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

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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.

Incentivized

Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time

Incentivized

-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

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.

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

• 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

• 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