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.

About SolarWinds Platform features in SAM

The SolarWinds Platform is at the core of the SolarWinds IT Management Portfolio. It provides a stable and scalable architecture that includes data collection, processing, storage, and presentation. It also offers common features such as user accounts, views, dashboards, and alerting that you can use across all SolarWinds Platform products, as summarized here.

If you're new to SAM, review this section for details that may be helpful as you explore your environment. To learn more, see the SolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide.

SolarWinds Platform basics

Log in to SAM in a web browser to open the SolarWinds Platform Web Console and get started with SAM. Accessible from any computer connected to the Internet, the SolarWinds Platform Web Console includes views (individual pages) and widgets (informational blocks on views). To learn more, watch Navigating the Web Console.

Manage SolarWinds Platform Web Console user accounts to set user rights, reset passwords, limit access to network segments, and enable authentication with Active Directory.

Review Events to find out what is going on in your environment.

Use the SolarWinds Platform Log Viewer (OLV) to see event, syslogs, and trap messages.

If using deprecated Syslog and Traps features, note that they will be replaced by SolarWinds Platform Log Viewer in a future release, likely in 2022.

Get alerts about issues in your environment. See Explore alerts and reports.

View monitored objects on maps in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Add nodes and applications that you want to monitor

Run the Discovery Wizard to detect servers and applications in your environment so you can decide what to monitor. Available polling methods include WMI, SNMP, ICMP, API, and agents deployed on Windows, Linux, and AIX devices.

Add individual nodes or use Active Directory domain controllers to add nodes automatically.

Manage monitored nodes by editing properties, setting polling methods, toggling monitoring on and off, or muting alerts.

Customize your SAM environment

Customize dashboards, colors, logo, views, widgets, and charts in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. Specify what other users can see on modern dashboards and views, as well as what type of data appears for different objects.

Add widgets, from a list of available widgets, to show the data you need and arrange them in an order that works best for you. Widgets are available for active alerts, events, reports, and much more. You can customize some widget types, such as a chart page or a list of maps, to display the information or nodes you want to monitor in your dashboard.

Create custom properties for nodes and applications. For example, add a custom property to identify IIS nodes.

Create groups and dependencies to organize how monitored data is presented in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. Set up dependencies to represent relationships between network objects.

Set thresholds for monitored metrics. Customize general thresholds or use baselines.

Monitor additional metrics and nodes

Monitor your virtual infrastructure for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, ESXI, ESX, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, and VMware.

Monitor cloud instances and VMs for AWS and Azure.

Monitor container services for Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes, and Apache Mesos.

Monitor hardware health for insight into hardware issues on Dell, HP, HPE ProLiant, IBM, and Cisco UCS devices. You can also monitor Nutanix clusters with Hyper-V and VMware hosts.

Use the Quality of Experience (QoE) dashboard to monitor network traffic.

Expand SolarWinds Platform functionality or scale your deployment

Do you need to scale your deployment? See Scalability Engine Guidelines and review tips to optimize your deployment.

Expand monitoring across low-bandwidth or high-latency network connections with SolarWinds Platform Remote Collectors.

Balance the load on polling engines by specifying nodes to be polled by individual polling engines. See also Manage Additional Polling Engines.

Use SolarWinds High Availability to provide failover protection for your SolarWinds Platform server and Additional Polling Engines (APEs).

Use SolarWinds Platform Remote Collector with SAM.

Troubleshoot your environment

Investigate issues in Performance Analysis (PerfStack™) dashboards.

Use alerts to monitor your environment. See also Reduce alerting noise and learn about generating Service Desk incidents from alerts.

Maintain the SolarWinds Platform database and use the Active Diagnostics tool.

For quick reference, here are additional links to SolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide content: