BMC TrueSight Operations Management vs SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jun 28, 2023

We performed a comparison between BMC TrueSight Operations Management and SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor based on real PeerSpot user reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: BMC's setup can be simple, yet complex setups can take up to eight months. SolarWinds' setup can take anywhere from a few hours to two months, with varying opinions on how easy it is. Upgrades for SolarWinds may present difficulties.
  • Features: BMC TrueSight Operations Management provides various beneficial features such as proactive monitoring, consolidated dashboard, event management, Helix Innovation Studio, deep-dive detail, end-user metrics data, synthetic monitor, granular monitoring, and improved VM load. On the other hand, SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is known for its easy setup, in-depth monitoring, intuitive component and cable monitoring, powerful network devices' performance monitoring, and infrastructure dependency mapping.
  • Pricing: BMC has a high price point but offers transparent licensing based on device count, while SolarWinds' pricing is based on device count and included modules, subject to fluctuation based on the dollar rate. The overall perception of pricing for both products is varied.
  • Service and Support: Some customers find BMC's service good, while others feel that the L1 and L2 support is not up to par. Similarly, SolarWinds' support is viewed as both knowledgeable and responsive by some, but others experience long wait times and a lack of expertise.
  • ROI: BMC TrueSight Operations Management's ROI is unclear, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor provides better visibility, automation, easy management, enhanced productivity, and reduced expenses.

Comparison Results: BMC TrueSight Operations Management is the preferred option over SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor, offering advanced features like proactive monitoring, event management tool, Helix Innovation Studio, and a consolidated dashboard. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is lacking in code-level monitoring of applications, infrastructure dependency mapping, and software-defined network monitoring capability. BMC TrueSight Operations Management also has a more transparent and affordable licensing model for small, medium, and large companies compared to SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor's expensive pricing, making it the preferred solution.

787,033 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The most beneficial part of the product in terms of IT monitoring revolves around the areas involving automation, and it also serves as an end-to-end event management and incident management tool.""Helix Innovation Studio is a very good feature. It allows us to develop our own enterprise applications and make them available for the customers.""The solution provides visibility to our infrastructure, how it is, the resources we are monitoring, and quick updates when it has any problems. We have integrated it with ServiceNow to open instances.""I believe that the ease of use and UI is great""It provides common administration, and a Single Sign-On Platform with RBAC, which eases the cross launch between multiple tools""The event management part of TrueSight Operations Management, in my experience, is probably the best in the market. You have endless flexibility. You can build your own rules, you have the MRL language, and you can implement any kind of logic on the alerts. It may be correlation, abstraction, or executing something as a result of the alerts. You have almost the whole range of options available for event management using the available customization.""The major advantage of the product is estate management.""The ability of this platform to monitor the very diverse assets that we maintain around the world is its most valuable feature... We support a vast array of manufacturers' equipment, like HP, IBM, Cisco, Dell, EMC, Hitachi... We can do it all with [this] one [solution]."

More BMC TrueSight Operations Management Pros →

"Identifying the problem statement is easy.""There are many valuable features, including the network configuration manager, and the network performance manager.""One of the most valuable features are the reports. They're pretty good. Also, the ease of installation and customization for the client is another feature that we value. SolarWinds has a lot of features but these are the ones I like the most. We also like that the KPIs have the ability to be preset.""I am impressed with the tool's AppStack feature which mainly helps us in the identification process. This feature can give an overview of the fault and help us identify the issues for performance degradation. Instead of looking at multiple places, we can look at a single place to identify the issues.""Features like monitoring and infrastructure dependency mapping are valuable to us.""Hardware health: It allows for proactive monitoring of the hardware health and is a game changer.""Extremely user friendly: Any IT professional can learn how to admin NPM in a short time.""The most valuable feature of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is the network devices' performance monitor is the best."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pros →

Cons
"I would really like to see out-of-the-box support for monitoring uninterruptible power supplies.""The dashboard and performance graphs should include a way to automatically schedule and export reports.""Deployment requires lots of resources (servers). It has too many consoles.""It would be better if the initial setup and deployment were more straightforward.""In a large company of our size, we need multiple people in our company trained. So, I have to take the training classes. Then, I have to go and train the rest of my organization. I would prefer to say to the other people on my team, "Go to this link and..." Or, "Here's a list of training sessions that you can go to which are online and that are free." I think it would help the adoption of their product in the marketplace, personally.""It's too complex, too many servers are required, there are too many different components in the solution, and a lot of agents are required.""BMC TrueSight Operations Management could improve the reporting.""We were somewhat limited in TrueSight due to some of the RBAC controls not quite being what we wanted as far as delegating out administrative privileges for implementation. But because we were able to turn requests around pretty well, that burden wasn't too heavy."

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"I think they need to make reporting easier and more simple & dynamic.""It would be helpful if the solution could integrate more with the security compliances, like this IDSS, etc.""There is one feature that is a report writer. And they are currently trying to take it out from being a stand-alone application and integrating to the web. This doesn't give us the flexibility and it doesn't expand what we can get when it comes to reporting. So, putting it on the web is going to make it difficult to get some information. Leaving it where it is now will help us a lot.""Solarwinds should come up the same monitoring system for other certificate expiration alert apart from SSL.""Mapping interactions between systems.""Some custom applications cannot be monitored, and a lot more applications need to be included.""This product has no real downside unless they fail to continue development of its capabilities.""The tool's AppStack needs to improve in the storage monitoring part. It should also include an analytics and recommendation approach. If I have found a fault in a server or application, I would like to know what caused it and how do I recover from it."

More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "Use conservative figures. In terms of hardware, monitored servers and also effort. The product is not cheap. But as with other products, you get what you pay for."
  • "The solutions are not the cheapest but are robust and stable. License model is rather complex and BMC do often change the model."
  • "Pricing is very high."
  • "We pay license fees of between $150 and $200 per asset. There is an enterprise software license fee, and then you pay a percentage for your maintenance, and then Premier Support. For example, if you buy a two-year license for the product, then the maintenance fee is added to that for two years at X percent a year. Then there's a small fee on top of that for Premier Support..."
  • "Pricing is all volume-driven. I think we were paying between $80 and $85 per license. That's per unit, for a perpetual license. You pay it one time and then, every year, you pay 20 percent of that for annual maintenance and support. But now that we've grown, we've purchased tens of thousands of licenses and the cost per license has gone down to something like less than $30..."
  • "It is a large, complex product. So, there is a commitment of manpower to deploy it, as it is not a cheap product."
  • "There is a big upfront cost when you buy the license, then there is annual maintenance. We look at, if I bought a license and paid for maintenance for five years, then average it out, what would be my monthly cost. We have had some of the competing tools come in around four dollars. This is coming in as a premium, which is why I don't have it deployed as I would like it. Therefore, we're in negotiations right now. If I can get it down to the four dollar range, I will triple my deployment in a year and a half."
  • "The only possible additional cost that I can mention, that you might not be aware of, is that it uses Oracle partitioning, if you use Oracle. There are Oracle partitioning fees that go with that."
  • More BMC TrueSight Operations Management Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "I have always said SolarWinds is very “proud” of their products, meaning they are expensive. I cannot afford to purchase all the licenses I need for all the SolarWinds products."
  • "When planning for the number of licenses to purchase, make sure you understand all of the elements within an application required to really understand performance well. In our case, we quickly came to the conclusion that an unlimited license for SAM was the way to go."
  • "Nagios XI, WhatsUpGold, Uptime Software, PRTG, Manage Engine, and SpiceWorks are the other tools that have lower pricing and licensing costs. However, they can't compete with SolarWinds when it comes to the features and functionality that SolarWinds can provide."
  • "I would advise potential buyers to wait until the end of the quarter, end of year, or other time to place orders. There are actually great deals to be had at those times if your budget cycle can match up."
  • "Pricing and licensing is fair for what you get. It does have a great bang-for-the-buck appeal."
  • "SAM is not per server so the pricing model can be deceiving. If you have an enterprise environment, you will quickly exceed your licensing quickly. You should know this before going in."
  • "Understanding the counts of objects to monitor will determine the licensing need. In terms of pricing, it’s not cheap but it’s not expensive as larger vendors whose products don’t have all the features or integrations."
  • "The product might cost you $30,000 USD to buy, but scaling this solution requires the purchase of additional polling engines at $20,000 USD each."
  • More SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution provides visibility to our infrastructure, how it is, the resources we are monitoring, and quick updates when it has any problems. We have integrated it with ServiceNow to open instances.
    Top Answer:The product is expensive, depending on the types of monitoring you have. You need to acquire more licenses. I rate the product’s pricing an eight out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive.
    Top Answer:The dashboards are not good. We have a limited dashboard, and if we want better dashboards, we need to use other solutions like Grafana because the TrueSight dashboards are not good. TrueSight could… more »
    Top Answer:The price is too high. The tool is overpriced. We don't need all the features. The product must minimize the features and reduce the price. It all comes down to pricing. The customers find it pretty… more »
    Top Answer:The biggest pain point is root cause analysis. It is difficult to analyze, assess, and warn my IT department about what will happen in the next five hours. It is also difficult to use AIOps to reduce… more »
    Ranking
    Views
    2,786
    Comparisons
    1,916
    Reviews
    17
    Average Words per Review
    434
    Rating
    7.7
    Views
    5,067
    Comparisons
    3,318
    Reviews
    10
    Average Words per Review
    406
    Rating
    7.3
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    ProactiveNet, TrueSight Operations Management
    SolarWinds SAM
    Learn More
    Overview

    BMC TrueSight Operations Management is a solution that delivers end-to-end performance monitoring and event management. It does so by using machine learning, analytics, and AIOps to identify, analyze, and resolve application and infrastructure problems quickly. BMC TrueSight Operations Management also offers automated remediation and ticketing.

    BMC TrueSight Operations Management Features

    BMC TrueSight Operations Management has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • TrueSight Smart Reporting
    • Broad monitoring capabilities
    • Hundreds of integrations
    • Event grouping
    • Proactive alerts
    • Incident tickets
    • Cause analysis
    • Automated log analysis

    BMC TrueSight Operations Management Benefits

    Some of the benefits of using BMC TrueSight Operations Management include:

    • Detects performance issues: BMC TrueSight Operations Management helps you detect and address performance abnormalities before they impact your organization.
    • Beneficial for IT teams: Since BMC TrueSight Operations Management automatically learns the behavior of your infrastructure, it is able to alert you when specific behaviors require attention, helping IT departments focus on other pressing priorities.
    • Cost efficient: BMC TrueSight Operations Management will save your company money by eliminating the need to manage thousands of traditional, static thresholds for event generation.
    • Reduces manual tasks: BMC TrueSight Operations Management minimizes the need to manually define, configure, and maintain correlation rules and policies.
    • Fewer false alarms: With BMC TrueSight Operations Management, the number of false alarms and associated incidents decreases drastically.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by BMC TrueSight Operations Management users.

    Mudassir A., Sr. Technical Consultant at a tech services company, says, "The event management part of TrueSight Operations Management, in my experience, is probably the best in the market. You have endless flexibility. You can build your own rules, you have the MRL language, and you can implement any kind of logic on the alerts. It may be correlation, abstraction, or executing something as a result of the alerts. You have almost the whole range of options available for event management using the available customization."

    A General Manager - Sales at a tech services company explains, “There are many features that are most valuable in BMC TrueSight Operations Management. First, its proactive monitoring feature is highly developed. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is an intelligent tool that's able to understand day-to-day operations and consistently gives alerts. The alerts are not automatic for some activities, e.g. some alerts are given monthly, while some are given more frequently. The consolidated dashboard where you can enjoy a single pane of glass to look at the full infrastructure from the servers to the VMs, to the clouds, to the application, to the database, to the network devices, including having a topology, and having a tendency map of the topology of key offerings, is also a valuable feature of this solution.”

    An Information Systems Computer System Controller at an insurance company states, “The business event manager tool that consolidates detailed information from a single instance of equipment is the most valuable thing for me. It provides support for the business tools and the IT services which come from several systems.”


    SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) delivers powerful application and server monitoring capabilities for IT pros, enabling them to diagnose and troubleshoot performance issues faster. Do not let slow applications and downtime impact your end-users and business services. Pinpoint the root cause of application issues across various layers of the IT stack. SolarWinds SAM is affordable and easy to deploy, use, and customize. You can automatically discover your system's environment and start monitoring in about an hour. No professional services or consultation needed.

    Sample Customers
    Ensono, Transamerica, Boston Scientific, Park Place Technologies, inContact, TD Ameritrade, PNC Bank
    Andr. L. Riis AS, NetSuite
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm32%
    Comms Service Provider21%
    Healthcare Company11%
    Manufacturing Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Comms Service Provider13%
    Construction Company13%
    Energy/Utilities Company6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization41%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Government7%
    Financial Services Firm6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business42%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise46%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise9%
    Large Enterprise76%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business35%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise48%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business11%
    Midsize Enterprise49%
    Large Enterprise40%
    Buyer's Guide
    BMC TrueSight Operations Management vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor
    May 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about BMC TrueSight Operations Management vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor and other solutions. Updated: May 2024.
    787,033 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    BMC TrueSight Operations Management is ranked 16th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 50 reviews while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is ranked 17th in Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability with 38 reviews. BMC TrueSight Operations Management is rated 8.2, while SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of BMC TrueSight Operations Management writes "The product is reasonably priced, but the solution is a little obsolete because it is deployed on-premise". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor writes "We use this product for base and application monitoring. ". BMC TrueSight Operations Management is most compared with BMC Helix Monitor, Dynatrace, ServiceNow IT Operations Management, Zabbix and Azure Monitor, whereas SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor is most compared with Azure Monitor, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Prometheus and Tanium. See our BMC TrueSight Operations Management vs. SolarWinds Server and Application Monitor report.

    See our list of best Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability vendors.

    We monitor all Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and Observability reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.