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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    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

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

    Score10 out of 10
    N/ASolarWinds® Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is a tool for monitoring, performance management, capacity planning and optimization for on-premises or cloud-based virtual environments. It also integrates with other SolarWinds products.N/A
    Pricing
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    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 Server & Application MonitorSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    I run quite a suite of SW tools. I have found them all to so tightly integrate that you have trouble telling which module a specific task actually came from. All you know is it all runs very well together!
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    We actually did a side-by-side test and compare with another similar product called What's Up Gold. Solarwinds was more robust and was able to monitor and analyze everything we we needed it to.
    Incentivized
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    To be honest we never looked into any other products. We already made use of SolarWinds SAN, and once we found out SolarWinds was also able to monitor our virtual environment, we immediately had a trial of the software. We were very happy with what the VMAN component had to …
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    We're also a Veeam customer and have assessed Veeam ONE. We found the interface to be lacking and the contents misleading. Having VMAN in a single pane of glass integrated with the rest of our Orion products makes life very easy and everything very clear. The features that VMAN …
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)

    VMware vCenter Server accommodates only VMware hosts and guests. The dashboards are not customizable and require a lot of clicks to get the necessary information on a host or guest.

    MS Configuration Manager and Virtual Machine Manager are cumbersome when compared to VMan. The …

    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    We did test two other alternatives since we used other SolarWinds products, the Virtualization Manager was a natural extension of the existing platform.
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    SolarWinds is far superior to the base tools. Every manufacture has a management tool that often has really good benefits to using it, however with VMAN you get a single pane of glass for so much more than just Virtual Machines and or storage. You gain total control of your …
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    We are fairly heavily invested in other SolarWinds packages already so why add another software package when I can plug a module into a proven framework I'm already running.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    33 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    14 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    14 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    33 Answers
    93%
    Happy with the feature set
    13 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    26 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    12 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    28 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    13 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Feature
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    8.6
    276 Ratings
    12% above category average
    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    -
    Ratings
    Application monitoring8.9266 Ratings00 Ratings
    Database monitoring8.4230 Ratings00 Ratings
    Threshold alerts8.9271 Ratings00 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities8.2215 Ratings00 Ratings
    Application performance management console8.2239 Ratings00 Ratings
    Collaboration tools7.7148 Ratings00 Ratings
    Out-of-the box templates to monitor applications7.8256 Ratings00 Ratings
    Application dependency mapping and thresholding8.5216 Ratings00 Ratings
    Virtualization monitoring8.8234 Ratings00 Ratings
    Server availability and performance monitoring9.8269 Ratings00 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting9.1250 Ratings00 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery9.0199 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter
    Score9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter
    Score9 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.8
    (278 ratings)
    10.0
    (66 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    8.6
    (7 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (29 ratings)
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    Availability
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    6.4
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (21 ratings)
    8.8
    (6 ratings)
    Online Training
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    4.5
    (3 ratings)
    9.1
    (3 ratings)
    Configurability
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    9.1
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN)
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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
    SolarWinds
    On the whole, Solarwinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) is an excellent product which gives us a single point to monitor our virtual environment. After our initial trial I was sold on the product and what it had to offer. Immediately after implementing VMAN, we were able to spot virtual machines with old snapshots which were never deleted and no longer needed, we could spot virtual machines which either had over allocated resources or under allocated resources meaning we could make changes and fine tune them for best performance. We could also monitor virtual machine latency, IOPS, and show us where our bottlenecks were.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    SolarWinds
    • I created custom dashboards, to view the different elements of the virtual environment. For example, you can view the number of online VMs and those off, or disconnected. You can also choose to see the status of every virtual cluster, the storage disk usage on every VM, the RAM usage, CPU usage.
    • I used this application to see the growth of virtual memory in each cluster and accordingly do forecasting for future growth. A capacity planner included in this application would help in doing accurate estimations and setting a future upgrade budget.
    • Another powerful tool was the customized reports, where i could generate reports on any element of the VM or cluster. Reports can be exported to Excel or PDF and are very useful for sharing information with colleagues and management.
    • Alerts can be customized. For example, you can set a rule to get an email alert if any virtual server RAM usage exceeds 85% and send a text message if RAM usage exceeds 90% for more than 10 minutes.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    SolarWinds
    • We did have issues during the setup, with successfully connecting to some of our hosts and vCenters and we found support were just sending us back to articles we had already read, it was also taking long periods before getting a response. The issue is still ongoing, in fact.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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
    SolarWinds
    Currently, there is no other tool that gives us what we need to monitor a geographically disperse environment with multiple non-related instances of VM clusters. In addition, the level of reporting, historical data trending, and alerting that VMAN provides is essential for our business process. Lastly, the effort to customize and set up any monitoring system is not trivial. This makes switching to any other product very difficult without being able to clearly demonstrate a ROI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    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
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds VMAN is easy to use for everyone. When I say everyone which literally means anyone e.g. Virtualization Environment SME, Consultant, Support Team, Management Officers etc. Anyone who have worked on IT technologies could easily deploy SolarWinds by reading videos, Thwack posts or Virtual Classrooms (Custom Success Centers) - this makes this application easy to operation and for maintenance support is always there.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    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
    SolarWinds
    We have yet to enconter any issues in terms of availability. We have a highly available SQL cluster running Orion.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    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
    SolarWinds
    We find page load times to be quite slow at times. Flipping between tabs can also be very slow.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    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
    SolarWinds
    SolarWinds gives good support. I have never had a time when i was working through a support case where I did not get the support I needed for the required issues to be resolved. I have always had resolutions from SolarWinds support. They are top notch. Issues once had are no more.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    SolarWinds
    It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    SolarWinds
    Its really the best product on the market for someone looking to have total control over their VM environment. anyone interested should download a demo and try it, I know you will buy it after you do. It changing the way you have to manage on a daily basis
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    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
    SolarWinds
    The operation began using Nagios XI, after a year of use, and based on the results obtained, we realized that what our client wanted was not fully met. Our client asked us to use WhatsUp, however, SolarWinds covered in a more efficient way what was required by our client (IT) and even more.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    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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    SolarWinds
    Purchasing the correct license allows the platform to scale with your environment.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    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
    SolarWinds
    • VMAN has been used for reports provided to executive-level meetings. These reports showed our growth patterns, allowing for easier decisions on purchasing additional hardware.
    • VMAN has provided a positive impact on allowing for near real-time monitoring of resources, able to pinpoint when services are using more memory than expected, not running at all, or other options as defined.
    • VMAN was purchased to help monitor our VMware platform, the added abilities for AWS allowed us to migrate clients from on-prem to cloud-based with the same views.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    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

    SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN) Screenshots

    Product screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshotProduct screenshot