Documentation forServer & Application Monitor
Monitoring your applications and environment is a key capability of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly Hybrid Cloud Observability) and is available in the Essentials edition. Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is also available in a standalone module.

How alerts work in SAM

An alert is notification that there is a problem with a monitored element. The SolarWinds Platform includes hundreds of predefined alerts for common problems such as a nodes or applications going down, SSL certificates expiring, and websites failing.

Many predefined alerts are enabled by default, so you are notified about issues as soon as you use Discovery to find servers and applications in your environment and add them to the SolarWinds Platform database. Here are some examples of how SAM utilizes the alerting feature in the SolarWinds Platform:

  • Alerting on an application: SAM includes predefined alerts that can notify you if the status of an application changes (for example: Up, Down, or Unknown) based on whether a component monitor reached a warning or critical threshold.

  • Alerting on a component: If you create an alert for each component monitor in a SAM application monitor template, you will receive one alert for each component that exceeds a threshold. Alerting on a component monitor can be beneficial if you have custom scripts where you must be notified if the output of the script crosses a specific threshold.
  • Monitored objects, such as nodes and applications, must exist in the SolarWinds Platform database before creating or configuring alerts.

SolarWinds recommends that you identify who will receive warning or critical alerts.

By default, alerts appear in the Active Alerts widget on the SolarWinds Platform Home page.

To see all alerts, click the All Active Alerts button in the Active Alerts widget, or click Alerts & Activity > Alerts. When the All Active Alerts page appears, you can:

  • Acknowledge an alert that you are working on
  • Click any alert to open the Alert Details page for more information
  • Click Manage Alerts to enable/disable, add or edit any alert.

You can create your own alerts, either by duplicating and editing a predefined alert, or by creating a custom alert. Alerting is very powerful and can be complex, with multiple trigger conditions, reset conditions, and actions.

To learn more about alerts, see:

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?