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SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. Splunk AppDynamics

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

    Score7 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

    Splunk AppDynamics

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AAppDynamics is an APM and Mobile APM program, with application mapping and predictive capabilities. These capacities enable automated remediation and code-level diagnostics in real time. It can be deployed on-premise or as a SaaS.N/A
    Pricing
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk AppDynamics
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk AppDynamics
    Free Trial
    YesYes
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoYes
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsSAM pricing starts at $2,995.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk AppDynamics
    Considered Both Products
    SolarWinds
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor is able to provide 90% of the functionality my business requires. SolarWinds is able to scale out functionality by purchasing additional modules to meet the individual needs of its customers. While this functionality provides …
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    SolarWinds is cost-effective, we have a great solution provider that helps us with tool integrations and maintenance, the integration capability and extensive documentation also help a lot in the ability to use it in various monitoring models and scripts.
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Solarwinds Server and Application monitor is my first choice of tools preferred for server and application infrastructure monitoring because of the following reasons -
    1. Single product to offer on-prem, hosted, cloud monitoring
    2. Single Product to offer Server, Database and …
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    We selected SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor over AppDynamics because SolarWinds product suited our needs better. We needed better infrastructure monitoring and internal application monitoring brought from other vendors. If we wanted to monitor an application that was …
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    SolarWinds stacks up better than most due to its available ecosystem of tools. As they align, consolidate and integrate, the full value will be realized.
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    It was already purchased for me to use.
    Incentivized
    Chose SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Nagios and Rancid are used internally by a company that was acquired last year. They're a big open source group.

    Other groups also use HostMonitor, Big Brother, and a couple of home grown tools that don't really stack up. Those groups don't want to change the way they do …
    Incentivized
    Cisco
    Chose Splunk AppDynamics
    AppDymanics and Solarwinds was a good products at application and website monitoring. For SQL monitoring AppDymanics was the superior product is it found several queries that were slowing down the server while Solarwinds could not find any issues. The version of Nagios that we …
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    33 Answers
    98%
    Would buy again
    61 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    31 Answers
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    57 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    33 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    61 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    26 Answers
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    46 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    93%
    Implementation went as expected
    28 Answers
    95%
    Implementation went as expected
    53 Answers
    Features
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk AppDynamics
    Application Performance Management
    Comparison of Application Performance Management features of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor and Splunk AppDynamics
    Feature
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    8.6
    276 Ratings
    12% above category average
    Splunk AppDynamics
    8.5
    74 Ratings
    11% above category average
    Application monitoring8.9266 Ratings9.474 Ratings
    Database monitoring8.4230 Ratings8.071 Ratings
    Threshold alerts8.9271 Ratings8.872 Ratings
    Predictive capabilities8.2215 Ratings7.771 Ratings
    Application performance management console8.2239 Ratings8.971 Ratings
    Collaboration tools7.7148 Ratings7.659 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 Ratings8.544 Ratings
    Server usage monitoring and capacity forecasting9.1250 Ratings8.842 Ratings
    IT Asset Discovery9.0199 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk AppDynamics
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    SolarWinds AppOptics
    Score8.1 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Splunk AppDynamics
    Score8.2 out of 10
    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
    Score7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk AppDynamics
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.8
    (278 ratings)
    8.6
    (74 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    8.9
    (10 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Usability
    8.6
    (29 ratings)
    8.5
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (21 ratings)
    8.1
    (6 ratings)
    Online Training
    4.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    4.5
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Configurability
    1.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.9
    (3 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    4.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk AppDynamics
    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
    Cisco
    Platforms for software as a service (SaaS) frequently cater to a large number of users with a variety of needs and usage patterns. Because AppDynamics offers multi-tenant monitoring capabilities to track performance across various customer environments, it is a good choice for SaaS platform monitoring. SaaS providers can maximize resource utilization, proactively detect and resolve performance issues, and provide a dependable and consistent user experience for their clients with AppDynamics.
    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
    Cisco
    • AppDynamics delves deeply into traceability and profiling at the code level. By identifying and refactoring any hidden performance hogs in our code, we can directly observe the performance improvements.
    • AppDynamics provides real-time dashboards and in-depth insights into each layer of the application stack, lifting the curtain on performance.
    • AppDynamics gives us the ability to proactively detect and resolve performance issues. We are able to keep things running smoothly for our users and stop outages.
    • We can monitor stability and performance prior to, during, and following releases with AppDynamics, which helps to minimize regression risks and facilitate smooth rollouts.
    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
    Cisco
    • Improving the clarity and comprehensiveness of the documentation could benefit users. Clearer documentation ensures that users can make the most of all the functionalities
    • Leverages AI and machine learning for intelligent insights, aiding in issue identification and prediction.
    • Competitive, with AI-driven features becoming increasingly common in APM solutions.
    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
    Cisco
    its working for us, we are familiar and comfortable with the tool and its proven valuable/indispensable in helping evaluate our code.
    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
    Cisco
    Actually, I would like to give it a score of 10 out of 10, but taking into account certain factors such as: the cost of the annual licence, the complexity of installation and configuration, the blurring of setting Splunk AppDynamics over the cloud and especially OpenShift since we use it as a container platform. So, 8 out of 10 looks perfect for it
    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
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Cisco
    AppDynamics has its own community site that includes forums and a knowledge base. On the forums, you can converse with other members of the community and ask technical questions as you have them. Though this forum isn’t filled with people there are active members for you to gain some valuable insights.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Online Training
    SolarWinds
    It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    SolarWinds
    Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Cisco
    It is distinguished from these programs because the platform provides visualizations of application processes, showing the interplay between various parts and services. Understanding the architecture of complicated apps and finding their weak spots is greatly aided by this.
    Read full review
    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
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    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
    Cisco
    • AppDynamics has played a pivotal role in optimizing our applications for a seamless user experience. The proactive monitoring and quick issue resolution have translated into improved user satisfaction and increased retention rates.
    • The initial cost and effort associated with implementing AppDynamics might be considered a negative impact, particularly for organizations with budget constraints. However, the long-term benefits have justified this initial investment.
    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