Documentation forServer & Application Monitor

Introduction to SAM

Server & Application Monitor, or SolarWinds SAM, gives you the tools to monitor your applications and environment through a single web console. SAM includes custom collections of templates, application monitors, and alerts to intelligently monitor application status and issues. Monitor over 250 application types including application servers, authentication servers, database servers, and more.

In addition to describing how to use SAM, this product guide contains recommended best practices and troubleshooting tips. If you're new to SAM, we recommend reviewing the SAM Getting Started Guide first.

Server & Application Monitor runs on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform. See the SolarWinds Platform Product Guide to learn about common features, such as adding devices, managing users, customizing your deployment, or viewing monitored devices on maps.

Download the PDF: SAM Product Guide (formerly known as Administrator Guide)

Discover your environment

With SAM, you can easily discover your servers and applications, then monitor public, private, or hybrid environments in a variety of ways.

Monitor your environment with AppStack

Use interactive visual mapping in AppStack to gain an in-depth perspective through the entire environment to help identify the root cause of performance and availability issues.

Analyze SAM metrics in PerfStack

Correlate historical and real-time data from multiple SolarWinds products and entity types in a single Performance Analysis (PerfStack) dashboard for in-depth troubleshooting.

Monitor cloud-based instances and VMs

Monitor your cloud infrastructure including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS applications and servers on-premises, with optional agents for cloud services like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and more. Hybrid cloud monitoring allows you to keep track of your applications, even when they move from on-premises to the cloud.

Monitor container services

View, track, and correlate key performance metrics, including CPU, memory, and uptime, for Docker, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes containers.

Monitor metrics with 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.

Monitor with AppInsight applications

Use AppInsight applications to monitor Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, IIS, and SQL servers and display metrics, status, and issues to manage and maintain applications and servers.

Monitor using Application Templates and built-in Component monitors

Combine process monitors, port availability, and performance counters to assess every aspect of an application, including status and overall health. SAM includes hundreds of application monitor templates and component monitors out of the box. You can also create custom application monitor templates and script monitors.

Monitor application dependencies

Detect how applications and nodes interact to ensure important data for key applications are monitored.

Monitor your server infrastructure

Discover and store IT Asset Inventory data on your servers, while monitoring hardware health to ensure server and application uptime.

Manage credentials in SAM

Use SAM and SolarWinds Platform to manage credentials related to your monitors.

Learn more

Here are some additional learning resources for SAM: