SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

We primarily use the solution for Microsoft Exchange. We use it as a monitoring tool to query and monitor databases. Using the solution we are able to see what service is running or what services are not. It allows us to get a complete picture of the SIEM.

We find that the most valuable aspect of the solution is its configuration capabilities. It's quite simple. Users can configure Linux or Windows very easily.

The solution is great for monitoring. If something is going wrong, we can immediately find the root cause.

The templates could use improvement. Currently, they are quite complex. They should have drag-and-drop functionality instead. It would make it easier to use.

The technical support is slow to respond. They need to act on tickets faster.

We have been using the solution for approximately three or four months. It hasn't been that long.

We've found the solution to be very stable. We haven't had issues with bugs, glitches or crashes. It's been very good.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

We don't have users per se on the solution, as it's only meant to monitor. We have seven people on our team, and any one of us can use the solution to check and monitor everything as needed.

We use it on a daily basis.

We've been in touch with technical support in the past to help us deal with the customization of reports, which is quite difficult on the platform.

Their support is, at times, difficult because of the time zone. For example, if we raise a ticket now, we won't get a response for seven hours. The delay isn't great for us.

We previously used ManageEngine. It was not giving us what we needed, which is why we switched. With SolarWinds, we can even get great performance and good monitoring from MongoDB through SQL. 

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. We found it rather easy.

In terms of setup, traditionally, to configure any single node, it takes about five to ten minutes.

In order to maintain the solution, a company would need at least two people: one to monitor performance and another to monitor the application itself.

I was able to handle the entire implementation myself after going through and reading the documentation. I didn't need the outside assistance of an integrator or consultant.

I don't have any information on pricing, as that is handled by our procurement team.

We are using the latest version of the solution. I believe it is version 12.5.

If a company would really like insight into its database utilization or performance and why their servers are slow or why the database is not giving a proper response, this solution will help. It's perfect for revealing bottlenecks. You will have more visibility once you will install it in your environment. The solution will no doubt help other companies resolve issues very quickly.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We primarily use this solution with customers who would like to have insight into their application environments. These environments could be on-premise, hybrid, in clouds, it does not matter where it resides. They want to have deep insight into the performance and availability of applications, databases, networks, VMware, Hyper-V, etcetera. It doesn't matter what they want to look at because all infrastructure components can be monitored using SAM. This product can monitor about 150 infrastructure components by default.  

The most valuable feature of the product is the monitoring capability. Basic infrastructure monitoring is a good start for using the product. For example, I like Microsoft monitoring and various components like SharePoint and Active Directory, which can be very important. But also it is very useful for monitoring Microsoft SQL Server environments. That only covers the surface approach to monitoring applications and servers. You can also monitor the underlying infrastructure. For example, you can monitor hardware components such as the health of your servers so that you know if they are functioning optimally or if they have some type of performance issue or failure. You can go a step further to get deeper insight into specific components. But it is a very good thing to start with APM (Application Performance Management) and to get into monitoring the underlying infrastructure of your system so you are aware of its condition.  

These tools are made for evaluation and monitoring. They were developed some years ago and they are still evolving, and what I would like to see is that they are made cloud-ready as soon as possible. It would be good at this point to have it so you can run them and use them in the cloud. That is actually already possible, but I want to make sure that they continue to mature that type of development and enhance the product's capabilities.  

What can and will be added in upcoming releases is that the product will support a few more well-known database flavors like Oracle SQL server. I would like to see an extension of that capability to other database flavors including freeware environments like MySQL, Progress, and MariaDB. I know for a fact that they will be adding these capabilities in the future for sure, and that is a great step forward.  

 We have been using SolarWinds SAM (Server & Application Monitor) for six years.  

SolarWinds SAM is very stable. We are using it with hundreds or thousands of customers and there are no stability issues.  

The product is very scalable. No problem with that at all.  

The technical support is very good. We can access it 24/7 when we need to.  

The initial setup is very straightforward.  

Pricing is quite cheap. It starts at 2,440 euros. For that, you have the ability to monitor a couple of nodes. You also get one year of maintenance and support included in the price.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate SolarWinds SAM as a ten in regards to the total cost of ownership and quality. But being more modest because there is room for improvement I will rate it a nine.  

I would highly recommend this solution to users.  

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.