• Easy to deploy and manage – no expensive consultants required
• Start monitoring in minutes with automated discovery of servers and applications and automated assignment of monitoring templates

Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is so easy to deploy and manage – most customers only need 10% of one full-time employee (FTE) to manage the entire environment.

Within minutes of installation, the application discovery engine automatically scans your servers, discovers applications, and assigns out-of-the-box monitoring templates. No agents are needed, so deployment and maintenance is a breeze and there's no concern about slowing down your network. Additionally, the application discovery engine automatically assigns out-of-the-box monitoring templates including Microsoft^® Exchange, IIS, Active Directory^®, Java^® applications, and Apache^®.

• Monitor server hardware health for blade chassis including HP C7000, HP C3000, and Dell M1000e.
• Monitor server components including Windows^® Mount points, network interfaces, and Windows^® storage performance.
• Get out-of-the box dashboards and best-practice thresholds for all key health and performance metrics. Key metrics include:
  • Hard drive status
  • Array status
  • Array controller status
  • Power supply status
  • Fan status
  • Chassis intrusion status
  • Chassis temperature and/or status
  • Chassis fan speed and/or status
  • CPU temperature and/or status
  • CPU fan speed and/or status
  • Memory module status
  • Voltage regulator status
  • Machine serial number

You aren’t monitoring your servers if you aren’t keeping an eye on hardware health. SolarWinds uniquely provides built-in server monitoring across multiple hardware vendors so you can keep abreast of hardware component failures and performance degradation.

Get access to more than 150 out-of-the-box server & application performance monitors to manage all elements of your critical business applications. Built-in application monitors include:

• Java™ application servers
• Web servers
• Collaboration servers
• Email applications
• Database servers (including in-depth SQL Server^® database monitoring )
• Authentication servers
• Virtual Infrastructures
• Hardware
• Operating systems
• Processes, services & Windows^® event logs

Our Server & Application Performance Management software enables monitoring for all critical server and application elements within the same user interface. Comprehensive visibility into server, virtual machine, and application problems speeds up troubleshooting of performance issues. SolarWinds’ application management and monitoring software provides you with the capability to support monitoring for new apps in minutes!

With AppInsight for Exchange, you can quickly identify and diagnose performance issues that are affecting your Exchange Server. Monitor Exchange servers in your Database Availability Group (DAG) and instantly get notified if an issue arises in a specific mail server. With AppInsight for Exchange, you can automate many Exchange admin tasks, such as:

• Planning for Exchange mailbox database capacity: AppInsight provides quick visibility to mailbox database size to include volume usage, transaction log size, and file size. This helps determine overall capacity constraints. Users can drill into individual mailbox details to determine if a large mailbox should be moved to another database to balance capacity.
• Proactive mailbox management: Quickly view top mailbox offenders – largest mailboxes or percent quota used - and drill into historical mail usage patterns to include attachment sizes and synced mobile devices. Quickly search for mailboxes by user. Alert users directly when they are about to exceed size threshold with actionable information – size of attachments, what to do, etc.
• Removal of dormant mailboxes: View dormant/inactive mailboxes to free up database capacity (great for migrant users like education institutions, companies that use contractors, or large companies).
• Alert on Exchange server performance: SolarWinds Exchange monitoring tool provides details on database copy status, failover alerts, replication status/alerts, and other performance metrics to include storage I/O.

AppInsight for Exchange quickly determines the root cause of Exchange bottlenecks by leveraging built-in expert knowledge within Server & Application Monitor.

In addition, Exchange admins can leverage the automated alerting mechanism built-in with AppInsight for Exchange. Setup alerts to instantly notify end-users that their quota is nearly reached. With SolarWinds application monitoring tool, you can customize alerts with actionable information like the number and size of the attachments, and instructions on how the user can reduce their mailbox size. With sustained thresholds , users can receive daily alerts until their mailbox size has been reduced. This automation can save Exchange admins several hours and leaves the responsibility of size reduction on the user.

AppInsight for Exchange provides IT and Exchange admins with a range of information to monitor Exchange Server:

• Database copy status
• Database file size
• Mailboxes processed/second
• Users by messages sent and by quota used
• RPC requests & latency
• Connection count
• DAG details
• Database cache size
• Exchange event logs
• Replication status
• I/O Database latency

• Visualize database status & capacity, active user connections, SQL Server error logs & SQL agent job status
• Find expensive queries by CPU time & average duration
• Visualize SQL storage metrics to identify performance issues
• Determine the cause of performance issues & get expert advice for issue remediation

AppInsight for SQL helps you quickly identify and troubleshoot SQL performance problems. With AppInsight, you have instant visibility into long-running queries and can see actual query details, so you can notify developers of the exact query issue that is causing the application performance problem.

In addition to long-running queries, AppInsight for SQL provides information on:

• Database & log file size
• Application details
• Buffer manager statistics
• Cache
• Active user connections
• Latches & locks
• Memory
• Paging
• Sessions
• SQL agent job status
• SQL event log message details
• Disk performance

• Calculate thresholds from baseline data for 24/7 system performance
• Warnings & critical thresholds calculated at 2 & 3 standard deviations from normal performance
• Configure alerts based on correlated events, sustained conditions, complex state combinations, resource dependencies & more
• Built-in alert delivery & responses include email, pages, SNMP traps, text-to-speech, syslog messages & launch of external apps
• Integration with Alert Central ™ automatically routes alerts based on alert type & on-call schedule

Calculating thresholds from historical performance data saves time in adjusting thresholds and provides for more intelligent alerts. The Baseline Threshold Calculator automatically gathers baseline data and calculates warning and critical thresholds according to each workload baseline.

SolarWinds application monitoring tool provides four tiers of thresholds that can be established (good, warning, critical, and down) to help you quickly assess the difference between a system that’s up and performing poorly and a system that’s about to fail.

In addition, SolarWinds SAM lets you intelligently map applications to their virtual or physical servers. With this information, you can configure intelligent alerts that recognize app and server dependencies, allowing you to receive a single critical alert if one app or server goes down – instead of an onslaught of alerts for each of the affected servers and apps. Sustained alerts intelligently alerts you based on the number of consecutive polls, or X out of Y polls for determining warning and critical states.

Our application & server monitor lets you quickly and easily configure powerful alert engines to respond to hundreds of different scenarios, including multiple condition checks. These advanced application alerting capabilities help you recognize and correct issues before your users experience performance degradation or availability issues.

Additionally, our server & application performance monitoring software automatically escalates alerts until a problem is resolved or acknowledged. And now with integration to Alert Central, alerts can be routed to the right person, determined by alert status and on-call.

• Monitor internal and SaaS based applications running across all servers in your environment
• Determine key Web service availability, latency, and validate the content returned as a result of that query by monitoring JavaScript ^® Object Notation (JSON)
• Check the overall health of JSON services running across your servers
• Easily monitor internal applications by querying the back-end server using the JSON API method

Slow and unresponsive Web service APIs affects application performance. SolarWinds application monitoring software notifies you immediately when there’s a failure or malfunction with your JSON Web service. Get a detailed report through the Web-based reporting console about the problem and diagnose the issue before it affects several end-users.

• View recent Windows event logs, filtered by user requirements
• Filter events by log source, log type & event level
• Within the Event Viewer, you can proactively monitor & be alerted when certain Windows event logs occur
• Monitor Windows event logs by specific criteria like event ID, key words, user name, event type & log source
• Scans event logs on a Windows sever & counts the number of events that match the user-specified rule

• From the Real-Time Process Explorer, identify resource hogs and end processes that are causing a drain on your server.
• Server management is enhanced with the ability to manage the services of your monitored Windows nodes. Simply click on the Service Control Manager to view information on stopped or running services and take action to start, stop or restart services.
• Reboot servers from the server management tools area of the Node Details page.

With our application & server monitor, you can monitor across server critical resources, including server health monitoring, operating system performance, service health, and process status. You can also perform server management from the same award-winning user interface.

• Visualize IT asset inventory in the Asset Inventory Dashboard for both physical & virtual assets
• View driver software inventory information like device name, publisher, version & driver date
• Report on hard drive inventory including model, serial number & total storage capacity
• See all installed software inventory using Windows^® Installer
• Create custom properties for asset information like in-service data, PO number, purchase date & purchase price

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor provides robust, automated IT asset inventory management to help save you time when tracking virtual and physical asset depreciation and gathering information about your entire stock of software and hardware assets.

• Scales to organizations of all sizes
• Enterprise extensions enable distributed polling and deliver unified visibility into geographically distributed networks
• Remote pollers provide deployment flexibility for IT managed services software deployments and distributed environments

SolarWinds’ products are designed to scale to organizations of all sizes, and Server & Application Monitor is proven to scale to thousands of logical endpoints. This is beneficial for organizations trying to reduce hardware, software, and labor costs by using a consolidated monitoring solution.

For companies that have distributed environments and require multiple servers and polling engines, SolarWinds provides an Enterprise Operations Console to aggregate multiple server instances over a distributed environment. With this, you can have a single interactive dashboard that displays your enterprise-wide server and application health monitored by distributed servers.

• Quickly pinpoint the source of performance issues with our integrated cross-product interface that is LUCID: Logical, Useable, Customizable, Interactive, & Drill-down
• View trends, capacity, and performance in easy-to-use dashboards that can be customized to your needs

Most software vendors will tell you that their software is easy to use. At SolarWinds, we are taking “easy-to-use” to a whole new level with our LUCID Interface. Based on feedback from thousands of IT pros just like you, we have identified and implemented five critical interface attributes that simplify troubleshooting of application and server performance issues.

• Logical – The SolarWinds LUCID interface presents application and server performance information in a logical and intuitive manner to help you quickly make informed decisions. The interface precisely presents the information you need to quickly determine if your applications and servers are suffering from poor performance.
• Useable – Provides a tremendous breadth of information in every view, yet the interface is very useable. Administrator tasks have all been designed to allow you to maintain the system with just a few clicks of your mouse.
• Customizable – Rearrange web resources, Top 10 views, modify time periods, and customize resources to meet your specific environment. Customize maps to match so you can quickly discover any performance related issues.
• Interactive – Automatically updates your application and server’s latest performance indicators to help you quickly determine if any issues could potentially impact users.
• Drill-down – View detailed information on virtually every application, server, performance indicator, and status link by simply drilling into respective hot performance indicators.

• Keep a vigilant eye on distributed applications by grouping applications, services, and more into business service views
• Group objects by category, such as location, so you can quickly determine where application issues occur
• Perform basic root cause analysis

Finding the root cause of an issue can be like finding a specific block in an unsorted box full of Legos^®! But now you can simplify application monitoring and root cause analysis in large complex IT environments by grouping servers or applications by virtually any category.

Using the dynamic service group functionality in SolarWinds’ application & server monitoring software, you can monitor and aggregate views of server and application groups by service (such as email), location, or department - making it easier to isolate where an issue is occurring.

Integration with other SolarWinds products allows you to add even more components into these business service views, including IP SLA operations, network devices, synthetic transactions, and more.

• Delivers built-in expert guidance on what to monitor, why to monitor it, and optimal thresholds for popular applications
• Provides the research and information you need – right at your fingertips

When you monitor a server or application, you need to know what stats are important and what they mean. What are the optimal thresholds? What does it mean when a certain group of stats increase at the same time?

SolarWinds SAM delivers this best-practice knowledge in expert templates that provide the research and information you need. Application monitoring tools from SolarWinds provides the smarts on what to monitor, why it’s important to monitor, and provides recommendations for threshold values.

• Delivers built-in expert guidance on what to monitor, why to monitor it, and optimal thresholds for popular applications
• Provides the research and information you need – right at your fingertips

When you monitor a server or application, you need to know what stats are important and what they mean. What are the optimal thresholds? What does it mean when a certain group of stats increase at the same time?

SolarWinds SAM delivers this best-practice knowledge in expert templates that provide the research and information you need. Application monitoring tools from SolarWinds provides the smarts on what to monitor, why it’s important to monitor, and provides recommendations for threshold values.

• Gain valuable real-time insight into what’s affecting your servers performance
• Details such as the name of the user executing the process and the command line arguments of the process are provided

Ever have a server spike and need to know what process is causing the sudden surge?

With the Real Time Process Explorer you can launch in context from the effected node (for WMI and SNMP monitored nodes) to find the pesky process. This feature is similar to the Processes tab found in the Windows Task Manager.

The advantage of the Real-Time Process Explorer is that you don’t need to physically, or remotely, log in to a particular machine and run the Task Manager to retrieve that machine's vital statistics. Information for both monitored and unmonitored processes is displayed directly through Server & Application Manager using this feature.

• Simulates the performance your end-users experience
• Delivers out-of-the-box user experience monitors for email, databases, and core IT services such as HTTP and FTP

SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) enables you to measure application performance from an end user’s perspective with out-of-the-box SaaS monitoring and support for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, DHCP, DNS, LDAP, POP3, IMAP4, MAPI, Microsoft^® SQL Server^®, Oracle^®, IBM DB2^®, and other ODBC databases. Finally, you can get a heads up on problems and ensure that your users are happy with the performance of the applications they rely on.

Consider the case of an online retailer. Its website is its lifeblood. Ensuring that web pages are available and performing well is critical, as downtime means immediate loss of revenue. Application performance monitoring ensures that web servers are up and running, providing immediate alerts if a host server crashes, a server-side error occurs or a broken link is found.

Additionally, an application monitoring tool like SolarWinds SAM can verify that web content is being served up correctly, including checking for a specific price on a particular product page. It can even notify an administrator of unauthorized changes to the pricing structure on the web site. Together, these features ensure not only the health, but also the accuracy of the web infrastructure.

• View Syslog data, traps, events, and alerts in a consolidated view
• Receive, process, forward, and send Syslog and SNMP trap messages
• Set up alerts based on Syslog and SNMP trap messages
• Filter messages on severity/facility rules
• Forward Syslog messages to retain the original source IP address

The Central Event Console in the application monitoring software is your central view for all of the notification messages about the performance of your applications and servers. This consolidated view allows you to quickly troubleshoot performance issues by analyzing SNMP trap and Syslog data from a single interface, instead of by polling various machines. Events and alerts are also routed to this interface, allowing you to perform manual event correlation and basic root cause analysis.

• Easily generate, customize & share Web-based reports
• Over 100 out-of-the-box reports help you monitor availability, performance & utilization statistics, as well as project future trends & capacity needs

Server & Application Monitor offers 100+ out-of-the-box reports to show server and application availability and performance. All reports can be easily modified, and custom reports can be easily created. A simple interface facilitates modification of built-in reports, as well as easy creation of custom reports with the Web console-based Report Writer or any standard SQL reporting service. Reports can be tailored for a department or recipient, and automated report delivery is offered via email.

• Perform problem analysis on historical performance data
• Report on hardware, server and application inventory, capacity & performance
• Report on server & app availability for the current month, last month or year
• Report on server warranty status
• Demonstrate server & application availability & abidance to SLAs

• Extend Microsoft^® System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) visibility by integrating alerts for applications and network elements through the SolarWinds System Center Management Pack
• View performance monitoring data for network devices, applications, storage, and servers in a single unified console
• Visually track, alert, and report on the overall health of the application infrastructure
• Quickly determine whether a problem stems from an application error or a network, storage, or hardware issue

When used together, SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor, Storage Manager, and Network Performance Monitor deliver an end-to-end view into network, server, storage, and application performance through an integrated Web console. Not only will you get a single pane of glass for all of your monitoring data, you’ll also love the intuitive charts, graphs, tables, alerting, top 10 lists, and reporting views that Server & Application Monitor shares with other SolarWinds products.

By delivering an integrated, unified console, our application & server monitoring software enables you to visually track the overall health of the application and server infrastructure and quickly troubleshoot issues by identifying whether the problem stems from an application, server, storage, or network issue.

With SolarWinds SAM, you won’t have to run multiple point products or toggle between screens to view the application and network data you need to troubleshoot problems.

Using the SolarWinds Management Pack, you can also visualize application alerts coming from Server & Application Monitor, Network Performance Monitor, and Web Performance Monitor in System Center Operations Manager 2012. There are several benefits to adding Server & Application Monitor to your SCOM environment:

• Save time creating custom application monitors using the SolarWinds Wizard.
• Deploy monitoring for new applications in just minutes. SolarWinds provides built-in monitoring for more than 150 applications. With Server & Application Monitor, you don’t need to seek out multiple Management Packs from various vendors—you can get all the application support you need with SolarWinds.

• Leverage your existing Microsoft Active Directory^® user accounts for Server & Application Monitor login credentials
• Customize accounts to display specific types of network data for a subset of users
• Create priority groups for users who belong to multiple AD groups so you can ensure the appropriate permissions are delivered to specific users

Leverage your existing Microsoft Active Directory user accounts to allow users to log into SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM). Users and groups can automatically login using custom username/password or optionally use an AD pass-through login to bypass the login screens altogether.

As an administrator, you can customize each account and specify which types of information are displayed within the application monitoring software interface for a particular department, group, or user. This ensures that only the people who need to view specific information have access to it, providing an increased level of internal security.

For example, our application & server monitoring software can be configured so that the server team only sees the servers on the network, while the Texas IT group has a view limited to the geography for which they are responsible. Even better, you can further customize these views by creating a page layout specific to an account—changing the color palette and modifying toolbars. Of course, this functionality also allows you to simplify views for business executives to pretty pictures and single syllable words!

• SAM Mobile Views enable you to keep a vigilant eye on your server, app, and hardware heath from wherever you are
• Mobile Views work with iPhone, iPad, Android, and Blackberry
• Add SolarWinds Mobile Admin and put over 40 IT technologies in your mobile device including SolarWinds Orion, Exchange, Active Directory, Windows Server, HyperVisors, and more

Increase your productivity from both inside and outside the office. Whether you are in a meeting or at a coffee shop, with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) Mobile Views, you can monitor server and application performance from your mobile browser. Supported browsers include iPhone, Blackberry, and Android. You can also acknowledge alerts. Or, for even more mobile administration power, check out SolarWinds Mobile Admin and put over 40 IT technologies in your mobile device including SolarWinds Orion, Exchange, Active Directory, Windows Server, and more.

• Easily add and remotely monitor any WMI performance counters to identify and resolve application issues before users are impacted
• Quickly build your own application monitors using out-of-the-box templates
• Run Nagios scripts natively (no conversion required) within Server & Application Monitor, making the most of the time and effort you have already invested in your scripts
• Schedule, run, report, and receive alerts on your custom Windows^®, Linux^®, or UNIX^® scripts

SolarWinds SAM makes it easy to extend out-of-the-box monitors, using WMI performance monitors, the Application Monitor Wizard, and script monitoring.

• Adding WMI monitors is as simple as clicking on a server icon, browsing the list of available counters, and selecting the ones you would like to add. Some common WMI performance monitors provided by the application monitoring tool include:
  - Windows^® Disk Queue Length
  - Exchange Mailbox Receive Queue
  - SQL Server^® Buffer Cache-Hit Ratio
  - Windows Page Writes/sec
  
• Using a simple three-step process, you can quickly create a new application monitor with SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor. First, choose from a list of available application monitor templates, including common applications like Exchange 2007, Apache^®, Java^® apps, or SQL Server^® 2008. Next, select the nodes to which you would like to apply your template. Finally, enter the necessary template credentials to apply the template to your node and begin instantly monitoring your application!
  Application performance monitors work on Windows^®, Linux^®, and UNIX servers and can include component monitors for services, processes, ports, scripts, and WMI performance counters.
• Server & Application Monitor runs your native Nagios scripts so there is no break in your productivity. You can continue to leverage the time and effort you have invested in these scripts, while experiencing the ease-of-use of managing applications.
• If you have written your own Windows, Linux, or UNIX scripts to monitor application health indicators that aren’t available through SNMP or WMI, you can integrate these into SolarWinds SAM. With just a few clicks, you can schedule their execution and report and alert on their output. Some common script functions include:
  - Count files in a Windows^® directory
  - Log into a web site and measure response time
  - Test for the presence of a particular Windows event log
  - Measure the total uptime of a Linux server
  - Check whether a file has been changed.