SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor Review

Part of the SolarWinds Orion software ecosystem, SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor gives you an overview of how your website and web-based apps are performing. You’ll be able to identify and diagnose latency issues, resolve slow webpage elements, monitor hypothetical user experiences (UXes), and record steps of a hypothetical user’s journey to determine if and where bottlenecks will occur. Unlike Editors’ Choice tool AppDynamics, SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor won’t let you monitor real UXes as they occur. In this way, SolarWinds is more like our other Editors’ Choice recipient, SmartBear AlertSite Pro, both of which are designed to chart synthetic paths through your website architecture to alert you to issues before they reach your customers or front-end employees.

How Pricing Works

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor begins at $1,995 per year for up to five recordings (or transactions, depending on how your team refers to them). This gives you access to data from any cloud-based web app or website URL. Unfortunately, to monitor additional resources (such as your servers, your internal on-premises apps, your databases, or virtual infrastructures), you’ll need to purchase additional SolarWinds tools.

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor’s $2,000 price tag is pretty high for a basic web monitoring tool. For example, Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals (2,000.00 Per Year at Riverbed)(Opens in a new window) ties all of that back-end data into one user interface (UI) for just five dollars more per year. Think of Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals as a low-end version of the SolarWinds Orion suite. If you’re eager to tie all of that complex data from other parts of your network into one tool, then AppDynamics, which begins at $3,300 per year, offers a more comprehensive app performance monitoring suite of tools than Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals. It won’t offer the breadth of data that SolarWinds Orion will, but it will give you an app and website ecosystem overview for a fraction of the price.

For a more apples-to-apples comparison to SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor, SmartBear AlertSite Pro, which is also solely a synthetic monitoring tool, only charges $199 per month based on a package deployment for up to 15 users, three endpoints, text-based notifications, and a dedicated customer service representative. Given how much Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals and AppDynamics ($3,300.00 at AppDynamics)(Opens in a new window) offer, it’s difficult to justify the cost of similarly priced website monitoring tools that don’t offer a complementary tie-in to your apps and network.

Widgets Galore, Waterfall Menus, and Hundreds of Alerts

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor gave me access to a demo environment with the full Orion software suite as well as a separate demo environment that was only configured with Web Performance Monitor. Both systems are built on a barebones UI that is reminiscent of Windows 7 or Windows Vista. If you choose to purchase SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor as a standalone, your dashboard will consist of widgets that list all of your transactions, your locations, the transactions that are experiencing problems, a transaction health overview, active alerts, particular steps with problems, transactions by duration, and steps by duration. In other words, you’re bombarded by incredibly relevant widgets that give you a cohesive overview of all of your need-to-know data.

If you click Transaction Health Overview, you’ll see a list of every transaction, including each transaction’s status (Warning, Critical, Down, and Unreachable). This is by far the easiest system to read, decipher, and take action on. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor allows you to automatically record screenshots of the last 10 failures so that you know what happened (and so that you can share the data with your team). Some website monitoring tools offer a similar feature but with unique URLs rather than screenshots. There’s a benefit to unique URLs: they are more secure, because they let you restrict who sees them as well as restrict how long the data lives. However, screenshots are a simpler, more universal way to share this data, and the fact that SolarWinds automatically records the screen is a nifty feature that simplifies everyone’s experience. Just be sure you don’t share the screenshots with anyone who has nefarious intentions.

The widgets that detail the minimum, maximum, and average duration of visits are handy charts that give you a boiled-down explanation of your problem areas. From each of these widgets, you can click into a specific visit and see a waterfall chart that shows you each step within that page and how long each load took.

If a problem reaches a critical stage, you can enable text, email, and phone alerts that are automatically sent to the members of your team. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor offers hundreds of pre-configured alerts, which is really useful for teams that are embarking on their first website monitoring endeavor. For more advanced users, you can configure custom alerts for any step, any transaction, any location, and more. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor has configured its alerts page to show you whether or not your alerts have been acknowledged by anyone on your team. This allows you to gain an overview of not only how many alerts have been handled but who has handled the most issues.

The Whole Enchilada

Should you decide to buy into the entire SolarWinds ecosystem, you’re looking at a starting investment of more than $22,000 per year. That’s a lot of dough, but you’ll be given access to everything from network monitoring, netflow analysis, app and database monitoring, virtualization monitoring, an event manager, and more. Each of these services can be configured a la carte, so you can mix and match as your system requires you to.

This comprehensive SolarWinds package gives you the ability to tie web transactions back to your data store, your storage appliances, and your on-premises apps. So, if you’re experiencing downtime and your URL monitoring isn’t triggering alerts, you’ll be able to dig deeper into your IT infrastructure to determine where problems are originating.

You can also configure SolarWinds Orion to tie to front-end web transactions in order to monitor real user journeys. This will help you to determine business outcomes in e-commerce or via business-to-business (B2B) sign-up pages in order to better understand how your website experience plays into making sales and closing deals. You can’t do this with SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor as a standalone because it only runs synthetic tests.

Bottom Line

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor is a utilitarian tool that is comprehensible, customizable, and intelligent. Although it’s not as attractive as other website monitoring and app monitoring tools, it’s got everything you need to ensure each step of your website and web app experiences are properly loading. It’s also priced a bit more expensively than other standalone website monitoring tools so, if you’re not planning to build SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor into a larger SolarWinds app environment, this might be a bit more expensive than you could be willing to pay.

If money is no object and you don’t care about pretty charts and colors, you won’t find a better standalone website performance monitoring tool on the market. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor has everything you need to stay ahead of website and web app issues.

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor

4.0

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Pros

• Important information and alerts are pre-configured.

• Synthetic monitoring gives you the chance to catch issues before they arise.

• Combined with the SolarWinds Orion suite, you can use this tool to monitor every performance aspect of your IT infrastructure.

Cons

• No built-in real user monitoring.

• Competitive monitoring can only be configured through Orion.

• Outdated interface.

The Bottom Line

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor is focused on synthetic monitoring and sports excellent features and analytics in that direction, though they’re wrapped in a slightly outdated interface. But if user monitoring or real-time analytcs are your thing, you’ll need to keep looking.

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