Documentation forServer & Application Monitor
Monitoring your applications and environment is a key capability of Hybrid Cloud Observability and is also available in a standalone module, Server & Application Monitor (SAM). Hybrid Cloud Observability and SAM are built on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform.

Understand the application/template relationship

In SAM, an application is a group of component monitors inherited from a template when you assign the template to a node. A component monitor queries for values returned by a process, counter, status, or script. SAM uses received data to display vital statistics concerning the health of the system.

SAM application monitor templates provide blueprints for the applications to be monitored. You can customize templates, and use only the component monitors you need to monitor a specific environment. SAM provides several types of templates:

  • AppInsight applications are predefined templates that provide detailed information about business-critical Active Directory, Exchange, Microsoft IIS, or Microsoft SQL instances. Each AppInsight template is specifically designed to discover and monitor elements of an application dynamically.

  • If you have other business-critical applications, apply one of the other templates included in SAM, as listed in the SAM Application Monitor Template Reference. SolarWinds recommends deploying a single template, customizing it for your environment, and then deploying the edited template on all similar applications. You can also obtain templates in THWACK.

  • For proprietary applications that you need to monitor, you can build custom templates.

    SAM API Poller templates are also available.

If you make a change at the template level, application monitors based on that template are affected. Conversely, if you make a change at the application monitor level, only the individual application is affected. This inheritance relationship is beneficial if you need to make a lot of changes. For example, rather than making one change to 100 applications (and therefore 100 changes), you can change the parent template and that change is inherited by all applications based on that template.