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SolarWinds Pingdom vs. SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds Pingdom

    Score9.8 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds Pingdom is a website uptime monitoring and alert tool, with additional reporting and Real User Monitoring capabilities. Pingdom is part of SolarWinds’s DevOps package, enabling full-stack monitoring as a service.

    $14.95

    per month

    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 PingdomSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Editions & Modules
    Synthetic Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Real User Monitoring
    $10
    per month
    Enterprise
    Custom Pricing
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds PingdomSolarWinds 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 PingdomSolarWinds 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
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    We've been happy with SolarWinds and have been using it for about 10 years. We have not needed to look at other products to replace it. We use pingdom to get similar performance monitoring on our websites from an external source. pingdom is also a SolarWinds product. Both …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    98%
    Would buy again
    52 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    33 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    52 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    52 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    33 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    43 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    26 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    49 Answers
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    28 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds PingdomSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of SolarWinds Pingdom and SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Feature
    SolarWinds Pingdom
    -
    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
    SolarWinds PingdomSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    Catchpoint
    Score9.2 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nexthink
    Score7 out of 10
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds PingdomSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    4.5
    (65 ratings)
    8.8
    (278 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    10.0
    (4 ratings)
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    8.6
    (29 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    Performance
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    Support Rating
    4.1
    (54 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 PingdomSolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Likelihood to Recommend
    SolarWinds
    I believe the scenarios we used it for were quite well covered, from the executive perspective. The downtime alarms worked very well and were easy to setup, uptime monitoring tools were clear and easy to use, even for non-technical people (C-level) and the SLA management tools allowed us to spend less time, and have less friction, with our clients
    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
    SolarWinds
    • The alerts are very responsive offering quite detailed timing information
    • The UI for reports is very clear and set up of reports is very intuitive
    • Customer service was good when there were problems - e.g. lapsing billing causing reporting to go down
    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 PagerDuty integration could be a lot better. When you use the PagerDuty integration, it doesn't send any information about which check failed! It just sends a message like "Timeout (> 30s)" -- this isn't very helpful when we have hundreds of checks. We've worked around this by using both the PagerDuty and Slack integrations and having them both post to the same Slack channel. But this means that when an engineer is paged from PagerDuty, they have to go to Slack (or Pingdom) to find the details about the page; it's not available on the page itself.
    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
    SolarWinds
    Recently added features have made Pingdom less intuitive for our requirements. While Pingdom has a broad offering and remains a good value, it is becoming more than we need. Our customer base is becoming more and more global and Pingdom still lacks Asia-Pacific monitoring, which we will need within a year.
    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
    SolarWinds
    Pingdom is easy to use, very intuitive and has a very short learning curve. From the onset, we've been able to jump in and leverage the tool to accomplish our goals for page speed performance and discover the insights we need to make improvements. Its a well-designed tool and makes for a good user experience.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    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
    Interface is unnecessarily complicated and frequently responds slowly.
    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
    SolarWinds
    Support responded the same day to my query, as I was setting the product up but couldn't find the setting I needed. This was successfully resolved in a short time frame, so I was pleased with how quickly we were able to get this resolved. I haven't needed to contact support since.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    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
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    SolarWinds
    Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    SolarWinds
    1. PRTG Network Monitor was a far more complicated tool to use and set up albeit it does both Internal and External monitoring. The setup wasn't intuitive and there are too many configuration options to complete to form an alert
    2. Amazon CloudWatch is specific to AWS resources and cannot be easily use outside of the AWS Ecosystem
    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
    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
    • Honestly, we have 4 other products that overlap this functionality whose organizations provide far superior support. At this point it is an unnecessary expense.
    • In my opinion, their lack of support responsiveness and commitment has impacted our IT agility.
    • Its time to explore other alternatives.
    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

    SolarWinds Pingdom Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct 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