This is Ground Control to Sergeant SAM

It's been little more than two months since the official release of SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor v5.2. A release that was packed to the gills with tons of new features. It's hard to believe that in such a short period of time that we're here once again to kick off the next SAM Beta.

Being a Product Manager at SolarWinds allows me the opportunity to talk with IT folks from around the globe. Most of whom dream of a utopian world in which there was one single place where they can visualize problems as they're occurring, as well as react and resolve them in real time. The main objective of any good monitoring solution is to provide the user with actionable information. Your servers hard drive fails? Replace it. Your users hogging all the bandwidth watching YouTube? Slap a CBQoS policy on your router. Better yet, track them down and slap the offenders upside the head. On second thought, maybe not.


Got users disconnecting from Terminal Server and Citrix sessions, leaving rogue processes running amok in their wake? Services crashing on your critical application servers? Time to fire up a Remote Desktop, or better yet, a Dameware session to the afflicted server right?  Wrong!

Sure that might have been the way you did things yesterday, but times have changed. Now you can resolve these kinds of common issues from within the same web interface that alerted you to the problem in the first place. No more firing up the VPN, starting up your remote control application, just to launch Task Manager or the Services Control Panel to kill off a few processes or start those services back up. That power is now available to you right from within the SAM web console. Point, click, done. It's that simple. Don't believe me? Watch the videos below.

Terminate Processes with the Real-Time Process Explorer Server & Application Monitor Service Control Manager

The first video demonstrates SAM's ability to terminate processes from within the Real-Time Process Explorer. The video starts off with me killing off a single instance of FireFox.exe, but shortly thereafter you can see how the Real-Time Process Explorer allows you to terminate multiple processes simultaneously. Windows own Task Manager doesn't even allow you to do that!

The second video showcases SAMs new Service Control Manager. From within the Service Control Manager you can see all services available on this host, their current state, startup settings, as well as the services description. Stopping, starting, and restarting services instantly is a simple point and click affair, that's sure to have you and your applications back up and running quicker than ever.

These are just a couple of the new features we're working on for the next release. If you already own Server & Application Monitor and are currently under active maintenance, you can sign-up to download the beta today.

Thwack - Symbolize TM, R, and C