SolarWinds SAM Features

Spotlight on SolarWinds SAMSpotlight on Solarwinds SAM's Features

One of SolarWinds' SAM (Server & Application Monitor) best features is custom application monitoring.  More good news, SAM supports multi-vendor hardware monitoring.

Download your free trial of SolarWinds SAM

Spotlight on SolarWinds SAM

Multi-vendor Hardware Monitoring

Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is designed to provide multi-vendor hardware support from for IBM System-X, Dell PowerEdge, HP Proliant and VMware ESX/ESXi hosts.  No longer do you need to view multiple server vendor consoles to see hardware health, you can see hardware health for all major vendors right along ide application and operating system performance.

Custom Application Monitoring

It is most satisfying to click on a server icon, then select monitors such as:

  • Windows Disk Queue Length
  • Windows Page Writes/sec

Also Exchange and SQL have their own monitors:

  • Exchange Mailbox Receive Queue
  • SQL Server Buffer Cache-Hit Ratio

Server & Application Monitor supports nearly 150 apps out of the box but if your application is not one of them, you can create your own application monitor very quickly. All you do is select the node, discover the performance counters available (using WMI, SNMP, VMware, JMX, etc.) and then select the counters you need.  Identify application problems before the users start complaining.  It's satisfying to create your own application monitors using the wizards that SAM provides.Download Solarwinds Server Application Monitor

Reasons for Experimenting with SAM

You need to troubleshoot a recurring network or server problem.  It’s the root cause you seek, not just a work-around.

Another reason for evaluating SolarWinds Application Monitor is that you are want to find out more about dependent services, both on the same machine, and how failure of one network server impacts others.

You are curious to comparing your view of what’s going on in your network.  Perhaps you want to take stock of your resources, or set a baseline before making changes.  With SAM’s performance counters you can scrutinize your computer empire.  Guy bets that the dashboards will display an important service that you did not know existed.

Server & Application Monitor provides an intelligent Wizard, which guides through not only selecting the performance metrics, but also setting the thresholds.  Incidentally, it does this by using WMI and SNMP.  You can then employ the resulting template to all your application servers.  For more details see this SolarWinds video.

Video Explaining How to Create Custom Templates

Download Solarwinds Server Application Monitor

How to Get Started with SolarWinds' SAM

For a powerful software application, SAM is surprisingly easy to setup.  The reason for this is that the installation is automated, in particular, if you haven't got IIS or SQL installed, or you don't have the right version of .Net Framework, no problem, the setup wizard takes care of the chores for you.

Review of SAM Application Performance Monitor

SolarWinds offers a free trial of Server and Application Monitor

Pre-Requisites for SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM)

Hardware Requirements
As for hardware, there are no extra memory or processor requirements for this SolarWinds monitor, and the amount of free diskspace install needs is only 50 MB.

Software Requirements
The operating system should be Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 R2.  As mentioned earlier, setup takes care of installing IIS, SQL, SNMP and .Net framework 3.5.1 or later.  Naturally in a production network you will want to configure SNMP and SQL before you install SAM.

Log & Event Manager (LEM)

If you are looking for an application that can provide automatic reaction to events, then investigate LEM.  In addition to analyzing syslogs, anti-virus software and logs from the servers themselves, LEM can also help you achieve IT compliance, for example CISP or FERPA.  See more on SolarWinds’ Log & Event Manager (LEM)

Download Solarwinds Server Application Monitor

See another review of SolarWinds SAM ยป

Summary Spotlight on SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor

Once you have installed your trial copy of SolarWinds' SAM (Server & Application Monitor) take the time to create custom application templates.  Another of SAM's best features is support for multi-vendor hardware monitoring.

SolarWinds Also Have a Free tool: Server Health Monitor

Server Health Monitor is another free tool from SolarWinds.  It is a chopped-down version of SAM, which displays the performance of server components such as power supply, temperature, battery and fan speed.  See more on Server Health Monitor

Full Reviews of the SolarWinds Licensed Family of Applications

Here are Guy’s comprehensive evaluations, comments and recommendations for SolarWinds licensed products.  Each application offers a 30 day trial of a fully functional program, so check out the download links provided.

Review of SolarWinds NPM   • SolarWinds SAM Review (Apps)   • AppInsight for Exchange

SolarWinds NCM (Configuration)   • Web Performance Monitor  • Performance Monitor

User Device Tracker    • Application Monitor  • Orion SLA Monitor  • SolarWinds IPAM 4   • Home