SolarWinds broadens systems portfolio

“Technology professionals managing increasingly complex and distributed IT environments require monitoring tools that transcend the challenges introduced by hybrid IT,” said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds. “The portfolio updates are designed to meet those challenges, providing a unified platform to help IT professionals see the bigger picture by monitoring, mapping, and proving where there are performance issues in IT environments.”

SolarWinds Delivers Windows System and Application Change Detection through New Server Configuration Monitor (SCM 1.0)

Built on the Orion Platform, a modular, scalable, unified monitoring architecture, the first generation of the SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor (SCM 1.0) is designed to provide visibility into configuration changes on Windows^® servers and applications that have taken place over time, helping technology professionals correlate configuration changes to performance. SCM can be used to quickly detect changes on a node, provide customisable reporting, alerting, and performance correlation.

“SCM picked up on things I didn't realise had changed,” said Jez Marsh, founder, Silverback Systems. “I think many people will be excited to learn about the capabilities and will find it useful, especially MSPs, who have commoditised-based spin up and spin down of virtual machines."

SCM’s integration with SolarWinds PerfStack^™ dashboard empowers technology professionals with a side-by-side view into how configuration settings are affecting overall performance metrics for applications. Cross-functional collaboration accelerates problem solving and allows the IT team to visually correlate data from multiple sources. SCM is also equipped to help technology professionals verify changes on applications and systems, such as unauthorised modifications to standard server configurations, for example, a critical capability in today’s ever-changing, complex environments.

Deeper DevOps Environment Monitoring in SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor 6.7

SAM is designed to provide end-to-end visibility, as well as server and application performance monitoring, using agent-based and agentless technologies across multiple data centres, remote locations, and the cloud. The latest update, version 6.7, now includes container monitoring for Docker^®, Kubernetes^®, and Mesos^®, and can assist in troubleshooting container-based applications and workloads, with the goal of improving monitoring and troubleshooting DevOps environments.

This enhancement is designed to take technology professionals into the future: in the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2018, 44 percent of respondents ranked containers as the most important technology priority today, and 38 percent of respondents ranked containers as the most important technology priority three to five years from now.

Optimise SDS Monitoring with VMware vSAN Support in Virtualisation Manager (VMAN) 8.3

The latest update, version 8.3, offers customers vSAN storage support. Through the update, users can view and monitor VMware^® software defined storage (vSAN) alongside virtualisation performance, from the same console. Customers can also use recommendations to help take the guesswork out of optimisation, as well as model capacity planning scenarios for today and tomorrow’s workloads.

Integration with the Orion Platform can deliver deeper virtualisation insights, broader infrastructure reporting, informative alerting, cross-stack performance data and metrics, and improved virtualisation management.

New Support for Huawei Devices and Expanded Hardware Health Support for Dell EMC Isilon, NetApp Arrays with Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) 6.7

The latest version of SolarWinds SRM (version 6.7) adds support for Huawei^® OceanStor^® and Dorado^™ devices and now features hardware health support for Dell EMC^™ Isilon^® and NetApp^®, two industry-leading all-flash array vendors. With this extended support, SRM 6.7 can enable resource monitoring across a wider mix of infrastructures in multi-vendor environments to meet the needs of a broader set of customers.

SRM’s data integration with other SolarWinds products, including Virtualisation Manager (VMAN) and Server & Application Monitor (SAM) through the Orion Platform, allows for end-to-end relationship mapping from application and virtualisation through storage.

Unified Infrastructure Monitoring through Intelligent Orion Maps and Orion Platform Integration

Today’s IT teams are responsible for managing increasingly complex and distributed environments, yet many are still manually mapping their environment and its dependencies—a time-consuming task that can quickly become outdated. SolarWinds Intelligent Orion Maps, built on the Orion Platform, is designed to eliminate the need for manual maps and help users easily create and view custom, logical, contextual maps—in near real-time. With just a few clicks, technology professionals can use Intelligent Orion Maps to pull and display application and infrastructure dependencies when troubleshooting a new issue, as well as view virtualisation platform recommendations in context application groups.

Exploring the adoption of newer strategies, such as adding analytics capabilities to applications or upgrading hardware or software, may shift the location of a bottleneck, but may not solve it altogether. Full visibility across all of these elements is needed to understand where an issue truly resides and improve uptime and performance.

Built on the Orion Platform, all the unified infrastructure management enhancements across SAM, VMAN, SRM, and SCM are designed to help technology professionals monitor their IT systems environment from application to spindle—to quickly find performance issues and correlations between all the layers. This also includes allowing IT teams to view and verify that any distributed and load-balanced software is also sufficiently distributed from a hardware infrastructure perspective. Integration with features like SolarWinds AppStack^™, PerfStack, and AppInsights^™ can help make the process of preventing and troubleshooting incidents easier than ever before for technology professionals.