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.

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. 

The most valuable features of the solution revolve around areas like SNMP polling and availability. My company doesn't use APM-related features of the product. I have an understanding related to network monitoring, but I want to understand what other features SolarWinds provides and to figure out what benefits customers will get from using it. I wanted to know if SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor are cheaper or costlier than Riverbed.

I find it to be a strong product suite, particularly when you need a comprehensive monitoring tool.

It's a good product. The ability to create tickets with our infrastructure team for them to be aware of immediate issues and be able to triage those quickly is valuable to us. The product integrates with Remedy. It's probably one of the biggest things.

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

Identifying the problem statement is easy. However, we must also find out why the problem happened. The vendor has invested heavily. The solution has a lot of features. It is good. The incident response is connected to the ticketing system. I always ask my team to create their own dashboards.

I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues. 

The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is its powerful monitoring capabilities.

SolarWinds is a very good solution. Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us. Infrastructure dependency mapping gives us a view of the networks connected with the applications and processes.

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.

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.  

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.

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)

• 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.

The application dependency feature identifies issues between applications and servers or within the network where the application is hosted. It highlights related problems, whether related to packet processing or other issues, enabling the creation of alerts and reports accordingly.

• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

SSL Certificate Monitoring and Expiry Alerting

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

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.

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

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. 

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.

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 most valuable feature is the Access Rights Manager.

It is a very powerful tool for database administration and management.

The support for Active Directory is good.

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

The most valuable feature is application monitoring. Already 1200 application monitoring templates exist with the Solarwinds SAM monitoring and the AppInsights for IIS, SQL, Exchange & AD. 

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.

Service monitoring - SAM (Solarwinds Application Monitoring) gives a very convenient way to manage the services of the server. It can monitor the service using WMI and SNMP. Tools give a wider choices to monitoring up to executable files currently running the server process. 

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. 

HTTP Monitor - Out of the box it can monitor the basic "get" command of the any website. 

Dashboard - It give a much detailed information of your services. Its very beneficial to easily decide for the capacity and resource management of the monitor node.

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