SolarWinds Observability SaaS
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Go well beyond basic server monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
It has a ton of out-of-the-box templates for different applications, it supports Perl/PowerShell scripts to build custom templates, can be used to monitor URL response time from one of your pollers, and supports using WMI/SNMP/Agent to build custom monitors.
What do you dislike about the product?
There is a limitation in only recovering 10 metrics per component, this means sometimes you have to create multiple components to pull all of the metrics you wanted. There is also a limit that the statistic value must be a number (not a huge deal, but can be annoying).
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are able build monitors for custom applications and things we have found to KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Make sure you test your scripts on non-production devices prior to deploying them to production to make sure it doesn't break anything.
Great product
What do you like best about the product?
The ability to customise the different monitors using PowerShell scripts and perfomance counters. I also like the AppInsight templates for IIS and SQL Server.
What do you dislike about the product?
Some of the graphic resources (charts) could probably use a refresh.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are able to monitor critical servers and applications that we were unable to before, thus providing valuable insight.
Great tool for reaching into every part of your applications
What do you like best about the product?
Highly customisable, great custom support, very flexible.
What do you dislike about the product?
Parts of the code get updated out of step with the others - can be a bit frustrating knowing you could do it one way on a different part of the system
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use SAM to monitor all our servers for availability and performance, as well as keeping up to date on applications and their performance.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Definitely get on Thwack, the community site - it's not just chat, there are a lot of crowd-shared monitors and implementations already there and ready to be used. 9 times out of 10 I don't even google a problem, I just look there!
Also, get a trial, take a little time to set it up - fully functional for a month at least.
Also, get a trial, take a little time to set it up - fully functional for a month at least.
SAM is a good product with a some work
What do you like best about the product?
I think the SAM product is very good at what it can monitor. I would highly suggest that you spend a lot of time trying to decide what needs to be monitored and what doesn't. The applications are monitored and you are able to see the history of any issues that occurred that is great.
What do you dislike about the product?
The licenses is crazy. When using the SAM for certain applications you will notice one application can consume 20-100 licenses depending on what you monitor. With that said you will under buy your licenses. Just to be clear the SAM is good but just use the demonstration so you can get the number of licenses required to monitor all of your applications.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are able to see deeper into just server up, down or high memory or low disk space. We are able to see when the actual application is having a problem. This helps in diagnosing when help desk calls.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I would highly recommend using the trial software. You must know how many licenses that you need otherwise you will consume way more product licenses than expected.
monitoring agent makes surface triage simple and fast
What do you like best about the product?
the drill down features make identifying issues in term meaningful to a developer great.
What do you dislike about the product?
At this time I have not had any issues with this product
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
SQL issues mostly
Pretty good templates and basic application monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
I like the templates, either canned or ones you can build, to apply across a line of servers to monitor applications. It is fairly easy to monitor processes or services for availability and performance. They recently (in 6.6) added some application dependency mapping (using an agent) to show what network connections are made by what services out to other servers/services, this is a nice addition if you are using the agent.
What do you dislike about the product?
The web interface is not always the easiest to use. If there is a problem with an application you click on the red text thinking it will tell you what the problem is, but it is often a few more clicks away.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We are able to apply the same template across multiple deployment tiers, allowing our developers to get access to the same monitoring that we will use in production. This allows them to make sure their applications are performing and reporting properly before we have it deployed for real.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you have other solarwinds products this is a good addition. They are also adding a bit more application monitoring (using an agent) in to SAM, which is nice. NPM is still their strongest offering. Support has gotten worse over the past few years though, and SolarWinds as a whole seems to be branching out in many (too many?) directions.
My opinions on SAM
What do you like best about the product?
I like the ability to drill down to the top 10 processes by various factors such as physical memory, cpu, load, and I/O reads. It also alerts you if your server warranty is about to expire, which is great if you have hundreds of servers to keep up with
What do you dislike about the product?
No details on the 'applications with problems' box, not a big deal as you can click on the applications to get more info. This isn't a big deal as you can click on the problematic application and find out plenty of details, but being able to scan over them without leaving the page would also be nice.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It helps isolate various server-related issues without digging through the event viewer inside of windows. This has also expedited the time to resolve the various issues.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It's great and worth the money. From a cost perspective, it saves us money.
SolarWinds Unified Server and Application harmony
What do you like best about the product?
I love that this integrates into our existing SolarWinds Orion environment to give a true single pane of glass into your environment.
What do you dislike about the product?
As with many of SolarWinds products, there is a learning curve to truly use the product to it's full potential.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Using SAM helped us monitor and support unique applicaitons in our environment that traditional monitoring solutions weren't able to support.
Solarwinds SAM Review
What do you like best about the product?
SAM allows us to monitor SQL server processes, Citrix and AD health and custom application monitors.
What do you dislike about the product?
I'm not a big fan of the Licensing model. It's very expensive to monitor all of our SQL servers in our environment. We have to pick the most critical and monitor those.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Improve responsiveness to resolving issues with down/underperforming applications.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Get a good feel for what you REALLY need to monitor.
NTA is very helpful
What do you like best about the product?
I like being able to see applications that are being used and the bandwidth they are taking up. I also like being able to see the conversations between different endpoints,
What do you dislike about the product?
I have not found anything that I dislike about NTA. The only thing for me that would be easier if there was a better search feature, we have a lot of nodes and devices and sometimes it is difficult find them in the NTA screen.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
It really helps when we have a circuit that is pegged and are not sure why. We can use NTA to locate the application and the user in one screen. This really helps get through issues quickly.
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