SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor (SAM) is an affordable and easy-to-use systems management software that provides deep visibility into application and server performance issues. Automatically discover the systems environment, and start monitoring in minutes. The agent-less technology in SAM makes it easy to install, and scales to meet the growing demands of infrastructure.
The SAM keeps track of the physical status of servers and watches the network traffic generated by the applications running on them. The “applications” referred to by the title of this tool refers to critical network applications, such as DHCP, Active Directory, and DNS functions, rather than any software running on the servers. This is a comprehensive monitoring environment suitable for enterprises of all sizes. However, the extensive WAN activity monitoring capabilities of this system make it particularly useful to large businesses with complicated, distributed IT operations.
Monitor your entire on-premises, cloud, or hybrid application environment and infrastructure from one tool. With 1,200+ application, system, and infrastructure monitoring templates. Comprehensive monitoring for Microsoft® applications, systems, hypervisor, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS products. Visualize and map the dynamic communication-based relationships between applications and servers so you can discover network issues that slow down your applications.
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor performance monitoring tools deliver a deeper view of your applications environment to help identify and troubleshoot performance issues before end-users are impacted. Intelligent alerts eliminate false positives and alert you when health indicators reach warning or critical thresholds and deviate from baseline performance.
Use out-of-the-box monitoring templates for critical applications including Exchange, IIS, Active Directory, Java, Apache, Citrix, Oracle, and over a hundred others. Analyze historical performance data with intuitive reports.
Simplify application performance management with automated monitoring practices. Automate many common processes with Server & Application Monitor application performance monitoring to save manual administration time.
Use SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor to proactively identify whether the changes made to the web application or web pages have an impact on end-users. Synthetic transaction monitoring helps you analyze the impact of code changes on the end-user experience and web application performance. Test your websites in the pre-production stage so you can detect performance issues ahead of time.
Web Performance Monitor integrates with Server & Application Monitor to monitor web transactions in context of application health.
With rapidly growing application workloads, it is important to ensure your servers are equipped with sufficient hardware (CPU, memory, disk). Monitor resource utilization of your physical and virtual environment over time and easily identify capacity needs allowing you to optimize resource procurement and manage workloads more effectively. Monitor services, processes, event logs, and hardware health to identify server problems that can impact application performance.
Maintain a centralized inventory of server hardware and software assets across your organization for streamlined resource management.
Sysadmins might not always know how their server resources (CPU, memory, storage, and network) are being used against the available capacity. This causes resource contention issues and ultimately impacts server performance.
SolarWinds server capacity planning software provides built-in capacity forecast charts and metrics to easily identify when server resources reach warning and critical thresholds. Trend peak and average capacity over time to make accurate capacity forecasts. Find and fix server capacity issues before they impact end-user productivity and business.
Get a unified view of your entire application stack—from apps, to servers, to VM, down to storage arrays—with SolarWinds AppStack™ dashboard. Identify capacity issues at every level using:
SolarWinds Server & Application (SAM) monitoring provides one unified framework to monitor the status and performance of customized applications alongside commercial applications.
Server & Application Monitor provides built-in monitoring templates for 200+ applications. These templates comprise component monitors to measure health and performance metrics of applications using WMI, SNMP, JMX, and VMware protocols.
Server & Application Monitor supports monitoring of multi-vendor commercial applications and servers out of the box, including:
With SolarWinds® Server & Application Monitor (SAM), you can poll dependencies and create maps to monitor incoming network connections for a managed server or application. Polling data can allow you to monitor applications with attention to specific nodes.
SolarWinds SAM application discovery tools are designed to provide visibility into server activity, allowing you to view what inbound connections are linked to your application and servers. You can also more easily identify the incoming port, service, and server to determine their internal resource consumption.
With an application dependency mapping tool, you can create custom maps of groups or entities to track the response time of dependent services. By visualizing logical and physical relationships, you gain insight into connection ports, services, network latency, packet loss, and TCP data, so you can more quickly troubleshoot issues.
With SAM, you can create and configure interactive maps for applications across your network and the servers they depend on, so you always have a current, in-context understanding of issues.
SolarWinds SAM is built to allow you to establish custom thresholds and alerts for network latency, packet loss, and uptime monitoring for dependent services. You can set warning or critical thresholds for dependency issues like packet loss, latency, and TCP connection problems.
If an alert is triggered, you can easily use SAM to check the map for contextual, real-time information about multi-tiered applications relying on other services and servers to potentially head off performance issues impacting end users.
Monitoring server health can play an important part of understanding the performance of applications and their dependencies. At the core of SolarWinds SAM is its ability to monitor overall sever and application performance, including monitoring server uptime, providing insights to help you detect hardware failures, and more easily optimize resource utilization.
SAM is designed to enable you to more easily troubleshoot when downtime or other application performance issues occur by providing a comprehensive view into your overall infrastructure.
Get complete Azure performance monitoring of your environment with SolarWinds® Server & Application Monitor (SAM), which includes:
Track and provide performance insights of Azure services with Azure IaaS monitoring, such as monitoring virtual machine and Kubernetes performance. With Server & Application Monitor, you can also:
Track key Azure PaaS service metrics to help ensure application performance and availability. Azure PaaS monitoring of critical Azure components such as CPU, memory, requests, response time, and more for your dynamic Azure workloads.
View metrics for:
Monitor and trend your Office 365 applications. Monitor and report on data such as active users, mailbox size and growth, mobile devices, and more. Track and remove inactive users to keep billing in check. View these metrics next to your on-prem Exchange server monitoring to assist with email migrations.
Gain one centralized view of your Microsoft systems, applications, and cloud resources on-prem and remote with agent or agentless monitoring from Server & Application Monitor.
SAM is designed to monitor many Microsoft software products, such as:
Released December 18, 2019
Updated January 2, 2020
New functionality and fixed issues in SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) 2019.4.1, a service release.They also provide information about installation, upgrades, and workarounds for known issues.
Note the following details about this release:
You can use the new API Poller feature to monitor external REST APIs and gather metrics for nodes and applications in your environment, providing an easy way to collect data from a modern application stack in a simplified manner. Add an API poller, define API endpoints, determine available metrics, pick the values you want to monitor, and then begin monitoring without the need for custom scripts.
Using APIs as another data source for SAM monitoring enables you to:
Monitor the Hardware Health of Nutanix clusters with the power of the Orion Platform, from alerting and reporting and mapping to AppStack™. With the latest release, you can:
To get started, add Hyper-V or VMware nodes for monitoring, add the Nutanix cluster, and then provide Controller VM (CVM) credentials.
Documentation for Orion Platform features supported by multiple modules is included in the Orion Platform Administrator Guide. Because Nutanix monitoring is supported by both SAM and SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (VMAN), you’ll find related details there.
A Trust Summary widget was added to AppInsight for Active Directory so you can visualize domain-to-domain communications to determine which domains can access another domain’s resources.
For example, if you use SolarWinds AppOptics, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product that allows deep dives into hybrid and cloud-native IT environments, you can configure an Active Directory trust that allows AppOptics to log into Active Directory resources hosted in a separate domain.
To support data collection for this new functionality, configure domain controllers with the Global Catalog (GC) role. Also, note that the AppInsight for Active Directory uses default port 3268 to gather trust data. If your domain controllers use port 3269, update that setting in the AppInsight for Active Directory template.
Some of the new features and improvements provided in Orion Platform 2019.4 include:
Do not install SAM on the same server as SolarWinds Access Rights Manager (ARM).
To deploy SAM locally, on a server, review the following recommendations for the main Orion server.
| Software Requirements | |
|---|---|
| Operating system |
Desktop operating systems, such as Windows 10, 64-bit Pro or Enterprise are supported for evaluation environments only. For a smooth transition from an evaluation to production deployment, SolarWinds recommends that you avoid installing evaluations on desktop operating systems. Support differences between Orion Agents and Orion Platform products
|
| Operating system languages |
|
| IP address version |
CIDR notation is not supported for IPv6 addresses. |
| Web server | If you’re not using Windows Authentication, make sure Anonymous Authentication is enabled for the SolarWinds NetPerfMon website. Anonymous Authentication is used with the default forms-based authentication.
The SolarWinds Orion Installer adds IIS by default, but you can install it manually to reduce installation time. |
| Microsoft .NET Framework | .NET 4.8
Run the same version of. NET on your primary server and any Additional Polling Engines (APEs) or Additional Web Servers (AWS) in the environment. SolarWinds recommends installing .NET on your primary Orion server and all scalability engines before installing SAM. |
| Services | If using the Syslog or SNMP Traps feature of the Orion Platform, make sure the following services are running after installation is complete:
Starting in SAM 2019.4, Log Viewer replaces legacy Syslog and Traps with an instant evaluation of SolarWinds Log Analyzer, depending on options selected during installation. |
| Orion Web Console browser | The Orion Platform supports the two latest versions of the following web browsers available on the release date:
The following browsers are also supported:
Do not enable Enterprise Mode on Internet Explorer. This setting forces Internet Explorer to emulate version 7, which is not supported. |
| Account privileges | SolarWinds recommends that Orion administrators have local administrator privileges on the Orion server to ensure full functionality of local SolarWinds tools. Orion user accounts limited to the Orion Web Console do not require local administrator privileges. |
Review and open ports support communication for the Orion server, the main polling engine, Additional Polling Engines (APEs), and Additional Web Servers (AWS). These ports include feature-specific requirements for Orion agents and SolarWinds High Availability (HA), as well as UCS device, Nutanix cluster, and container monitoring.
| Port | Protocol | Service/Process | Direction | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| User-defined, default: 22 | SSH | SolarWinds Job Engine v2
IIS |
Outbound from the Orion server to the device | Cisco ASA device access through the CLI
Nutanix Hardware Health polling Device-based encryption |
| 25 | TCP | SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 | Outbound | SMTP port for non-encrypted messages |
| 53 | UDP | SolarWinds Job Engine v2 | Bidirectional | Resolve DNS queries |
| 80 | TCP | IIS | Inbound | Default Additional Web Server (AWS) port. If you specify any port other than 80, you must include that port in the URL used to access the Orion Web Console. For example, if you specify 192.168.0.3 and port 8080, the URL used to access the Orion Web Console is http://192.168.0.3:8080.
Open the port to enable communication from your computers to the Orion Web Console. The port might also be used for Cisco UCS monitoring. |
| 135 | TCP | Microsoft EPMAP (DCE/RPC Locator service) | Bidirectional | WMI uses TCP Port 135 to initiate communication with the remotely managed host, then switches to any random high port anywhere between TCP ports 1024 — 65535. |
| 161 | UDP | SolarWinds Job Engine v2
SolarWinds Cortex service |
Bidirectional | Send and receive SNMP information.
SNMP v1 and v2 are unencrypted. SNMP v3 uses AES and 3DES encryption. |
| 162 | UDP | SolarWinds Trap service
SNMP Informs |
Bidirectional | Receive trap messages |
| 443 | TCP | IIS | Bidirectional | Default port for HTTPS binding. Also used for bidirectional ESX/ESXi server polling and Cisco UCS device monitoring.
SSL encryption |
| 465 | TCP | SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 | Outbound | SMTP port used to send TLS-enabled email alert actions
SSL encryption |
| 514 | UDP | SolarWinds Syslog Service | Bidirectional | Receive syslog messages |
| 587 | TCP | SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 | Outbound | SMTP port used to send TLS-enabled email alert actions |
| 1433 | TCP | SolarWinds Administration Service
SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 SolarWinds Information Service SolarWinds Information Service V3 SolarWinds Orion Module Engine |
Outbound | Communication between the Orion Server and the Orion database server. |
| 1434 | UDP | SolarWinds Administration Service
SolarWinds Alerting Service V2 SolarWinds Information Service SolarWinds Information Service V3 SolarWinds Orion Module Engine SQL Server Browse Service |
Bidirectional | Communication with SQL Server Browser Service to determine how to handle non-standard SQL Server installations.
Required only if your Orion database server is configured to use dynamic ports. |
| 1801 | TCP | MSMQ | Bidirectional | MSMQ WCF binding with WCF encryption. |
| 5671 | TCP | RabbitMQ | Bidirectional | For RabbitMQ messaging (AMQP/TLS) between the main polling engine and all Additional Polling Engines, High Availability servers, or Additional Web Servers.
TLS 1.2 encryption |
| 9440 | HTTPS and TCP | SolarWinds Cortex (communication)
SolarWinds Information Service |
Bidirectional | Encryption: TLS 1.2 with SolarWinds Cortex |
| 17777 | TCP | SolarWinds Cortex (communication)
SolarWinds Information Service SolarWinds Information Service V3 SolarWinds Orion Module Engine |
Bidirectional | Communication between services and SolarWinds Orion module traffic.
Communication between the Orion Web Console, the main polling engine, and all scalability engines. Communication between the main server and pool members. Encryption:
|
| 17778 | HTTPS and TCP | SolarWinds Agent
Container monitoring |
Bidirectional | Communication between the Orion server, the SolarWinds Information Service (SWIS) API, and agents.
For container monitoring, this port is used for orchestrator communications. SSL encryption |
| 17799 | HTTPS | Container service monitoring | Bidirectional | Communication with the SolarWinds Cortex API for container orchestrators. For environment-specific port requirements |
The following table lists minimum and recommended hardware requirements for your Orion server that hosts the Orion Platform and its modules. Installing multiple modules may change the requirements. Use the minimum requirements if you’re evaluating the product or do not anticipate heavy usage.
SolarWinds strongly suggests using the recommended hardware configuration to avoid potential performance issues caused by a heavy load or custom configurations such as increased data retention or more frequent polling intervals.
Hardware requirements are listed by deployment size, based on SAM node-based license levels.
CPU recommendations for SAM300 deployments use the PassMark Score.
| Feature | SAM10, SAM25 | SAM50, SAM75 | SAM100 | SAM300 and larger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPU | Quad core processor or better | Quad core processor or better | Quad core processor or better | CPUs with a total combined PassMark score of 7,000 or higher |
| Do not enable Physical Address Extension (PAE). | ||||
| Hard drive space | 10 GB minimum
20 GB recommended |
15 GB minimum
40 GB recommended |
30 GB minimum
40 GB recommended |
40 GB minimum
50 GB recommended Read/Write I/O performance of 800 IOPS |
|
SolarWinds recommends two 146 GB 15K (RAID 1/Mirrored Settings) hard drives with a dedicated drive for the server operating system and Orion Platform installation. Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as the server OS. You may want to move or expand the Windows temporary directories. |
||||
| Memory | 6 GB minimum
8 GB recommended |
8 GB minimum
16 GB recommended |
16 GB minimum
32 GB recommended |
16 GB minimum
32 GB recommended |
| Feature | SAM10, SAM25 | SAM50, SAM75 | SAM100 | SAM300 and larger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft SQL Server | Express, Standard, or Enterprise versions of the following:
SolarWinds recommends that you use Express versions only for evaluations and very small environments. |
Enterprise versions of supported SQL Servers:
|
||
|
End-of-support notice: Products running on Orion Platform 2018.4 and later are no longer compatible with SQL Server 2012, 2012 SP1, 2012 SP2, 2012 SP3, and 2012 SP4. To use the new features introduced in Orion Platform 2018.4 and later, upgrade your environment at your earliest convenience. Recommendations:
|
||||
| SQL Server collation |
SolarWinds products support a case-insensitive (CI) database on a CS SQL Server. SolarWinds products do not support case-sensitive databases. |
|||
| CPU | Quad core processor or better | Dual quad core processor or better | Dual quad core processor or better | CPUs with a total combined PassMark score of 32,000 or higher |
| Hard drive space | 20 GB minimum
40 GB recommended |
50 GB minimum
100 GB recommended |
100 GB minimum
400 GB recommended* |
500 GB minimum
1 TB recommended Read/Write I/O performance of 30,000 IOPs 190,000 IOPS or better recommended 1 Gbit dedicated NIC |
Some common files may need to be installed on the same drive as your server OS. You may want to move or expand the Windows or SQL temporary directories. |
||||
| Memory | SAM10
4 GB minimum 8 GB recommended |
16 GB minimum
64 GB recommended |
64 GB minimum
128 GB recommended |
256 GB minimum
512 GB recommended |
| SAM25
16 GB minimum 32 GB recommended |
||||
| Authentication | Use either mixed-mode or Windows authentication. If you require SQL authentication, you must enable mixed mode on your SQL server. | |||
| Other software | SolarWinds recommends installing SQL Server Management Studio on your Orion database server. The Orion Installer adds the following x86 components if they’re not found on the Orion database server:
For remote execution of PowerShell scripts, PowerShell 2.0 or later is required on the Orion server, Additional Polling Engines, and target servers. You cannot share the Orion database with SharePoint, Exchange, or BlackBerry servers. |
|||
*SolarWinds recommends the following hard drive configuration for large deployments:
Orion Platform products support the following cloud solutions:
To deploy SAM using AWS, consider using the following templates, listed according to node-based license levels.
The Orion Platform supports several Microsoft Azure deployment options, as listed here according to SAM node-based license levels. If using component-based licensing
| Feature | SAM10, SAM25, SAM50 | SAM75, SAM100 | SAM200 | SAM300 and larger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orion server | DS12_v2
4 CPU 16 GB RAM 150 GB disk |
DS12_v2
4 CPU 16 GB RAM 150 GB disk |
DS4_v2
8 CPU 32 GB RAM 150 GB disk |
DS4_v2
8 CPU 32 GB RAM 150 GB disk |
| Orion database using Azure SQL Database | All installed products must run on Orion Platform 2019.2 or later.
The time zone setting of the Orion Server must match the Azure SQL DB time zone (UTC). When deploying Azure SQL and creating a new user in the Configuration wizard, SA account credentials are required in the Configuration wizard. Starting with Orion Platform 2019.4, Orion Platform does not support memory-optimized tables. If you are using memory optimized tables, they are automatically disabled. |
|||
| DTU Standard Tier S3 or better
vCore General Purpose Tier 2 or better |
DTU Standard Tier S3 or better
vCore General Purpose Tier 2 or better |
DTU Standard Tier S4 or better
vCore General Purpose Tier 2 or better |
DTU Standard Tier S9 (up to 100k components), S12 (up to 400k components) or better
vCore General Purpose Tier 16 (up to 100k components), 30 (up to 400k components) or better |
|
| Orion database using Azure Managed Instance | Gen5 4 vCores | Gen5 8 vCores | Gen5 16 vCores | Gen5 40 vCores |
| Orion database in an Azure VM | A4_v2 | DS4_v2 Standard | E8s_v3 | E32-8s_v3 |
* Azure Storage Disk volumes are not your dedicated hardware. Consider using Azure Reserved Instances of storage disk volumes for SQL servers.
Microsoft Windows uses a random port between 1024 and 65535 for WMI communications, by default, so you must create firewall exceptions to allow bidirectional TCP/UDP traffic on those ports to support SAM component monitors and application monitoring templates that use WMI.
The following table outlines port requirements for SAM component monitors and templates with predefined port requirements, as detailed in the SAM Template Reference. For example, the AppInsight for Active Directory template uses port 3268 to gather data from domain controllers.
| Component/ Monitor | Port | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| DHCP User Experience Monitor | 67 | UDP | Used for DHCP requests. |
| DHCP User Experience Monitor | 68 | UDP | Used for DHCP responses. |
| Directory Size Monitor | SAM WMI . | ||
| DNS Monitor
DNS User Experience Monitor |
53 | TCP/UDP | Used for DNS queries. |
| Download Speed Monitor | 19 | Used for the character generator service. | |
| ESX Hardware Monitoring | 5989 | Used to collect vCenter data via API. | |
| File Age Monitor
File Change Monitor File Existence Monitor File Size Monitor File Count Monitor |
445 | SAM WMI and Poll devices with SolarWinds Orion agents. | |
| FTP Monitor
FTP User Experience Monitor |
21 | Used for FTP sessions. | |
| HTTP Form Login Monitor
HTTP Monitor TCP Port Monitor |
80 | Used for HTTP form-based login sessions. | |
| HTTPS Monitor | 443 | Used to test a web server’s ability to accept incoming sessions over a secure channel and then transmit the requested page. | |
| IMAP4 Monitor | 143 (default) | IMAP4 | Used for IMAP 4 sessions. |
| 585 | IMAP4 | Used for Secure IMAP (IMAP4-SSL) sessions. | |
| 993 | IMAP4 | Used for IMAP4 over SSL (IMAPS) sessions. | |
| IMAP4 User Experience Monitor | 25 | SMTP | Used to communicate with a Microsoft Exchange mail server. |
| 143 | IMAP4 | ||
| 993 | IMAP4 | ||
| LDAP User Experience Monitor | 389 | Used for LDAP connections. | |
| 636 | For LDAP over SSL, use port 636. | ||
| Linux/Unix Script Monitor Ports | 22 | Used for SSH connections. | |
| NNTP Monitor | 119 | UDP | Used for Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) connections. |
| ODBC User Experience Monitor | 1630 | TCP | To configure ODBC when polling with Orion Agent for Linux |
| Oracle User Experience Monitor | 1521 | TCP | The Oracle SQL*Net Listener allows Oracle client connections to the database over Oracle’s SQL*Net protocol. You can configure it during installation. To reconfigure this port, use Net Configuration Assistant. |
| 1526 | |||
| Performance Counter Monitor | See Description. | TCP | This monitor uses RPC, requiring the following ports:
|
| POP3 Monitor | See Description. | This monitor uses the following ports to communicate with Microsoft Exchange mail servers:
|
|
| POP3 Monitor
POP3 User Experience Monitor |
110 (default) | Used for POP3 connections. | |
| 995 | Used for Secure POP3 (SSL-POP) connections. | ||
| 25 | SMTP | Used for SMTP sessions. | |
| Process Monitor | SNMP | Uses SNMP communication. | |
| Process Monitor – Windows | Uses WMI or RPC communication to test if a specified Windows process is running and reports statistics about all instances of the process. | ||
| RADIUS User Experience Monitor | 1812
1645 |
Used to authenticate RADIUS protocols, along with port 1813. Cisco devices may require port 1645 or 1646. | |
| RWHOIS Port Monitor | 4321 | Used to test the ability of a Referral Whois (RWhois) server to accept incoming sessions. | |
| SMTP Monitor | 465 | SMTP | Used for Secure SMTP (SSMTP). |
| SNMP Monitor | 444 | SNMP | Used to test the ability of an SNMP server to accept incoming sessions. |
| SQL Server User Experience Monitor | 1433 | This component monitor only works if MS SQL Server uses the default port, 1433. If MS SQL Server uses a non-standard port, use the ODBC User Experience monitor instead to manually define a connection string for the port. | |
| TACACS+User Experience Monitor | 49 | Used for TACACS+ protocol connections. | |
| Tomcat Server Monitor | 8080 | Used to retrieve status information from the Apache Tomcat status website. | |
| VMware Performance Counter Monitor | 443 | Used to communicate with the VMware API. | |
| Windows Event Log Monitor | This component monitor uses the following ports:
|
Microsoft Windows uses a random port between 1024 and 65535 for WMI communications, by default, so you must create firewall exceptions to allow bidirectional TCP/UDP traffic on those ports to support SAM templates and component monitors that use WMI.
if wide ranges of open ports on the firewall present security concerns in your environment, consider using Orion agents for polling.
The following component monitors use WMI:
The following templates use WMI:
If you need to limit open ports, you can poll devices with Orion agents; server-initiated mode requires only a single port open.
If using component-based licensing, this table provides equivalent node-based license tiers for SAM system requirements.
| Node-based license tier | Component-based license tier |
|---|---|
| SAM10 | AL150 |
| SAM25 | AL300 |
| SAM50 | AL700 |
| SAM75 | AL1100 |
| SAM100 | AL1500 |
| SAM200 | AL2500 |
| SAM300* | ALX |
