What Is SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM)?
SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) manages and optimizes the performance of servers and applications. It's a tool that helps IT professionals monitor system health and troubleshoot issues. By providing visibility into the infrastructure, SAM ensures that critical applications are running smoothly.
SolarWinds SAM monitors a range of applications and servers, looking at both standard performance metrics and specific user-defined parameters. Its intuitive interface and reporting tools aid in timely decision-making, reducing potential downtime.
Key Features of SolarWinds SAM
Application Availability and Performance Monitoring
SolarWinds SAM monitors application availability and performance, offering pre-built templates for various applications. It continuously checks application health, ensuring consistent uptime and performance. This tool leverages real-time performance insights, making it easy to identify and resolve issues affecting application accessibility.
In addition to predefined capabilities, SAM allows customization to monitor unique application scenarios. It analyzes response times, CPU usage, and memory consumption, providing actionable data to rectify inefficiencies. SAM's diagnostics assist businesses in maintaining application operations.
Application Infrastructure Dependency Mapping
Application infrastructure dependency mapping in SAM helps understand complex IT environments. This feature maps relationships between applications, middleware, and infrastructure components, providing a view of interdependencies. By visualizing these connections, IT teams can identify potential failure points and optimize resource allocation.
The tool assists in performing impact analysis by simulating outages or performance issues across the infrastructure. It allows businesses to address vulnerabilities, thereby reducing risk exposure. This situational awareness helps in maintaining application performance while ensuring system stability and resilience.
Monitor Cloud Applications
Monitoring cloud applications is simplified with SolarWinds SAM, allowing businesses to oversee applications hosted on various cloud platforms. It supports Azure, AWS, and other cloud environments, enabling visibility over cloud-deployed applications. This capability ensures consistent performance and availability, irrespective of the deployment method.
SAM helps in identifying performance bottlenecks in cloud applications through metrics analysis. It aids in performance optimization by monitoring latency, availability, and other criteria vital for cloud services. By maintaining performance levels across all environments, SAM enhances the value extracted from cloud investments.
Cross-Stack IT Data Correlation
Cross-stack IT data correlation with SolarWinds SAM unifies monitoring across different technology layers. It integrates data from various sources to present a view of the IT ecosystem. This feature facilitates the identification of root causes of performance issues, leading to quicker resolution times.
By correlating data from servers, applications, networks, and databases, SAM enables trend analysis and forecasting. The insights facilitate strategic planning, allowing companies to align their IT efforts with business objectives. Such an integrative approach boosts operational efficiency by minimizing disruptions and enhancing IT responsiveness.
Customizable Performance and Availability Reports and Alerts
Customizability in performance and availability reports is a feature of SAM. Users can tailor reports to focus on specific metrics, create schedules, and distribute insights to stakeholders automatically. SAM's alert system complements this by notifying administrators of critical events, enabling timely interventions.
Reports and alerts can be configured to align with various SLA requirements, ensuring that performance objectives are met. The ability to generate historical data analysis supports informed decision-making. With SAM, companies can stay ahead of potential issues through proactive monitoring and timely communication of system changes.
Best Practices for Optimizing SolarWinds SAM
Align with Business KPIs
Optimizing SolarWinds SAM requires alignment with your organization's business goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). Begin by identifying critical applications and services that directly contribute to business success, such as revenue-generating systems, customer-facing platforms, or internal tools essential for daily operations. These should be prioritized within SAM’s monitoring framework to ensure their availability and performance.
Using SAM’s customizable reports and dashboards, you can correlate system metrics—such as uptime, response time, and resource usage—with business outcomes. By integrating these business-centric metrics into SAM's alerts and reporting system, you ensure that the IT team focuses on what truly matters to the business. This approach enables proactive troubleshooting, better resource allocation, and continuous alignment between IT performance and overall business objectives.
Review Polling Engine Loads
Efficient management of polling engine loads is critical for maintaining system performance and ensuring scalability as your environment grows. SolarWinds SAM relies on polling engines to gather data, and as your infrastructure expands or you add more component monitors, the load on these engines increases. Regularly reviewing the polling load on both the Main Polling Engine and any Additional Polling Engines (APEs) is vital to prevent overloads and delays in data collection.
To manage this, use the Polling Settings page in SAM to check the current load distribution across all engines. If a single engine’s load reaches 85% of its capacity, SAM will automatically extend polling intervals to prevent overloading, but this can delay important data collection. To avoid this, monitor the number of elements polled per engine, and adjust the polling intervals for less critical systems manually. In larger environments, consider adding APEs to distribute the load more evenly.
Adding APEs not only improves scalability but also enhances redundancy, ensuring that if one polling engine encounters issues, others can compensate. Regular reviews of the polling engine loads can help you identify when it’s time to scale up and avoid performance bottlenecks.
Check Deployment Health Regularly
Ensuring the long-term reliability of your SAM deployment involves continuous health checks of both your monitoring infrastructure and the environments you are overseeing. SolarWinds SAM includes the Active Diagnostics tool, which automatically runs daily checks on the health of your SolarWinds Platform deployment, including the Main Polling Engine, Additional Polling Engines, and the database server. This tool provides real-time insights into potential issues, allowing you to address problems before they become critical.
To maintain a healthy deployment, access the Deployment Health tab under the My Deployment settings. From here, you can review any detected issues and sort them by priority. Each issue comes with detailed information and recommendations on how to resolve it. For instance, if an engine is experiencing high CPU usage or database connections are running inefficiently, the tool will flag these issues and provide links to relevant troubleshooting resources.
By regularly checking deployment health and acting on these alerts, IT teams can prevent system slowdowns or outages. Also, maintaining a habit of regularly reviewing the health status, even when everything appears to be running smoothly, is an essential best practice. This proactive approach not only mitigates the risk of unplanned downtime but also helps ensure that your infrastructure is capable of supporting future growth.
Optimize SAM Script Monitors
Script component monitors in SolarWinds SAM are customizable and can be used to monitor virtually any metric within your environment. However, optimizing these scripts for performance is essential, as inefficient scripts can place a heavy load on polling engines and degrade system performance. When creating or modifying script monitors, it is critical to ensure that the scripts are as efficient and lightweight as possible.
First, test all scripts thoroughly before adding them to your production environment. By doing so, you can identify potential issues like excessive resource consumption or slow execution times. When deploying script monitors, use error handling, such as try/catch blocks, to capture and log failures without impacting the overall monitoring system. Furthermore, scripts should be written to collect multiple metrics in a single run where possible. For instance, a script that gathers CPU, memory, and disk usage metrics in one execution will reduce the number of polling cycles needed, enhancing performance.
Also, consider adjusting polling intervals for non-critical scripts to reduce the frequency with which they are run. Less critical systems or applications may only need to be monitored once a day or less frequently, which reduces the load on polling engines. Additionally, SAM allows you to extend polling timeouts for scripts that require more time to execute, ensuring that long-running scripts do not fail due to timing out. By carefully managing script monitors, you can maximize the efficiency of your SAM deployment while ensuring comprehensive monitoring.
Capacity Planning
Effective capacity planning is crucial to ensuring that your SolarWinds SAM deployment scales appropriately as your organization grows. SAM provides valuable historical data that can be leveraged to forecast future resource needs, allowing IT teams to make informed decisions about scaling hardware, adding Additional Polling Engines (APEs), or increasing database capacity.
Begin by regularly reviewing the total number of monitored elements—such as nodes, interfaces, and component monitors—to assess the load on your existing infrastructure. SAM provides detailed statistics on the number of components each polling engine monitors and their polling frequency. If you notice that one polling engine is consistently operating at high capacity or that data collection delays are increasing, it may be time to add APEs to distribute the load.
Additionally, consider reviewing historical trends in system usage and performance. For example, an increase in the number of virtual machines or cloud applications being monitored could put a strain on current resources. SAM’s reports can help predict when your environment will exceed capacity, enabling you to take proactive steps, such as extending polling intervals for less critical applications or upgrading hardware. Capacity planning should be a continuous process, with regular assessments to ensure that SAM can handle current loads while also preparing for future growth.
Conclusion
SolarWinds SAM is a tool for managing application and server performance within complex IT environments. Its features aid in maintaining application availability, optimizing performance, and supporting strategic IT operations. SAM's monitoring capabilities enable businesses to streamline processes and enhance the reliability of critical applications.
By adopting best practices, businesses can fully leverage SolarWinds SAM's strengths. Aligning with business KPIs, optimizing system components, and planning capacity ensures that SAM supports organizational goals. This approach not only enhances the tool's value but also strengthens overall IT governance and service delivery.
Top comments (0)