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Home » Network License » SolarWinds » Server Configuration Monitor (SCM)
A SolarWinds SCM license is what activates the secure configuration management features within your Orion Platform. Once you’ve made the purchase, everything gets managed through the SolarWinds License Manager, your central hub for registration, assignment, and keeping tabs on what’s active. Each entitlement record holds the important stuff: customer account details, subscription dates, which edition you picked, and your licensed capacity (node counts, monitored file systems, polling engine allocations, and so on). You can apply the license right through the UI, and most admins let it assign automatically to the Orion server. But if you’re dealing with multiple polling engines spread across different locations, you can distribute resources manually to match however your environment is set up.
Working in a restricted network? SolarWinds SCM handles offline activation using a UDI file, that’s a Unique Device Identifier. The process is straightforward enough: generate the UDI from your Orion server, move it to a machine with internet access, upload it to the SolarWinds Customer Portal, and grab the key file they send back. Import that key into your License Manager, and you’re done. No online connectivity needed on the production side, which is exactly what you want for regulated or air-gapped deployments.
The licensing runs on a subscription model with a fixed term. During that period, you get continuous access to updates, security patches, and technical support. If your environment grows faster than expected, license stacking lets you combine multiple subscriptions to bump up capacity without reworking your whole setup. Once your SolarWinds SCM license is activated, online or offline, you’ve got full access to configuration monitoring and compliance automation features.
After activation, SolarWinds SCM gives you advanced file integrity and configuration change monitoring across your infrastructure. It keeps a constant watch on critical configuration files, directories, and registry keys, whether they’re on servers, network devices, or applications. The platform catches unauthorized modifications in real time, which is a big deal for both security and operations teams. You can choose between agentless and agent-based monitoring depending on what fits your environment better, so it adapts pretty well to different setups.
One feature that stands out is automated baselining. You define what the expected configuration state should be, and the system automatically flags anything that drifts from that baseline. This makes it much easier to enforce internal security policies and stay compliant with regulatory frameworks like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and SOX. Real-time alerts mean you get notified right away when a change happens, so misconfigurations or potential security issues don’t slip through the cracks.
Because SolarWinds SCM integrates directly with the Orion Platform, you get unified dashboards, historical change tracking, and the ability to trace problems back to their source. You can correlate configuration events with performance data to see if a specific change affected system health or uptime, which is incredibly useful during troubleshooting. The reporting and auditing capabilities are solid too, giving you detailed logs that work well for compliance assessments and security investigations.
The whole point is to reduce the manual work involved in tracking changes. By automating detection, reporting, and alerting, SolarWinds SCM strengthens your security posture and helps your team respond faster when something goes wrong. That kind of operational confidence is hard to put a price on.
When you’re ready to buy SolarWinds SCM, start by figuring out how many nodes and file systems you need to monitor, since licensing is based on capacity tiers. You can request a quote directly from the SolarWinds store or work with one of their authorized partners or resellers. Before you reach out, it helps to know which edition you need, what capacity you’re looking at, how many polling engines are involved, what support tier makes sense for your team, and how long you want the subscription to last.
The SolarWinds SCM price depends on a few factors: edition type, monitoring capacity, any add-on modules you throw in, and your support level. If you’re willing to commit to a multi-year subscription or buy in volume, you can usually bring down the overall cost. License stacking is another option that gives you flexibility, you can start with what you need now and expand capacity later without ditching your existing entitlements. It’s a decent way to handle growth without overbuying upfront.
After you complete the purchase, the entitlement pops up in your License Manager. From there, you can activate online right away, or if you’re in a secure environment, use the UDI offline activation method we talked about earlier. Once activation wraps up, SolarWinds SCM automatically syncs the allocated capacity across your environment, and you can start using the monitoring and alerting features immediately.
Thinking about trying it first? There’s a free trial available so you can test things out before committing. You can grab the latest build from the SolarWinds SCM download page, and if you need pricing details, check the SolarWinds SCM cost page or talk to an official partner. The pricing model is pretty transparent, and because there are different SolarWinds SCM models to choose from, it’s easier to find something that fits whether you’re running a mid-size shop or a large enterprise setup.
