SolarWinds monitors your network, servers, and infrastructure at scale. Atatus goes inside your application, connecting every slow transaction, failing query, and real user session to the exact code responsible, with AI that surfaces issues as they develop.
SolarWinds is built for IT operations teams managing large, complex infrastructure estates network devices, servers, databases, and cloud resources across hybrid environments. Atatus is built for engineering teams who need to understand exactly what is happening inside their application code, at the request and user level, in real time. The two tools solve different problems for different teams.
Atatus instruments your application code directly, tracing every request from the user's browser through your API gateway, microservices, and database calls with full span-level timing. SolarWinds SAM monitors application component health at the process and service level but does not produce distributed request traces inside your application code.
SolarWinds uses threshold-based alerting across its monitoring products. Atatus uses machine learning to baseline the normal performance of every transaction and endpoint, detecting behavioral drift as it develops a p95 climbing steadily, an error rate creeping up on a specific endpoint, a query slowing down after a deployment before any infrastructure-level metric triggers an alert.
The SolarWinds Orion platform is powerful but carries significant deployment, configuration, and maintenance overhead it is designed for dedicated IT ops administrators. Atatus installs with a single agent command per language, auto-instruments your application, and gives development teams self-serve access to APM, RUM, and error data from day one.
Here is where Atatus delivers application observability that SolarWinds was not designed to provide, for engineering and product teams who need visibility at the code and user level.
SolarWinds SAM monitors component availability and resource metrics at the host and process level. A specific API endpoint returning 500s with all server metrics in range will not surface in SolarWinds. Atatus captures every exception, groups it by fingerprint, links it to the failing endpoint, and shows exactly how many user sessions are affected.
SolarWinds threshold-based alerts fire when a configured value is crossed. A payment endpoint whose p95 has risen from 200ms to 800ms over three hours while all server metrics remain within range will not trigger any SolarWinds alert. Atatus AI detects the behavioral drift and fires before users notice a problem.
SolarWinds has no browser agent and no ability to monitor real user sessions or client-side JavaScript. A frontend exception breaking your signup or checkout flow is entirely invisible to SolarWinds. Atatus captures it from real browsers, groups it by error type, and links it to the affected user sessions and page URLs.
SolarWinds DPA provides database wait-time analysis at the query level. Atatus connects every slow query to the application transaction and API endpoint that triggered it, showing which specific code paths are generating the most expensive database calls and how that maps to user-facing latency in real time.
Atatus tracks deployments and immediately correlates each release with changes in error rates, response time distributions, and query behavior per endpoint. When a new version slows things down, Atatus surfaces it within minutes with the affected transactions and stack traces. SolarWinds has no deployment context and no way to spot this at the code level.
SolarWinds pricing is based on monitored nodes, volumes, interfaces, and application components. As your infrastructure grows, costs scale with it in ways that can be hard to predict. Atatus uses predictable per-seat pricing that covers APM, RUM, error tracking, logs, and synthetics in one plan with no per-node or per-module charges.
A technical breakdown of where each platform focuses and what the gaps mean for engineering teams managing modern application stacks.
Full-stack APM with distributed tracing from browser to database across Node.js, Python, Ruby, Java, .NET, PHP, Go
Real User Monitoring capturing Core Web Vitals, session detail, and JS error correlation from real browsers in production
AI anomaly detection that baselines every transaction and endpoint, alerting on behavioral drift before infrastructure metrics report a problem
Error tracking with auto-grouped server and browser exceptions linked to affected transactions, user sessions, and release versions
Log management with structured log ingestion unified with traces and metrics in one platform with no module switching
Synthetic monitoring with HTTP and browser checks from 20+ global locations at per-minute intervals
Infrastructure monitoring for host metrics, containers, and Kubernetes alongside APM and RUM data in one view
Predictable per-seat pricing with all capabilities included in every plan and no per-node or per-module billing
APM via SAM and Observability application component and service monitoring available; distributed request tracing depth is limited compared to dedicated APM-first tools
No Real User Monitoring browser performance, user session data, and Core Web Vitals are not available in the SolarWinds core platform
Threshold-based alerting alerts fire when a metric crosses a configured threshold; no ML-based anomaly detection at the application transaction level
No application error tracking SolarWinds monitors service availability and resource health but has no code-level exception grouping or stack trace visibility
Log management via Loggly and Papertrail acquired log management products available but operated as separate platforms from the core Orion monitoring stack
Synthetic monitoring available web performance monitoring checks available but primarily focused on availability and response time rather than browser-level user experience
Deep infrastructure monitoring industry-leading network, server, and cloud infrastructure monitoring with NPM and SAM at enterprise scale
Per-node pricing model costs scale with the number of monitored nodes, interfaces, volumes, and application components; can grow significantly in large environments
“Our network team was happy with SolarWinds. Our dev team was flying blind. The moment something broke, we were digging through three different tools trying to connect the dots. With Atatus, the trace just tells you what happened. That alone cut our incident time in half.”
What teams running SolarWinds most commonly want to know before evaluating Atatus.
They address different parts of the observability stack. SolarWinds is a comprehensive IT management platform with industry-leading network monitoring, server management, and database performance analysis capabilities built for large IT operations teams managing complex hybrid infrastructure. Atatus covers the application and user experience layer: distributed tracing, RUM, error tracking, log management, and AI-based anomaly detection. Atatus also includes infrastructure monitoring for hosts, containers, and Kubernetes, so teams whose primary need is application observability can cover both layers without SolarWinds. Teams with significant SolarWinds NPM and network infrastructure investments typically run both, using SolarWinds for network and infrastructure management and Atatus for application-level observability.
SolarWinds Observability is a newer cloud-based product that includes distributed tracing, infrastructure monitoring, and OTel support. It covers more of the application observability space than the traditional Orion-based products. Atatus differs in its depth of developer-facing features: real user monitoring, session-level error correlation, deploy tracking, and AI anomaly detection at the transaction level. Atatus is also designed from the ground up for developer and SRE team self-service, with simpler onboarding and more transparent pricing than the broader SolarWinds product family.
SolarWinds alerting is built on a threshold and rule engine across its monitoring products flexible and powerful for infrastructure metrics, but requiring you to know in advance what to alert on and at what value. Atatus ML-based anomaly detection learns the normal performance pattern for each application transaction and endpoint automatically. When an endpoint starts performing outside its established norm, Atatus fires without requiring a manually configured threshold per transaction. This means regressions are caught as they develop, rather than only after a hard limit is crossed.
Atatus monitors application hosts, containers, and Kubernetes but does not provide SNMP-based network device monitoring, bandwidth analysis, or the deep network infrastructure capabilities that SolarWinds NPM is known for. If your team manages routers, switches, and network infrastructure at scale, SolarWinds NPM is the appropriate tool for that layer. Atatus is the right tool for everything happening inside the application and user experience layer above that network infrastructure.
SolarWinds pricing scales with the number of monitored nodes, interfaces, volumes, application components across its individual product modules. As infrastructure grows, costs scale with it and total cost across NPM, SAM, DPA, and log management can be significant. Atatus uses a per-seat model where APM, RUM, error tracking, logs, and synthetics are all included in one plan. Costs are publicly listed and scale with team size rather than with infrastructure size, making them easier to predict and budget for.
Yes. Atatus holds SOC 2 Type II certification and is GDPR compliant. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Data residency options are available on Enterprise plans and full security documentation including penetration test results is available on request for compliance and procurement review processes.
14-day free trial. Full platform. No credit card required. Migration support included. Join with teams who switched from Solarwinds · Average setup time: under 10 minutes