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SolarWinds AppOptics vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds AppOptics

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds AppOptics (formerly Librato) is an IT infrastructure monitoring service and APM, based on technology acquired by SolarWinds with Librato in 2015 to expand its cloud monitoring portfolio.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
    SolarWinds AppOpticsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds AppOpticsSolarWinds 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
    SolarWinds AppOpticsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    No answer on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    SolarWinds Pingdom and AppOptics [are] full-fledged Application Performance Management Tools. [SolarWinds] SAM provides Server and Application Monitoring using [SolarWinds] SAM templates, [but] it does miss out on APM capabilities which other APM solutions offer.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    5 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    33 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    5 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
    No answers on this topic
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    28 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds AppOpticsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of SolarWinds AppOptics and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Feature
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    6.9
    30 Ratings
    10% below category average
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    8.6
    276 Ratings
    12% above category average
    Application monitoring8.530 Ratings8.9266 Ratings
    Database monitoring7.528 Ratings8.4230 Ratings
    Threshold alerts6.526 Ratings8.9271 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities4.612 Ratings8.2215 Ratings
    Application performance management console7.226 Ratings8.2239 Ratings
    Collaboration tools6.014 Ratings7.7148 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications6.220 Ratings7.8256 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding6.618 Ratings8.5216 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring7.313 Ratings8.8234 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring8.123 Ratings9.8269 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting7.316 Ratings9.1250 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery7.29 Ratings9.0199 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds AppOpticsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Score6.9 out of 10
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds AppOpticsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.8
    (30 ratings)
    8.8
    (278 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    9.6
    (2 ratings)
    8.6
    (29 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (1 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
    SolarWinds AppOpticsSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    SolarWinds
    AppOptics is good for small to medium-sized organizations with less than 150 servers or less than 40 services to monitor. It performs well for this use case where people need to get an overview of application performance, and 95%ile data is okay. Somewhere every data point and every record is critical; it should be avoided.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Pros
    SolarWinds
    • Request tracing with code profiling.
    • Automated alerting on latency and response codes for each API.
    • Low resource overhead while collecting data from our application servers.
    • Highly performant dashboard that enables us to make progress rapidly.
    • Very resilient. We have not seen a downtime in their service in the entire year that we have used them.
    • Identify database and cache requests that are taking longer than expected
    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
    SolarWinds
    • The only thing that I would add is the possibility to display every single query our servers receive to eventually analyze them and query through them. We could also generate nice visualizations from that. Right now I believe we can only see averages.
    Incentivized
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    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
    SolarWinds
    We have been using AppOptics for over 3.5 years and expect to continue to renew it for the foreseeable future
    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
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    Usability
    SolarWinds
    As far a usability is concerned for AppOptics, it is just as matter of few minutes away even if you start from scratch, as all you need to do is register on the site and you will get the URL and password. And after this all you have to do is follow the instruction, as per the configuration wizard (tool tip) within the console for various technology such as SQL, IIS, .NET
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Reliability and Availability
    SolarWinds
    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
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    Performance
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    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
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    Support Rating
    SolarWinds
    Solarwinds AppOptics is rated as 9 out of 10 and the reason is there are still few areas where AppOptics needs to improve such as Service Now Integration, GCP Cloud Support, Better Dashboard visualization for application transactions flow. Other than these feature everything is there in AppOptics and that's a reason given 9 points out of 10.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Online Training
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    SolarWinds
    What we found positive in AppOptics from others is:
    • Easy to install and manage.
    • Various stack support.
    • Point to point deep-dive metrics and correlation.
    • Metrics like DB connection, query analysis, latency in API calls, and other connections, response codes for various APIs, etc are the key ones in our case, which AppOptics provides efficiently.
    • Alerts can be sent on different channels.
    Incentivized
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    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
    SolarWinds
    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
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    Return on Investment
    SolarWinds
    • Application monitoring troubleshooting became more accurate. Accurate results save more man-hours of manual troubleshooting.
    • As Realtime monitoring and alerts provide more flexibility, downtime can be minimized and Accurate Root causes can be provided.
    • Dashboards can be useful for making future strategy based on trends.
    • Installation and integration is easy.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    ScreenShots

    SolarWinds AppOptics Screenshots

    Screenshot of AppOptics Home ScreenScreenshot of AppOptics DashboardScreenshot of AppOptics TracesScreenshot of AppOptics Trace Root CauseScreenshot of AppOptics InfrastructureScreenshot of Host Heat Map

    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