SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Reviews

It has allowed us to present various customer-specific views to many of the IT support teams.

It is simple to implement and can provide fairly decent Windows-based monitoring, beyond simple SNMP. It is great for monitoring newbies and smaller shops.

It needs time-based functions for monitoring. Some things need to be polled on a specific schedule or only during a specific window. Much of this has to be rebuilt for every individual monitor outside of the product, since you can’t build a schedule and assign monitors or notification periods to that schedule.

SMNP trap receiver/alerting needs to be built into the alerting engine. Having two places to build and manage alerts is not efficient and not all alerting tools are available in the trap manager. It also needs a data warehouse capability for long-term reporting and looking back in time, especially with some of the new functionality in the latest release.

We did have problems with large numbers of PowerShell and WMI monitors.

There has been at least one unstable upgrade in the past, but then, that happens to pretty much any product out there.

We had scalability problems with the large number of PowerShell and WMI monitors.

Level 1 is level 1. For many, that is sufficient. Having a number of experienced engineers on my team, when we need support we need level 2 or above and sometimes, it takes a bit to get things bumped up. Many of the level 1 guys don’t read all the info you provide and you end up wasting time pointing out that you already provided this information.

The previous solution was too expensive and limited; they dropped support.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward, although there are a few gotchas that are not well documented.

Ror small shops and for those new to monitoring it is simple to set up and implement. The OOTB (Out of the Box) implementation does have very good node specific pages and can provide a wealth of information.This is the key.The OOTB it provides is more than other tools in a usable format.

But simple WMI monitors using both canned and user built provide more comprehensive monitoring and alerting capabilities…This is based on experiences implementing other solutions in very dynamic large environments. It has had improvements in the unix/linux world but still remains primarily windows centric.

Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal.

It had been decided upon before I was employed here; I just got to implement it.

Go onto THWACK (the SolarWinds user community). You will find training, help, and advice from many who have been there before. It is one of the premier user communities that many out there need to emulate!

• Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. I was awarded Q3 employee of the quarter. I am the first NOC member to receive this award at Kforc).
• By replacing SCOM and several other monitoring tools and merging them into the Orion Suite, I reduced outages by 66% YOY.
• The NOC saw a dramatic reduction in our MTR (Mean Time to Resolution) thanks to the powerful dashboard and alerting options offered in the various SolarWinds tools.

• Ease of installation and administration
• Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time.
• Powerful data collection from a wide range of different network devices.
• Devices not supported can be added each month via the MIB library update request.
• Robust reporting options and easy to use alerting features. NPM still has very complete alert logic available if one chooses. It takes fifteen minutes to build complex alerts that would take hours in other tools.
• Very active user community (THWACK) and outstanding peer information sharing.
• NetPath is spot on for what many NOC are lacking. CDR search is used daily. There is a huge value add for maintaining a healthy phone system for a company that is very much phone dependent.

• MS Azure Service and user experience monitoring. This is an area in which the SolarWinds tools are lacking.
• Most focus seems to be on AWS cloud services. But some press has been released stating more Azure Cloud Service monitoring options in the near future.
• Without a doubt, this is the Achilles heel of the Orion monitoring tools, as well as many others available today.
• I am currently reviewing other vendors for Azure service monitoring tools.
• Our current need is focused on Office365, Exchange Web Services, MS Dynamics 365, and other Azure services.
• Nodes in Azure are able to be monitored with the use of agents, but this does not apply to cloud service offerings that are not node based.
• More granular control of what components are enabled for the various AppInsight monitoring options (IIS, SQL, and Exchange currently).
• AppInsight is all or nothing with SolarWinds, and this isn’t the best option.

We encountered issues with stability in a few rare cases, due to being on older versions of the software. But this was self-inflicted in all cases.

For the most part, the Orion suite is very stable, dependable, and easy to manage.

Installs and upgrades are a bit time consuming, but this is expected with such a large platform.

Yes, there were issues with scalability. The polling engine can be a bit confusing as there are several conflicting statements regarding number of components, flows per second, Nodes, Volumes, and other variables that impact the polling engine performance.

In our case, the software stated we were at 65% of the available polling engine that was available. But we experienced monitors going into a hung state at random times.

This was finally determined by SolarWinds support to be due to the number of components we had active in SAM, even though SAM stated we were well below the acceptable number of components for our poller.

We added a second polling engine. (It is a super easy process to add additional polling engines.) SolarWinds has invested a great amount of time in the scalability expansion process, but the tool should reflect accurate info regarding the impact to the polling engine regardless of the source.

I ended up writing a custom SQL query to pull data points which gave us better polling data.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/10 on a good day. Since going to a Philippine support group, there has been a significant decrease in the skill set of the customer support.

Support used to be very results driven and it was not uncommon to have a person help you with whatever issue you had. That has changed in the past two years and support tends to be very quick to state “sorry that’s an unsupported feature and in several cases respond with “we can’t find the issue”.

Regardless of the issue being reported, you will be asked to run diagnostics and upload to their site. This is a time buying move as on several cases, as the logs were uploaded but not used in any way. (I asked where they found the info in the logs and was told it was an internal document that gave them the solution).

I avoid calling support for most issues unless I am at a total loss.

It’s important to note that this was not always the case. The real change seems to have occurred when SolarWinds went private again.

In years past, support used to be one of the HUGE factors that made SolarWinds such a great investment.

Support isn’t what it used to be and this is very disappointing. THWACK is a great resource and most answers can be found there with some searching and posting if needed.

But I should be able to get support from the help desk when I need it, not by manually searching and finding fixes myself.

My entire team avoids calling support at all costs. Sorry, but this is our experience. If I could still get version updates, but give up support, I would drop our annual maintenance in a second, without any hesitation.

We used the following solutions previously:

SCOM, BMC Patrol, HP CIM, What’s up Gold, NetScout, HP Openview, and several other home brewed monitoring tools.

SCOM is very powerful and an amazing tool. The issue is with administration and lack of real network monitoring. It is a monster and requires a very wide skill set to effectively administer.

Even with the skill set, it requires many staff hours for care and feeding. SCOM is cumbersome and very difficult to use.

SCOM is also strictly agent based, while SolarWinds gives you agent or agent-less options.

SCOM network monitoring is hot garbage on a summer day (IMHO).

MS included SNMP monitoring options, but SCOM can’t be used as a true network monitoring solution.

You must have a different tool for Network if using SCOM.

Orion, on the other hand, has it all if you invest in the modules.

SCOM will go much deeper into MS products, but it is not worth it for the amount of staff resources needed.

The setup was very easy. SolarWinds has invested a significant amount of effort into streamlining and improving the install process. It is one of the easiest tools out there to set up. SolarWinds nailed on this one.

Block the sales numbers and email address for all SolarWinds sales people at the engineer level J.

Every quarter close, year-end, or other significant time, there are emails sent to every person on our team who has access to our SolarWinds Support portal.

This is inappropriate and our leadership has asked SolarWinds to stop reaching out to engineers regarding “special pricing” or “super duper deal because it is end of the year”.

I get it, sales are sales, but this issue has been discussed several times on the THWACK forums and has become a running joke on the boards. It is harmless, but annoying.

On a more serious topic, I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up.

If you can make purchases with minimal turnaround time, you can do very well.

I would say the pricing of the SolarWinds products are more than competitive, even the list prices.

The ROI for SolarWinds products is unmatched in the industry.

I do annual vendor reviews as part of my role. Its not uncommon to find a tool that offers more functionality in one specific area than the SolarWinds suite. But when it comes to the pricing and across the board monitoring, no one touches SolarWinds. Money spent on SolarWinds products goes much further than with other vendors. This is an area where SolarWinds has left the competition behind.

Oh my gosh, we evaluated all of them. Like I said above, I do vendor reviews every year and the result is always the same.

No one offers the same level of functionality across so many different devices/services in a single tool at such a good price.

We may be buying a small license for Azure service monitoring until SolarWinds has a solution for sale.

Most recently, I reviewed Thousand Eyes, Exoprise, SCOM, Riverbed’s tools, Net Scout, and a half dozen others I don’t recall. All were interesting, but none were competitive price wise.

Before you install, join THACK and start talking to other users. The tool is very powerful and offers amazing monitoring options, if you have someone who knows what good monitoring should look like.

Take advantage of the various custom properties to refine monitors and you will have an amazing monitoring platform.

Install it, compare against others, and you will always find SolarWinds beats them for the ROI.

You must also factor in the savings from being able to train general IT staff how to support the tool.

It doesn’t matter how great a tool is, if you can’t find an admin to run it. Anyone can figure out SolarWinds if they have any sort of APM background. Many other tools can’t say this.

The way NPM determines the network nodes status gives you the trust that you will not receive fake alerts!!

SolarWinds allows network administrators to easily monitor the network by customizing the pages to see what exactly is needed. this is in addition to the deep statistics shown for nodes and interfaces like response TIME, packet LOSS, interfaces CRC, interfaces errors, as well as the rich graphs for all network elements.

For companies with multiple branch offices in different governments/countries, administrators can set their network nodes on the map provided by SolarWinds to easily monitor all locations at the same time.

Using the VNQM module, you can put a probe in each branch, configure all these probes with a couple of clicks, and easily monitor the response time between branches. You can also monitor internet connectivity for the branches themselves.

Beside the fancy features of both NPM and NCM, I adore the NTA module that provides deep details on ingress/egress traffic for any interface. With a few clicks, you can correlate who is accessing what and when, beside the bandwidth consuming applications/users.

I believe that SolarWinds should spend more effort in reporting. You can easily generate reports for technical engineers, but not such summarized reports that need to be sent to managers!

You can generate a lot of reports related to all modules either NPM , NCM , NTA or VQNM and we don’t have any problem in that.

The problem is that – compared to another vendors developing another H/Ws or S/Ws – you can’t generate such reports full of charts to summarize a kind technical info for managers.

To Elaborate more , looking for some products like McAfee , Fortigate , tenable … etc , you can find the reports in terms of tables and charts beside the tables and easily customize the charts type and location.

Once , I opened a case with our local vendor who contacted Solarwinds as well , asking about creating a report that includes something exactly like the below graphs to show to the management and they answered “No Avaialbility” !! also the below graphs are taken from our NTA module which should be added normally to a report!

Again , it’s a shame that you generate a PDF report from Solarwinds like the below, where headers appears in the report and text shown an clear text not a rich one!!! Simply the report is not generous although having a good technical info but to be seen by me not by managers .

Finally, I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic.

I didn’t experience any stability issue in any of the modules we used.

Like any other vendor, SolarWinds recommend a maximum number of elements to be monitored by each polling engine. In case you have more elements to be monitored, you can deploy additional polling engines.

I managed to monitor more than 13,000 network elements using the main polling engine and four additional polling ones. It was really a great experience for me to handle all these engines with no problems.

For more than seven years, I didn’t refer to the support team as I used to depend on myself to solve any problems. But I have referred to them in a couple of cases and they were very helpful.

We used WhatsUp Gold and ManageEngine OP Manager.

It is very easy to install. There is no need for experience to install it.

I have used other applications. After evaluating SolarWinds, we think it’s a good choice.

Even you have your own monitoring system, you need to try others to judge well and know where you are standing. Just visit the website and download a 30-day trial version.

SolarWinds user community, THWACK, is a very informative one where users share their experience to solve problems and suggests development for all SolarWinds modules.

• We are able to correlate application performance issues with bad SQL queries to the database.
• It allows us to identify missing indexes or bad vendor coding.
• It gets us to root cause quicker, especially in identifying whether or not it is something within our control.

• AppInsight for SQL: Enables us to see the relevant error log entries on the same page as performance parameters.
• AppInsight for Exchange: Presents the array of processes and the 66+ databases that make up our Exchange service in-house, in a single view. This allows us to analyze and isolate problems quickly. We have seen problems occur with a single database, a small collection of users, that we were able to correct before all the users on that mailbox server went down.
• Active Directory Templates: Allows us to be aware of issues or failures of any of the complex components providing our Microsoft Windows Active Directory services throughout our enterprise.

SAM AppInsight for SQL: The ability to ignore fragmentation of specific indexes.

One of the components of the AppInsight for SQL is monitoring of table statistics. A data element within in that set is table indexes. There are certain tables in our databases that we expect to have a high level of fragmentation all the time. It is just the nature of the applications.

However, there are many tables where we would want to know if the indexes become an issue because they adversely impact performance. My comment related to an ability to ignore certain tables within a database but not the whole database.

This way, the status of the database or any of the applications upstream would not be impacted by these specific tables.

We have not had issues with this version.

So far, we have been able to scale up to monitor everything we want without any issues. If we needed to poll more frequently, we would need to add additional polling engines.

In addition, the use of agents that can be deployed on local servers helps to offload processing from the primary poller.

The times when I have needed technical support, they have been responsive and able to resolve my issues.

I use the THWACK community a lot to resolve issues without the need for technical support.

We did not have a previous solution.

The setup was very straightforward. Upgrades are getting easier over the eight years that we have been using the products.

Having used various other vendors for monitoring over my career, the SolarWinds products give outstanding value for the price. They satisfied our needs for the mid-sized to large organization we have.

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.

I didn’t evaluate other options. I had previous experience and my boss was willing to go with my advice without having to do a comparison.

• Spend the time to examine the recurring issues in your infrastructure. Are there one or two things that come up repeatedly?
• Determine what data would help avoid the problem.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, policies, and procedures that collect and make use of that data.
• It’s about shifting the work from responding to your customer’s problems to correcting systems and conditions before your customers even notice.

VMAN recommendations have helped us manage the VMs to perform more efficiently. They note everything from storage to processor utilizations. This helps us, in the organization, to make informed decisions about whether or not we need to expand the infrastructure. This saves us time and money.

The features like trends, capacity planning, recommendations, and diagnostics are the main items I focus on for added value.

The trends help me when I am looking at how my VMs are performing. There are times when we need more performance out of certain VMs. With trends and capacity planning, you can really focus on the items and help get a better picture of how you can move things around to streamline your infrastructure.

For example, with the VMAN recommendations, it immediately show you a graphical view, single click drill down to the actual recommendations, which allow you to read more. Almost a single pane of glass approach to your Virtual infrastructure. From recommendations we can see things like the space utilization on a datastore has reach a critical threshold. With detailed explanation of the issue you can quickly go in and almost effortlessly make corrections you need. Some are more labor intensive however you still know what you need to do. VMAN also details the CPU utilizations on a particular VM which has been both lower, and offering to save you resources automatically or higher, offering to increase your resources automatically by simply accepting the recommendation. The VMAN tool then will apply the suggested changes to the VM for you with usually little interaction from the end user / administrator required. This allows us as a small IT department to operated more efficiently and react to situations before they become larger issues.

The recommendations are a life saver. They have valuable, daily information regarding your VM network. I don’t always follow the recommendations, but when I do, it’s usually automated. There is no other interaction needed from me. It’s like having another employee.

The diagnostics simply helps me make sure that I am meeting my required KPIs.

I would like it to be fully integrated into Orion. Although there are many pieces that are integrated and make it a very good application for managing and monitoring your VM environment, I would like to see more of it in Orion. I would like to not have to switch between sites for information.

I believe that some of the trends, environmental maps, and items like those found in Orion would be very beneficial.

We create NOC views in Orion. Adding many of the VMAN dashboard items to it would be great added value.

I had some stability issues. I lost my environment, but with the help of SolarWinds support, I was able to get back to a stable platform. I was able to install the upgrade to VMAN to bring me up to v7.

The appliance for VMware would lock up and I was unable to shut it down properly. If I didn’t reboot, I could not see the VMAN admin console. I had to shut it down through VMware, thereby corrupting the appliance.

SolarWinds was not sure why this happened, but after several days, we were better than before. There was not a hiccup since.

We didn’t encounter any scalability issues for our infrastructure. We only have a 50 VM license and we are currently using 27 of them. We are not one of the larger enterprise environments. The speed and stability has been great.

Since 2012, we only had one major issue, and that is pretty good. If Windows were that reliable, what a world we would live in.

At times it’s been difficult to get through to technical support. However, in the past twelve months, they have reformed their ways and it’s been fantastic.

I have used SolarWinds with three different companies in the past seventeen years and they have never failed to help me. Sometimes it takes some time, but they always get you going.

Of course we used other products, and we still do. One product cannot do everything you want it to do, at least with what you can afford.

Sometimes it’s better to run a tiered approach, such as with security, so all your eggs are not in one basket, so to speak.

However, mostly everything else we use is freeware or open source. SolarWinds is the only fully paid product we currently own.

I found the setup really very easy, if you are familiar with deploying '.ova' files. The setup was a snap, and the setup wizard really walks you through everything.

Their documentation is very detailed and if you need support, you can use their technical support and THWACK, which is world class and ahead of its time.

I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products. But in the case of VMAN, I have exactly what I need and room to grow. That being said, you are not going to find a better solution on the market for the price.

We were only using tools from VMware and we didn’t look at other options. Knowing SolarWinds from using Orion and other applications they sell, I wanted to have my monitoring software to be as integrated as possible. We looked no further.

DO IT!!! You will not regret it. This product is so helpful, out-of-the-box. Even for larger environments, you have a very short roll-out timeline, fantastic benefits, and results.

I work in a space where we manage enterprise monitoring for server infrastructure. Hence, SAM is one the best modules that's capable of doing it.

As a part of base monitoring of server infrastructure, we look at server down, CPU threshold, memory threshold, and disk threshold. In some cases, they might look for hardware health monitoring, as well.

As part of extended monitoring, we monitor the applications and their performance that run on top of these servers. This is where SAM is effective. We create templates (applications) which would further have specific components (monitors).

As mentioned in my previous point, SAM has about 50 component monitors, which include file monitors, URL monitors, user experience monitors, Windows monitors, service monitors, process monitors, and script monitors.

We have the list of all business critical applications and servers in our environment and we have configured monitoring and alerting accordingly. This increases service availability, reduces downtime of devices or apps and, as a result, issues will not go unnoticed and there won't be any business impact or financial loss.

Most of the features are helpful. The name of the module itself says "Server and Application Monitor". We use this module extensively for base monitoring and application monitoring. This keeps our infrastructure/service availability intact.

Here are some of the valuable features:

• Network Sonar Discovery: Discovers the nodes on your network and gets them onto SAM monitoring within no time with simple rules. It saves us the manual effort of adding devices one by one. Discovery can be scheduled, as well, during off hours or the way that you want it to be.
• 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.
• Manage Dependencies: Helps in basic auto-correlation to avoid a flood of alerts from children when a parent is down.
• Manage Views: You can use this to create custom views for customers, stakeholders, and your internal IT team based on the scope of what they need to view.
• Customize Menu Bars: You can create your own menu bar on the tool and attach them to specific views.
• Manage Advanced Alerts: Where you create your alerts, auto-correlation can be done at the alerting level, as well using advanced SQL alerts. SAM alerting, as well, provides advance auto-correlation conditions when you create an alert.
• Manage Reports: Creation of all kinds of reports for data available on SAM. This can be done using Web Reports or Reporter Writer. You can also schedule the reports accordingly and you can trigger an email to recipients.
• Component Monitor Wizard: Provides a shortcut and helps you in creating specific component monitors that are required.
• Manage Templates: Manages all your templates, applications, and components created in your environment. You can also assign nodes to specific templates from these areas. You can create new templates from here.
• Credentials Library: Lists all the credentials used by SAM in your environment.
• Unmanage Schedule Utility: Un-manages the nodes or devices during maintenance periods to avoid false or unwanted alerts. This can be scheduled as well.
• AppInsight for SQL and Exchange: This definitely is a good feature which is bundled with all component monitors to monitor SQL and Exchange space.
• PerfStack is a great addition and added value that SolarWinds implemented in recent times.
• Apart from the above mentioned points, we have close to 50 component monitors that SAM provides that cover most of the application monitoring space (file monitors, HTTP/S monitors, user experience monitors, Windows monitors, service monitors, process monitors, script monitors, etc.).
• Custom Attribute Editor: Used to manage custom attributes in your environment. Custom attributes can play a major role in alerting and reporting. It can also receive SNMP traps and syslog messages from other systems and convert them into a SolarWinds alert.

I always thought we should be able to perform all admin activities using the web portal. Over a period of time, SolarWinds has achieved this.

Most of the admin activities can be performed using SolarWinds web portal (such as advanced alerting, web reports, custom attribute editor, report schedulers, etc., which in the past were hosted on the SolarWinds server).

I also thought SolarWinds doesn't provide a service navigator map that would drill down from application layer to node level, with PerfStack in place. Most of these things have been addressed.

PerfStack can be made more effective. I am sure SolarWinds already has a plan for the same in coming versions.

We have not really had stability issues, but then it doesn't mean SAM would run without any issues. With a proper health check and maintenance plan in place, stability issues would never occur.

• We should have a regular maintenance schedule in place where SolarWinds servers are rebooted at regularly scheduled intervals. For instance, once a month.
• A health check of the SolarWinds server should be in place.
• Unwanted component monitors have to be removed in regular intervals from SAM.
• Decommissioned nodes have to be deleted from SAM on a regular basis.
• Unknown monitors/applications have to be addressed on a regular basis. Unknown applications are the ones that would eat up most of your server resources on the SolarWinds server. Such things have to be addressed on a regular basis to keep the instance healthy.

We have never had scalability issues so far. Scalability can be handled by additional pollers, if and when required, to balance the load.

If the numbers are scary, then we can have multiple SAM instances based on geography or region or connectivity and use an EOC (Enterprise Operational Console) on top of it to collate the same.

We can also move the SolarWinds web UI/portal onto a different server when AWS (Additional Web Server) is used in conjunction with SAM.

I would give technical support a rating of 9/10. SolarWinds technical support has always been good to us. We have received a great amount of support and accurate information from them for tickets raised so far.

We did have a previous solution. We switched to SolarWinds due to two major reasons. It is cost effective and easy to manage.

Since the tool can be easily managed, we wouldn't have to spend money on training as well.

The initial setup was pretty easy.

1. We had to start with base monitoring of our infrastructure which includes server down, CPU threshold, memory threshold, and disk threshold issues.
2. Once the pre-requisites were in place (SolarWinds Server and the DB server), we went ahead and installed SolarWinds SAM on our environment. This was pretty straightforward and self-explanatory.
3. We used Network Sonar Discovery to discover the devices and on-boarded the same.
4. We created generic alerts for the conditions mentioned (server down, CPU threshold, memory threshold and disk threshold issues).The above process hardly took a day's time and our SAM setup was up and running.
5. We incrementally built our setup, i.e., the application monitoring part (creation of SAM templates).

Please note: SolarWinds also provides a Product Upgrade Advisor for upgrading modules, which is a great add-on. This makes it so simple for new admins to upgrade the modules without any issues. It gives granular data for module upgrades.

There are not many tools in the market that can compete with SolarWinds when it comes to pricing and licenses. SolarWinds licensing cost is the best for the features they provide.

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.

SolarWinds has three main competitor groups:

• IT teams that don't have professional tools. They use free or open source tools like Nagios that require a lot of work and customization and custom scripts.
• Low-end tools that are often somewhat less expensive, but offer significantly less functionality. These are great for smaller teams, who often upgrade to SolarWinds as their needs grow. This category includes WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, ManageEngine, and SpiceWorks.
• Big, complex, monolithic monitoring systems from HPE, CA, VMware (vROps), IBM (Tivoli), Microsoft (SCOM), and BMC which are hard to use, expensive to manage and maintain, and cost millions, but have been in use for years. The effort to move to something better is too big.

SolarWinds offers over 30 products in different categories including virtualization, storage, databases, systems management, network, and security. Each of these products has a set of competitive products.

• As I mentioned in one of the other points: "Simplicity at its best".
• SolarWinds is easy to implement and simple to use and manage.
• As a system admin or network admin, you would just love this tool. It's not complicated and the features available can perform most of the activities that any other tool can.
• Licensing costs are lower.
• It provides a great global forum (THWACK), which is a single pit stop for all queries.
• Customer portal or technical support provides a great amount of help and are they are proactive towards the issues that occur in the system.
• Bug fixes and new versions (with great features) are released quite frequently. SolarWinds just launched themselves into the cloud as well. It isn't an on-premises tool anymore and can be hosted on the cloud.

Note: We are not using VMware VMAM and SRM in our setup. I work for a big client who is distributed geographically and we have separate teams to handle the infrastructure. My primary role is to only take care of server infrastructure.

We have a separate VMware team who does the job for us in the virtualization space. I have evaluated VMAN in the past and it definitely is a great tool that provides a deep dive into virtualization space. We do manage virtual machines and ESX boxes on a SAM instance, but we do not have an extended module like VMAM to support the same.

I have used STM in the past for storage monitoring. It’s a similar case where we have a separate team for storage and they are using Netcool to manage the traps coming from storage devices. Hence, it is not managed via SolarWinds. It is out of my scope of work in the current role.

Helps us be more proactive instead of reactive.

AppInsight. Provides a simple way to get very in-depth monitoring configured for our most popular applications. Exchange, SQL, and SharePoint.

Mapping interactions between systems.

No issues.

No issues.

Customer Service:

Excellent.

Technical Support:

Good.

Microsoft System Center Operation Manager. Although SCOM was very powerful it was also very complex to setup.

Straightforward. After creating a service account that had proper permissions on the systems that were going to be monitored. The agent-less deployment was quick and very easy.

Usually, the Web/SSL based certificate expires for our UCS servers and we were unable to monitor them on timely manner. This feature from Solarwinds SAM helped us to monitor and alert whenever the SSL cert is going to expire on the server to avoid any downtime of the services running on the server specially on ADFS platform where we have Video conference,Webex, Office 365 and single sign-on services.

SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting

As per my view, Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL. Currently, it can be achieve through script writing but that is tedious and tough task to do due to scarcity of script writer experts.

None

None

Customer Service:

Very good.

Technical Support:

Very good.