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F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/ASecurely connects distributed apps and services across public cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Utilizing Infrastructure as Code, App Connect provisions resources and maintain uniform policies across multiple sites.N/A

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

    Score6.9 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers application and server monitoring capabilities. SAM allows for self-service for easy setup, 1200+ monitoring templates, and customization options, as well as integrate with other SolarWinds products.N/A
    Pricing
    F5 Distributed Cloud App ConnectSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    F5 Distributed Cloud App ConnectSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsSAM pricing starts at $2,995.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    F5 Distributed Cloud App ConnectSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Considered Both Products
    F5
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    7 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    33 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    7 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    33 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    26 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    28 Answers
    Features
    F5 Distributed Cloud App ConnectSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Feature
    F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect
    -
    Ratings
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    8.6
    276 Ratings
    12% above category average
    Application monitoring00 Ratings8.9266 Ratings
    Database monitoring00 Ratings8.4230 Ratings
    Threshold alerts00 Ratings8.9271 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities00 Ratings8.2215 Ratings
    Application performance management console00 Ratings8.2239 Ratings
    Collaboration tools00 Ratings7.7148 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications00 Ratings7.8256 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding00 Ratings8.5216 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring00 Ratings8.8234 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring00 Ratings9.8269 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting00 Ratings9.1250 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery00 Ratings9.0199 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    F5 Distributed Cloud App ConnectSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Small Businesses
    .NET
    Score8.7 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    AWS Auto Scaling
    Score9.2 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
    Score8.5 out of 10
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    F5 Distributed Cloud App ConnectSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (4 ratings)
    8.8
    (278 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (29 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    7.0
    (3 ratings)
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (21 ratings)
    Online Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    -
    (0 ratings)
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    F5 Distributed Cloud App ConnectSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    F5
    My advice is if your firm build multi-cloud, high availability SaaS products or you just run polyglot workloads across kubernetes and VMs, then F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect is your guy. Coming from an expert, just start with a few core services or else you will be overwhelmed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    For monitoring applications that run on Windows hosts on VMware or HyperV virtualization, SolarWindows offers a nice, vertical view of both the loads and the resources. In such an environment, this makes life really good! But if you have something else -- for example, Linux hosts -- you're on your own to some extent. That is, the things it does well, it does very well -- but everything else is much less polished.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    F5
    • Ease of use - standing up a new site took very little time, less then an hour.
    • Connecting the dots - the ease at standing up a load balancer and advertising it on CEs was simple and straight forward. Once you get familiar with the field layout it's very comparable to BIG-IP
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Monitor Azure Cloud Severs- We use SolarWinds SAM to monitor Active Directory and DNS on Several DCs published on Azure Cloud.
    • Monitor Hyper V and VMware - SolarWinds SAM monitors applications on both Hyper V and VMware, while also monitoring the physical host machines.
    • It also helps us monitor Warranty expiration for physical servers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    F5
    • User access roles should be more granular what we currently have
    • user interface should be user friendly
    • Setup process and guided workflows could add a user friendly process for first time users
    • log export from SIEM tool still require a manual intervention
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Provides basic monitoring/visibility. Visibility into detailed/fine-grained issues best suited for more specialized/expensive solutions.
    • Licensing per monitored application rapidly uses up purchased license count.
    • More out-of-the-box templates or easier setup of monitoring less-common applications would make the solution more appealing given the target audience of the product.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    F5
    At this point it has become too focal to our operations. An entire department could collapse if we dropped it now or in the near future. My experiences as mentioned in the previous questions tell of its gravity
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    We are heavily invested in Solarwinds products for a reason. They are generally easy to setup and run with, requiring only some interfacing with support or help articles on rare occasions. They do what we bought them to do and we can't ask for more.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is quite easy to use and super versatile. It allows you to do just about anything you can through premade templates or through scripting. You can use an agent on the servers if you want to, or you can monitor through WMI or SNMP credentials. You can customize thresholds for alerting quickly, and you can configure alerts to be as complex or as simple as you want.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    The tool works and monitors items 24x7, it only requires maintenance a little more frequently due to security fixes in the Windows operating system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    F5
    From what we have been able to test load/responsiveness is quick and when we've tested out reporting and troubleshooting modules they have pulled the correct information in quick timeframes. We haven't been able to test out any software integration with Splunk of other software on our system since we are still in early POC stages but from what we've been told we should be able to implement that in our environment
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    The graphical interface and the performance of the database leave a little to be desired, they could be better explored.Some functionality and screens do not work well depending on the browser used. The integrations never had any problems or caused crashes in other systems.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    I think there was only a couple times I had to open a support case for SAM and one time they got multiple engineers on the phone to get a better idea what I was trying to monitor and was able to point me in the best direction to monitor that system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    F5
    -F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect provides more granular security policies with features like DOS, WAF etc and others lack -F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect provides high performance global network and other rely on public internet and impact is latency and it gives F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect a better user experience
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    It has been a while since we first purchased SolarWinds, but I looked over several other products that I can't remember now. Many other products tried to scan the network to find computers but given that our computers are located in various places across campus with other computers in our buildings that are not ours that type of network scanning was not what we needed. Other services have extra services that we had no need of and I liked the ability to add custom fields in SolarWinds so we can track the information on each computer that we need to know.
    Read full review
    Scalability
    F5
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It is hard to find the recommended SQL setup and convince others that is the way you should configure the server when you set it up
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    F5
    • Inconsistent policies and procedures and now its all seem to be sorted and now requires less support
    • Deployment cycle time was reduced and achieves a faster adoption of newly added contents
    • Saved migration cost and more gave durability to the existing setup
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    • Less time spent investigating causes of issues. We are alerted straight away and can find the root cause of the issue in less time.
    • We have been able to ditch all our previous individual monitoring solutions, none of which integrated with each other for a single solution which fully integrates with each of the different modules to provide a single portal for monitoring and alerting.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    F5 Distributed Cloud App Connect Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor Screenshots

    Screenshot of Multi-vendor application performance monitoringScreenshot of Multi-vendor server monitoringScreenshot of Application dependency mapping with AppStack™ dashboardScreenshot of Microsoft Exchange performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Microsoft IIS performance monitoring with AppInsight™ templateScreenshot of Server hardware health monitoring