Introduction to SolarWinds SAM

SolarWinds SAM gives you the tools to monitor your servers and applications through a single web console. It provides custom collections of templates, application monitors, and alerts to intelligently monitor application status and issues. Monitor over 200 application types including application servers, authentication servers, database servers, and more.

With SAM, you can monitor public, private, or hybrid environments in a variety of ways, including:

• AppStack: Use interactive visual mapping to gain an in-depth perspective through the entire environment to help identify the root cause of performance and availability issues.
• Performance Analysis (PerfStack) dashboards: Correlate historical and real-time data from multiple SolarWinds products and entity types in a single view for in-depth troubleshooting
• Cloud monitoring: Monitor IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS applications and servers on-premises, with optional agents for cloud services like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, and more. Hybrid cloud monitoring allows you to keep track of your applications, even when they move from on-premises to the cloud.
• Container monitoring: View, track, and correlate key performance metrics, including CPU, memory, and uptime, for Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and Apache Mesos containers.
• API pollers: If you can access an external REST API, you can use the API Poller feature to collect data from modern application stacks and display it in SAM dashboards.
• AppInsight applications: Monitor Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, IIS, and SQL servers and display metrics, status, and issues to manage and maintain applications and servers.
• Application monitor templates: Combine process monitors, port availability, and performance counters to assess every aspect of an application, including status and overall health.
• Application dependencies: Detect how applications and nodes interact to ensure important data for key applications is monitored.
• Server infrastructure monitoring: Discover and store IT Asset Inventory data on your servers, while monitoring hardware health to ensure server and application uptime.

SAM is part of the SolarWinds SolarWinds Platform, making it easy to add other modules to expand your monitoring capabilities. There are many ways to integrate SAM with other SolarWinds Platform products, including:

• The Systems Management Bundle includes SAM and the following modules:
  • Virtualization Manager (VMAN): Gain insight into performance, capacity, and usage of your virtual infrastructure, including hosts, VMs, clusters, containers, virtual storage area networks (vSANs), and other datastores.
  • Storage Resource Monitor (SRM): Provide performance monitoring and alerting across all your storage arrays.
  • Web Performance Monitor (WPM): Find and fix both web and SaaS application performance issues before users are affected. When used with SAM, WPM can map the relationship between web transactions and the supporting infrastructure, allowing you to see overall status details in one place. For example, SAM may show that Microsoft IIS is running, but WPM can notify you if sites take too long to load. After you remedy the situation, WPM can validate that the user transactions are operating successfully.
• The Server Performance & Configuration Bundle combines SAM with Server Configuration Monitor (SCM) to offer performance monitoring and change detection in a unified solution.
• The Log and Systems Performance Pack pairs SAM with Log Analyzer so you can aggregate, search, and chart log data while tracking system performance.
• The Application Performance Optimization Pack includes SAM and Database Performance Analyzer (DPA).
  • Add response-time analysis to see the root cause of application issues.
  • Use historic analysis and dynamic baselines to spot SQL tuning problems.
• IT Operations Manager combines SAM with VMAN and SRM.

Did you know that when an alert indicates that an application failed, you can use SolarWinds IPAM to quickly determine if a broken or missing DNS record is at fault?

Ready to get started with SAM?

Click here to download a free trial. After installing SAM, see the SAM Getting Started Guide. If you're already using SAM, you can easily add other products from the My Deployment page in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

SolarWinds recommends using the latest version of SAM and the SolarWinds Platform, including hotfixes and service releases.