Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)

Getting Your SolarWinds SRM License Set Up

A SolarWinds SRM license is what gives you full storage resource monitoring and visibility across your infrastructure through the Orion Platform. After you purchase it, everything gets activated and managed through the SolarWinds License Manager, basically your control center for all things licensing. Each license record contains the essentials: customer account info, subscription dates, which edition you’ve got, your licensed capacity (like how many storage arrays, LUNs, or volumes you can monitor), and polling engine allocations. You can apply the license right through the UI, and most of the time it’ll assign itself automatically to your Orion server. If you’re running multiple polling engines across different sites, you can distribute it manually to match however your environment is laid out.

Working in a restricted or air-gapped network? SolarWinds SRM supports offline activation using a UDI file (Unique Device Identifier). The process goes like this: generate the UDI from your Orion server, take it to a machine that has internet access, upload it to the SolarWinds Customer Portal, and download the key file they give you. Bring that key back and import it into the License Manager, done. Your production server never needs to connect to the internet, which makes this approach perfect for regulated industries or high-security networks.

The licensing model is subscription-based with a fixed term. During that period, you get continuous access to updates, new features, and technical support. If your storage environment grows, license stacking lets you combine multiple subscriptions under one deployment instead of starting from scratch. Once your SolarWinds SRM license is activated, whether online or offline, you’ve got full storage visibility and monitoring capabilities across your enterprise setup.

What You Get with SolarWinds SRM

Once you’ve got SolarWinds SRM running, you’re looking at complete storage visibility across multiple vendors and platforms. It monitors and analyzes storage performance so your IT team can actually see what’s going on. The platform collects detailed metrics on storage arrays, LUNs, volumes, and pools, giving you real-time insights into capacity, throughput, and latency. This kind of visibility helps you spot bottlenecks and performance issues before they start affecting your applications, which is worth its weight in gold during an incident.

One of the more practical features is capacity forecasting and trending. Instead of guessing when you’ll need more storage, you can actually plan expansions based on real data. That means avoiding the awkward situation where you either over-provision (wasting budget) or run out of space unexpectedly (causing panic). Because SolarWinds SRM integrates with the Orion Platform, you get a unified view of both server and storage performance, which makes diagnosing infrastructure-wide issues much easier. The dashboards and visualization tools highlight critical storage health metrics, so your operations team knows what to prioritize.

There’s also customizable alerting and reporting, which lets you automate responses when performance drops or capacity thresholds get breached. The platform works well in mixed environments , it supports popular storage vendors and protocols without forcing you into a single ecosystem. And since it integrates with other SolarWinds modules, you get better overall IT observability. Everything from performance to network to storage metrics shows up in one place, which beats jumping between five different tools.

By automating the monitoring side and improving visibility, SolarWinds SRM helps you reduce operational complexity, improve performance, and make decisions about capacity planning that actually make sense.

Pricing and How to Buy SolarWinds SRM

When you’re ready to purchase SolarWinds SRM, start by figuring out your monitoring capacity requirements, how many storage arrays, LUNs, or volumes you need to keep tabs on. You can request a quote directly from the SolarWinds store or go through an authorized partner. To get accurate pricing, it helps to know which edition you need, what your capacity requirements look like, how many polling engines are in play, how long you want the subscription to run, and what support tier makes sense for your team.

The SolarWinds SRM cost depends on several things: which edition tier you choose, your total monitored capacity, the number of polling engines you need, and how long you subscribe for. Multi-year subscriptions or bundled purchases usually bring down the total cost and make renewals simpler. If your environment expands down the road, license stacking lets you increase capacity without buying separate deployments or reworking everything.

After you complete the purchase, the entitlement shows up in your License Manager. You can activate it online for immediate deployment, or if you’re in a secure or air-gapped environment, use the UDI offline activation method we covered earlier. Once activation wraps up, your capacity allocation syncs across the environment and you can start monitoring storage performance and managing capacity right away.

Thinking about testing it out first? SolarWinds offers trial versions so you can experience the full functionality before committing. You can also check out different SolarWinds SRM models to find the right scale and feature set for your environment. Pricing information is available on the SolarWinds SRM cost page or through authorized partners, so you can plan your investment and align licensing with your growth strategy without any surprises.