IT management can feel like a battlefield. There are too many alerts, scattered tools, and a never-ending to-do list.
SolarWinds promises to bring order to that chaos by simplifying IT monitoring, security, and network management in one platform.
That’s a big promise, especially when the average company uses over a dozen observability tools across hybrid and multi-cloud setups, resulting in fragmented visibility and reactive firefighting.
But does it deliver? In this review, we’ll explore where SolarWinds excels, where it falls short, and whether it’s the right fit for your team.
Is it as intuitive as they say? Can it truly unify your tech stack? And should the 2020 breach still be a dealbreaker? Let’s find out.
TLDR;
SolarWinds is a comprehensive IT management platform covering everything from monitoring and observability to help desk and ticketing.
Its modular and scalable design makes it well-suited for enterprises and hybrid IT environments.
AI-powered automation and AIOps tools help reduce manual workloads and improve system reliability.
Customer support remains a pain point, with frequent user complaints about slow or unhelpful responses.
Pricing is flexible but can become costly, especially when scaling or unlocking advanced features.
Best suited for midsize to large organizations seeking an all-in-one solution—not ideal for budget-conscious teams.
The 2020 security breach still casts a shadow, but SolarWinds has made significant improvements in response.
Via SolarWinds
SolarWinds’ tagline, “Bring IT all together,” captures its core value: a unified platform that combines IT monitoring, observability, and service management in one place.
This centralized approach is especially valuable for managing both on-premises and cloud-based environments.
The platform is trusted by industry giants like Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Walmart, and McDonald’s and has been adopted by 86% of Fortune 500 companies. Founded in 1999 as a web-based network monitoring tool, SolarWinds has since evolved into one of the most widely used IT management solutions on the market.
SolarWinds is modular and scalable. It supports self-hosted and SaaS deployment options and is suitable for varied security and compliance needs.
For instance, the self-hosted version of SolarWinds Observability is built to optimize performance and ensure availability behind the firewall, while the SaaS version offers cloud-native flexibility.
Self-hosted options also integrate with other self-hosted SolarWinds solutions, and SaaS options generally deliver deeper monitoring for custom and cloud-based apps and user experience.
Within the SolarWinds platform, you get various solutions for different aspects of IT management. These include
Network performance monitoring: Real-time insights into network health and performance.
Infrastructure monitoring and observability: Unified monitoring for hybrid, cloud, and multi-cloud environments.
Application performance management: Deep visibility into application responsiveness and user experience.
Database performance analyzer: Detailed analysis of database operations to optimize performance.
IT asset management: Streamlined tracking and management of hardware and software assets.
Enterprise help desk solutions: Centralized service delivery to improve internal support efficiency.
IT automation solutions: Automated processes to reduce manual workloads and improve reliability.
Cloud migration and observability: Tools explicitly designed for seamless transitions to cloud environments.
That looks like a complete solution, right? Is there anything that comes close?
When evaluating SolarWinds, several competitors come to mind: Workwize, Datadog, Zabbix, New Relic, and ManageEngine.
What sets SolarWinds apart is its end-to-end coverage. It spans network, server, application, database, log, security, and IT service management—all within one integrated platform.
Here’s how some of the key alternatives measure up:
Workwize specializes in hardware lifecycle management, offering full visibility from procurement to disposal. It also includes an ITSM suite that helps employees resolve hardware issues quickly and efficiently.
Datadog excels in infrastructure, application, and log monitoring, with strong capabilities in cloud-native environments.
Zabbix is a free, open-source monitoring solution known for its flexibility and customizability. It is best suited for teams with technical know-how.
New Relic focuses on application performance monitoring and digital experience, making it ideal for teams that prioritize front-end and user experience.
ManageEngine OpManager delivers robust network monitoring and management features, often favored by mid-sized organizations for its affordability and breadth.
| Platform | Core Strength | Ease of Use | Integrations | Pricing Model |
|
Workwize |
Full lifecycle IT asset management |
★★★★★ |
★★★★★ |
Subscription |
|
SolarWinds |
Unified IT monitoring + observability |
★★★★☆ |
★★★★☆ |
Flexible, can be pricey |
|
Datadog |
Cloud-native monitoring, analytics |
★★★★☆ |
★★★★★ |
Subscription |
|
Zabbix |
Open-source monitoring |
★★★☆☆ |
★★★★☆ |
Free (open-source) |
|
New Relic |
Application observability |
★★★★☆ |
★★★★☆ |
Subscription |
|
ManageEngine |
Network monitoring, service desk tools |
★★★★☆ |
★★★★☆ |
Tiered (Free–Pro) |
Let’s start with one of SolarWinds’ most popular, revered solutions: the IT Service Management platform. This flagship product from the SolarWinds suite promises to be an all-in-one solution for all ITSM needs. Well, let’s find out if that's true.
When it comes to IT service management, SolarWinds covers the basics well. You get everything you’d expect—incident, problem, change, and service request management—in one easy-to-navigate console.
The built-in asset management is solid, too. We had no trouble tracking hardware and software, and the CMDB integration kept everything connected and up to date.
It also gives you a clear, centralized view of your IT setup, making life much easier when dealing with changes or troubleshooting issues.
The AI and automation features in SolarWinds are good. Unlike some clunky implementations, this one feels useful without being overbearing. It helps IT teams automate repetitive tasks and gives end-users quick access to self-help tools—including a virtual agent.
Some generative features include auto-generated incident summaries, responses, and guided solutions. The runbooks stand out, too—they walk agents through workflows with clear steps, approvals, and notifications.
Here’s what one SolarWinds user had to say about their experience with the service desk:
Via Reddit
Rating: 4.8/5
The SolarWinds monitoring and observability platform offers end-to-end visibility across networks, infrastructure, applications, databases, and user experience. You can see your entire IT stack in one place.
The best part about this system is how it brings everything together in one place. It has full-stack visibility, so we can see how issues in one part, like a slow database, affect the whole system.
The platform is powered by AIOps, which uses AI and ML for anomaly detection and alert management. This reduces alert fatigue and accelerates issue resolution.
We also liked the flexible deployment options. You can choose self-hosted for behind-the-firewall control or SaaS for cloud-native flexibility. The platform integrates with other SolarWinds products and third-party tools via APIs and out-of-the-box integrations. It supports open-source frameworks and cloud providers like AWS and Azure.
It is a solid observability and monitoring tool, even without all the other SolarWinds integrated perks.
Rating: 4.5/5
SolarWinds’s database observability platform is not linked to its IT monitoring platform. This is good because it separates your IT infrastructure from your database management.
We liked how this solution supports many databases, including SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Azure SQL, Amazon Aurora, and more. This means you don’t have to worry about compatibility with your IT stack.
The database observability platform is again separated into three offerings.
Solarwinds Observability SaaS simplifies the management of cloud-native and hybrid IT environments.
SolarWinds SQL Sentry: a tool to quickly find and fix SQL Server performance problems.
SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer—a cross-platform database monitoring and management software built for SQL query performance monitoring, analysis, and tuning.
Each tool can be used independently, highlighting the significant advantage of SolarWinds' modularity.
We also like how it provides clear, standardized, real-time views of resource usage, wait times, and database performance in intuitive dashboards.
It is possible to evaluate the performance of top queries over time, link query responses or actions to system metrics, and identify abnormal behaviors along with potential contributing factors.
Rating: 4.5/5
SolarWinds offers multiple support tiers, but user feedback suggests mixed experiences.
On the SolarWinds support page, support branches out into different kinds. There’s premium support, federal support, and deployment services to help you set things up, which can appear confusing.
Although we didn’t have to contact support during our time with the platform, users all over the internet had sour experiences with the support team. These vary from frustrating to downright terrible.
Via Reddit
Via Reddit
For what it's worth, few other tools provide such comprehensive IT observability and monitoring if you can tolerate the shaky support. Another user on Reddit echoes our sentiment:
Via Reddit
No discussion of SolarWinds is complete without addressing their past security breach.
For those unaware, SolarWinds was subject to a massive cyberattack, the Sunburst incident, in December 2020.
The attack exploited SolarWinds Orion, which was trusted even by US government agencies for managing networks and systems. The hacker cleverly injected Trojans into the system over a period of time until they were detected after many months.
The hit was brutal, too—an average of 11% of annual revenue for affected firms, according to IronNet’s 2021 report, with some pegging costs at $12 million per organization.
SolarWinds immediately released patches and tightened security all over. But what’s done is done. To this day, many avoid SolarWinds due to this incident, and many jumped ship once they knew about the incident.
Via Reddit
SolarWinds has significantly improved security despite past breaches, making it as secure as other leading IT platforms today.
Via Reddit
Apart from platform-wide security with rigorous access controls and encryption, it follows all the guidelines described in ESF and EO 14028. The organization is ISO 27001 certified and SOC 2 compliant.
In our experience, SolarWinds is relatively user-friendly.
All their products follow a similar design language, which is easy on the eyes and easy to navigate.
Of course, there will be a learning curve when you are new to the platform, but it's not fundamentally challenging to work with.
The SolarWinds Platform Web Console is also quite intuitive. The unified interactive dashboard lets you monitor databases and diagnose issues.
The documentation, including installation guides and user manuals, is extensive. It is easy for IT admins to set up and configure, especially for self-hosted deployments.
SolarWinds pricing varies from product to product. The Service Desk costs $39/month per technician, with separate asset pricing. Plans scale up to $99/month per technician. Top-tier plans, though, support unlimited users.
Observability SaaS pricing is modular and flexible. Application observability starts at $27.50 per app instance. Network and infra observability start at $12.00 per active network or host. Log observability follows a GB-based model, starting at $5.00 per GB monthly.
Database observability is naturally higher, with plans starting at $70 per database instance. Then, there’s Digital Experience Observability, which starts at $10 per 10 uptime.
SolarWinds Service Desk is rated 4.3 stars out of 5 on G2, based on 700+ reviews. The Observability platform is also rated 4.3 stars.
On the other hand, it’s rated quite poorly (2.1 stars out of 5 based on 11 reviews) on Trustpilot:
Via TrustPilot
Users who use the Service Desk software praise its ease of use, comprehensive ticketing system, and built-in asset management. Here’s what users are saying:
The observability and monitoring system is often praised for its excellent monitoring performance, ease of use, and per-node pricing model. However, as I’ve already highlighted, customer support remains a sour point.
Frankly, that’s still a difficult question for us to answer.
In our opinion, it’s not pocket-friendly and can be too extensive for regular use cases. Startups and SMBs would be better off with smaller, more cost-effective options.
We also feel the modularity is excellent for organizations of any size. The entire platform is technically impressive if you fall in the intended usage group. There are more features than you’ll ever use and need, and if you use multiple SolarWinds products, the interoperability is a treat.
However, their customer support is a hit or miss.
Ultimately, we feel SolarWinds is a robust, flexible, and scalable solution for IT management, with a wide range of monitoring and service management capabilities. While the 2020 security incident left its scars, their subsequent actions to improve security offer much relief.
Workwize is an alternative to Solarwinds ITSM, and we recommend you check it out. It offers powerful asset management capabilities, allowing you to see asset configurations, locations, and more in one place.
Unlike SolarWinds, Workwize isn’t limited to ITSM or asset visibility. It’s a platform for managing the entire lifecycle of your devices, from procurement to disposal—all within one platform.
Rent or buy assets, see where they are, retrieve them when needed, or securely dispose of them. Loved by brands like Monday, HighLevel, DuckDuckGo, and many more, Workwize simplifies IT management.