SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor - Review 2022

Part of the SolarWinds Orion software ecosystem, SolarWinds Spider web Functioning 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 tape steps of a hypothetical user'due south journeying to make up one's mind if and where bottlenecks will occur. Unlike Editors' Choice tool AppDynamics, SolarWinds Web Functioning Monitor won't let yous monitor real UXes as they occur. In this fashion, 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 bug before they reach your customers or front-end employees.

How Pricing Works

SolarWinds Web Functioning Monitor begins at $i,995 per twelvemonth for upwardly to five recordings (or transactions, depending on how your team refers to them). This gives y'all 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 lot'll need to purchase additional SolarWinds tools.

SolarWinds Web Functioning Monitor'southward $ii,000 price tag is pretty loftier for a bones web monitoring tool. For example, Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals ties all of that back-finish data into ane user interface (UI) for only five dollars more per yr. Retrieve of Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals equally a low-end version of the SolarWinds Orion suite. If y'all're eager to tie all of that complex data from other parts of your network into one tool, and 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 latitude of information that SolarWinds Orion will, but it will give you an app and website ecosystem overview for a fraction of the price.

For a more than apples-to-apples comparing to SolarWinds Web Operation Monitor, SmartBear AlertSite Pro, which is also solely a synthetic monitoring tool, only charges $199 per month based on a packet deployment for upwards to fifteen users, three endpoints, text-based notifications, and a defended customer service representative. Given how much Riverbed SteelCentral AppInternals and AppDynamics 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.

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor - Dashboard

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 besides every bit a split demo environs that was but configured with Web Performance Monitor. Both systems are built on a barebones UI that is reminiscent of Windows 7 or Windows Vista. If yous choose to buy SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor equally 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, agile alerts, item steps with problems, transactions by duration, and steps by duration. In other words, you lot're bombarded by incredibly relevant widgets that give you a cohesive overview of all of your demand-to-know data.

If yous click Transaction Health Overview, you'll see a list of every transaction, including each transaction's condition (Warning, Critical, Down, and Unreachable). This is by far the easiest organisation to read, decipher, and take action on. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor allows you to automatically record screenshots of the last 10 failures so that y'all know what happened (and so that yous tin can share the data with your team). Some website monitoring tools offer a similar feature but with unique URLs rather than screenshots. There'southward a benefit to unique URLs: they are more secure, considering they let you restrict who sees them as well as restrict how long the data lives. Notwithstanding, screenshots are a simpler, more universal manner to share this information, and the fact that SolarWinds automatically records the screen is a smashing characteristic 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 meet a waterfall chart that shows you each step within that page and how long each load took.

If a trouble reaches a disquisitional stage, you can enable text, email, and phone alerts that are automatically sent to the members of your squad. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor offers hundreds of pre-configured alerts, which is actually useful for teams that are embarking on their commencement website monitoring endeavor. For more advanced users, yous can configure custom alerts for whatever stride, any transaction, whatsoever location, and more. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor has configured its alerts page to prove you lot whether or not your alerts accept been acknowledged past anyone on your team. This allows you to proceeds an overview of non only how many alerts have been handled merely who has handled the virtually issues.

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor - Transactions

The Whole Enchilada

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

This comprehensive SolarWinds package gives you the ability to necktie web transactions back to your information store, your storage appliances, and your on-premises apps. And so, if you're experiencing reanimation and your URL monitoring isn't triggering alerts, you'll be able to dig deeper into your IT infrastructure to make up one's mind where problems are originating.

Y'all can also configure SolarWinds Orion to tie to front-end web transactions in lodge to monitor real user journeys. This will help you to decide business organization outcomes in east-commerce or via business concern-to-business (B2B) sign-up pages in order to better sympathize how your website feel plays into making sales and closing deals. You can't do this with SolarWinds Spider web Operation Monitor equally a standalone because information technology only runs synthetic tests.

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor - Transaction Health

Bottom Line

SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor is a utilitarian tool that is comprehensible, customizable, and intelligent. Although it's non as attractive every bit other website monitoring and app monitoring tools, it'due south got everything y'all need to ensure each step of your website and web app experiences are properly loading. It's too priced a bit more than 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 exist willing to pay.

If money is no object and y'all don't intendance almost pretty charts and colors, y'all won't notice a meliorate standalone website performance monitoring tool on the market. SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor has everything y'all need to stay alee of website and web app issues.