need it.

Technical support is awesome. An email is responded to within five minutes and we will get feedback. Their staff is always on standby to work with you to provide guidance on how to fix the problem.

You also have tutorials online and other articles that have been published that are related to issues you may be currently facing. The knowledge base of the solution is wonderful.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Deployment depends on the customer's infrastructure, on what they have and what they would like to add to the solution.

The solution is structured to be modular. You simply look for the module that looks good for your organization, you can just buy and integrate.

This solution caught my attention and I didn't bother looking at others.

SolarWinds has a network for applications, for virtual infrastructure and every other thing we can think of. Users can look for a module that would suit their company they can buy it and integrate.

If you are looking for end-to-end visibility in your infrastructure I think SolarWinds should be the place you to go. They've got you covered.

I would rate this solution at 9.5 out of 10.

Any customizable monitoring needed from process/service monitoring to performance counters, PowerShell and Per Scripts for reportable status or values, SQL based queries for status or values

The best example would be that we can provide transparency to the infrastructure which is meaningful to developers, but even to business users. Our IT teams can work with developers using a common reference when reviewing issues or planning improvements.

The overall valuable feature is the integration that exists. It really ties everything together to see the entire stack. Individually, the main focus of each component is the value.

• Being able to see your devices (NPM)
• Monitoring the components on your devices with out of the box monitors or the ability to create new ones (SAM)
• Seeing the components of virtual infrastructure (VMAN)
• Reviewing the storage behind it (SRM)
• Performance of web applications using synthetic playback (WPM)
• Being able to deep dive into DB activities to see blocks, deadlocks, and improve performance by tuning queries (DPA)

The nice thing about SolarWinds is that the company always looks to improve their products. Since they regularly update the software for stability and new features, it’s not easy to pinpoint items to improve unless they directly impact usability.

It’s difficult to find a feature or capability of SolarWinds that needs improvement as they are consistently looking to make the product better. Through the Thwack community, they get great feedback from customers for feature improvements as well as ideas to use the product better in ways beyond original intentions. The community is pretty innovative regards to using SolarWinds. My experience is that if a feature directly impacts my daily routine, then the product needs improvement. So far, any issues I’ve had in the past have been rectified by Support, added as feature to correct, or new enhancements that never allow me to face problems reports by others.

Stability was hardly an issue as long as we balanced what we were monitoring.

Scalability was an issue in the past. It wasn’t growing the environment, but rather it was maintaining it on upgrades. It used to take a long time since we have a large deployment.

Now that the lightweight scalability features exists, maintenance is not time consuming. Another issue was firewalls which is on our part due to “allow nothing, request everything” policy. No product out there will ever connect agnostically when it comes to firewalls.

Support knows what they are doing. Very rarely do I find the standard approach to issues to be “reboot and call back” type of action.

We had another solution for many years and it was functional but not insightful. We needed software that could level the playing field or better; to bring all the fields under one roof without having to build everything from scratch.

The initial setup was straightforward, but it’s very important to understand the amount of objects (CPU, memory, network interfaces, any monitored component) to monitor. You could easily overload the environment if you pull everything.

As mentioned about scaling, understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations.

We evaluated Nagios and Nimsoft at the time.

Nimsoft seemed similar to what we were previously using and didn’t want to repeat history.

With Nagios, we found it to be highly customizable, but requiring us to build out everything. We were at a stage where we didn’t know the possible heights of monitoring we could reach, but knew there was more than what we had.

SolarWinds fit the bill because it gave many possibilities in monitoring with a good amount of out of the box capabilities.

If you need a starting point, SolarWinds is a good start.

Be sure to know how many objects or element you plan to monitor to determine the licensing and the topology of your environment to help scale out your deployment. If you have those down, you’ll be able to up in running in no time

Additionally, a nice thing about SolarWinds is that the company always looks to improve their products. Since they regularly update the software for stability and new features, it’s not easy to pinpoint items for improvement. Through the Thwack community, they get great feedback from customers for feature improvements as well as ideas to use the product better in ways beyond original intentions. My experience is that if a feature directly impacts my daily routine, then the product needs improvement. So far, any issues I’ve had in the past have been rectified by Support, added as feature to correct, or new enhancements that never allow me to face problems reports by others.

Once we got our IT inventory organized and aligned with the business, we were able to leverage our Orion Platform to provide more than just a reactive-based monitoring service to the business. It is used for EA, capacity management, configuration management, asset management, and others.

• Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer.
• Windows service and event monitoring: It provides an in-depth server OS and application of health monitoring. It allows for automated workflow for the conditioned response to an alert.
• AppInsight for SQL: It provides centralized management and performance monitoring of 100+ SQL installations.

AppInsight needs to include more applications, the current list is very limited.

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.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues, scalability has been easy.

I would give the technical support team a 7/10 rating, i.e., slightly better than average.

Previously, we were using Big Brother. It is not as intuitive and support was lacking. Eventually, it reached EOL.

The setup was straightforward, customization requires time and resource investment.

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.

We didn't really evaluate other options. By this point, we were committed to the “one monitoring tool” policy. Our goal was to reduce the number of dashboards to as few as possible.

Don’t go with the “dive in and figure it out” approach. You’ll spend months, if not years, straightening SAM out. Take the planned approach; organize your servers and your IT services, identify what you want to monitor such as the Windows services, events, ports, SNMP traps, Syslog messages, etc and create your alerting rules. Understand your dependencies so that you can create your enterprise views and maps. Align the Orion Platform to be more than a monitoring tool. Use it for EA, capacity management, configuration management, asset management, and others.