SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor vs. Splunk Observability Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
SolarWinds 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 Observability Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Splunk Observability Cloud aims to enable operational agility and better customer experience through real-time AI-driven streaming analytics allowing accurate alerts in seconds. It is designed to shorten MTTD and MTTR by providing real-time visibility into cloud infrastructure and services.
$180
per year per host
Pricing
SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk Observability Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Infrastructure
$15
per month (billed annually) per host
App & Infra
$60
per month (billed annually) per host
End-to-End
$75
per month (billed annually) per host
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk Observability Cloud
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 MonitorSplunk Observability Cloud
Features
SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk Observability Cloud
Application Performance Management
Comparison of Application Performance Management features of Product A and Product B
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor
8.6
276 Ratings
12% above category average
Splunk Observability Cloud
-
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
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User Ratings
SolarWinds Server & Application MonitorSplunk Observability Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(278 ratings)
8.6
(24 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.9
(10 ratings)
6.4
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(29 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Availability
9.9
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(21 ratings)
-
(0 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 Observability Cloud
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.
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Cisco
Its great if you need real-time visibility across complex or regulated environments. Also strong for hybrid or multi-cloud setups where uptime, observability and fast IR are required. It’s probably overkill for smaller teams or environments that don’t have constant changes or compliance reporting needs. It's expensive and has a steep learning curve. Also, in my opinion, do not get yourself into a consumption based model. Costs can certainly get out of control quickly.
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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.
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Cisco
  • The first one is its Kubernetes container monitoring.
  • I really like this features because as we know how much K8s is vast and to manually monitor each part of the Kubernetes it takes so much time but Splunk Observability Cloud makes it easier. And even once we integrate K8s with Splunk Observability Cloud it gives us some prebuilt dashboards which gives holistic view of our Cluster and its nodes, pods, etc.
  • The dashbaord feature of Splunk Observability Cloud, it gives us full flexibility to customize our dashboard with a wide range of predefined chart types.
  • Now it also supports OTEL, which is a plus point for observability. As now everyone is moving towards Otel and in current market there are only few tools who supports OTEL based integrations, Splunk Observability Cloud is one out of them.
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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.
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Cisco
  • You can use table-like functionality to generate dashboards, but these queries are heavy on the system.
  • It could be easier to give insight into what type of line parsing is used for specific documents in a company-managed environment and/or show ways to gain the insights needed.
  • I would like to see ways to anonymize specific data for shared reports without pre-formatting this in a dashboard on which reports could be based.
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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.
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Cisco
Good: Stable system with low error rate Easy to use for simple use cases Bad: UI is not very clear for complex usage Mobile view (when logged in from phone) is bad No library for .net
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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.
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Cisco
When there is an issue, it’s a win if one can easily identify the root cause. To do the same, it should allow the user to dig deep with multiple data points and compare the data and identify the anomaly. In this use case, it’s good to drive from Splunk 011y.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Cisco
Splunk support is very quick and efficient. Pre-sale specialists are very skilled and available.
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Online Training
SolarWinds
It was sufficient to read their documentation and watch videos.
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Cisco
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
SolarWinds
Make sure SNMP and WMI are configured ahead of time
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Cisco
Follow a training before starting.
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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.
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Cisco
Splunk Infrastructure Monitoring provides far superior options for anybody using a complex hybrid multi-cloud environment and allows both your SOC and NOC to work together on the same data while driving their own insights. We found other products are still in the old world view of servers and agents residing together within a single data centre, but modern apps are no longer like this.
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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
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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.
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Cisco
  • Significantly reduced the MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery), which in turn has improved the end-user experience tremendously.
  • Meets compliance requirements of security policies, audit, regulation, and forensics.
  • Helps us to track/manage the resource usage on our cloud instances which has a direct implication on the recurring cost.
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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

Splunk Observability Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Real-time monitoring for public, private and hybrid cloud