Installing IT packaged applications has changed over the decades, from floppies, to CDs to, to downloads, to flash. You grab the binaries, configure dependencies, install, and smoke-test. But all that takes time, especially if you've got to procure hardware, get into the correct subnet, or find space on an underused load balancer! Public cloud, like Microsoft Azure, changes the game. Increasingly, software vendors - including SolarWinds - are making the apps we depend on available in cloud marketplaces. In this episode, Microsoft Senior Cloud Advocate Pierre Roman joins SolarWinds Head Geek™ Patrick Hubbard and Sacha Dawes, Director, Product Marketing to discuss SolarWinds products available on the Azure Marketplace. You’ll learn how easy it is to install and configure SolarWinds products to run on Azure; operations practices to make them run their best; and (most importantly), how to centrally monitor and adjust resource provisioning to ensure that you are operating within your budget.
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Episode Transcript
Hello, and welcome back to SolarWinds Lab. And joining us today are Pierre and Sacha and we're talking about marketplace applications. You know, all those applications that you find inside of your cloud host that are, look like they're pretty much ready to go, pre-provisioned, and you can pretty much just click next, next, next.
Well, they are ready to go. That's the whole point of the marketplace.
And at this point, how many, a typical marketplace will have thousands of apps.
Thousands of apps. That changes every month, but yeah, thousands.
And we're going to showcase a little bit today about SolarWinds applications on Microsoft Azure from within their marketplace.
Right, I mean, Database Performance Analyzer has been out there for a long time. You have people who need to, you know, that classic case of sort of being the accidental DBA, you're looking at the application, then all of a sudden wait time. what is wait time, and what are the factors that might be conspiring in the way that it's operating, but in that case, it might be something that's running in Azure SQL or some other database that you're actually running in the cloud. So there are some other apps that we've added recently, and we're going to get into that. So the main things that we're going to talk about here are what, how are they different? The things you need to know about, maybe instance sizing when you launch them, and a little bit about migration, but maybe not too much, because we've covered that in a couple of other episodes. So where do we want to start?
Well, I think just what is the value of, you know, what is the value of a marketplace?
I think that'd be great.
Yeah.
So, the marketplace really is a place for ISV, so independent software vendors and other companies to basically provide their goods, their software, their services, in a way that's prepackaged. But also the big thing is, to put the app into the marketplace it has to go through a series of validation. Will it deploy properly? Will it behave the way you want it? So there is a level of comfort.
Right, the organization that put that app in the marketplace stands behind it more than if they just handed you an image, for example.
That's right. Plus, when you're looking at a marketplace, or if you're deploying anything anywhere, the thing that always gets you is the dependencies. So you start deploying something, and then halfway through it says, "Oh, excuse me, you need .NET version X." And you go, "Ah, that's not the one I installed." Or if it's on Linux, or whatever platform you're using, there's always dependencies that are, or preconfiguration or prerequisites that you need to--
Platform dependencies.
Platform dependencies. Where you're looking at marketplace, you don't have to deal with any of that because it's already built-in.
Right, and then just the configurations that we were talking earlier on about just, you know, expected configurations. It's the fact that you don't have to worry about all the minute details. There's some of those dependencies, for sure, but it's all there for you. You don't have to worry about provisioning the hardware because, of course, you're running it on a public cloud. You don't have to worry about all that provisioning and sitting there watching the software to load and finding those dependencies. How many hours have we all spent installing software in the traditional way on a PC or server?
Yeah, deploy the server first, then apply all of the updates, then wait for three reboots, then install your dependency, then reboot one more time, then install the products that you want, and then you get into the configuration. As opposed to find, create.
Right, and you can use that time to go get a coffee, or take a break, or something else. Well, the other thing is, it also takes care of a lot of version control, right? Like, especially for platform dependencies. The rest of it is, you know, when you look at the requirement spec sheet, something that's in a marketplace is going to actually, that's already been thought through for you. So you don't even have to worry about, well, this database version or that platform requirement version, that's already been included, and we'll get into it a little bit later how it can actually help, there are some versions of it that'll actually help you make sure you receive updates from the original publisher for those marketplace applications so that you're always up-to-date, and you know that you need to be up-to-date, or maybe complete an upgrade.
Right, well, you know, it's, you do get offered some choice, so if you want to run it on one version of Windows Server versus another, and one version of SQL Server versus Azure SQL, then, you know, these are all things that you can select through that process. At least, you know, again, what we'll show you in a short while.
And some marketplace vendors will provide that as a black box, so that it ensures that you can't go and, I can't mess up, for lack of a better word, the base configuration, or others, such as SolarWinds, I think actually allow you to get into the box and use it, so--
We're always going to give you admin access to anything that you're operating, because our customers are administrators, and in a lot of case, they're senior administrators who need to be able to have that really granular control over the system, so we're not going to lock that down so that they can't access it.
Yeah, but it all depends on what you're looking for in the marketplace. So if you're looking at, for example, a hardened application gateway from company X, well, they're going to provide it to you in a locked box. So it's a black box that you deploy in your environment, then you use it.
All right, so let's do this. Sacha, I'd love to see a demo of how this actually works, like how to install a SolarWinds product from the marketplace, I think it'd be really cool. We could talk about the differences versus installing it yourself. We can talk a little bit more about the difference between maybe a sort of commercially-packaged marketplace app versus an image versus a couple of other ways of packaging applications. I promise not to, well, if I say I promise not to talk about containers, and then I talk about containers and I'm talking about that. Sort the difference between an application and a container in the marketplace, and some will actually include container instances as well. So we'll talk about that in a little bit. But mostly what the differences are between installing from marketplace, when it's appropriate, and maybe what some of the benefits are.
Yeah, well, let's take a look and actually roll through and actually get something deployed.
Let's do it.
Okay. Okay, so we're going to start off in the Microsoft Azure portal. Many of you already familiar with that. I've actually gone into the dashboard and so we can actually see from here what resources I've got running. As I said, if you're already familiar with this, then it's going to be a familiar experience to you. One thing I'm going to jump into, because obviously we're talking about it, is the marketplace. And obviously, you know, Pierre, we were talking, thousands of applications and--
Thousands of applications and services, yes.
Yeah, and I think that's the key thing, is you've got services and applications that can run on IaaS, on PaaS, as well as SaaS, that you can get right from within the marketplace itself.
Yep, and depending on what your needs are, if you actually need, or if you actually know what you're looking for, you can basically filter on specific vendor, on specific operating systems that you're looking at. Because sometimes if you're just fishing, it can be a little hard to find what you're looking for. So, in your case, you'd be typing, what, just SolarWinds?
Just SolarWinds, yeah. In fact, it's nice how they, you know, you've grouped it into kind of key categories, which is super-helpful when you're, you know, when you know what you're looking for.
Except, I absolutely agree that filtering is fantastic. But the other thing, too, is, I mean, Google is a wonderful thing. Like, when you've got an idea about a thing, search. Free search is really handy. And in this case, because this is essentially a curated set of applications, it really narrows it way down to a subset, so I find a lot by searching. Like, just kind of exploring with terms and then looking at the applications that come up, and reading the docs, or at least the intros. I find a lot of new things that I hadn't thought of before.
Well, that's another good point about the marketplace, and we'll see that in a second when we, where we actually get to the application, is that the landing page of the service or application that you're getting through the marketplace is mandated that you have some, like, links to documentation, to like README. That kind of forces you to read the README. Whoever reads the README or the EULA?
I am increasingly reading READMEs more--
So am I.
To solve the not-reading-the-manual problem.
Yes, I actually used to have a sign on my door, when I ran a support organization, the pre-Microsoft days, that just said, "Read the manual."
Well, the other thing about READMEs, too, though, for SolarWinds customers, our customers do look at READMEs a lot. And one of the things that we do in, I get a chance to tell all of you on a regular basis, you know, make sure that you're looking at What Are We Working On now in THWACK, that's a section about what the upcoming features will be. So a lot of times they will go straight to the README in the Customer Success Center, which is support.solarwinds.com, they'll drill into the product, and that README is essentially the list of new features that have been added in that release, because there's a lot of new features that are added even in smaller--
Release notes will tell you tons about, do I really need to update, or upgrade from version 3.19 to 3.20? Or 20 to 20.1? Like, sometimes, the ROI just isn't there, because it's going to introduce a new feature that you're not using, or you have no need for. So, it's really informative, and really useful, especially if you're in operations where every cycle counts.
Right, well, even when it's not a small update, I mean, many of you out there have to go through a change process whenever you're doing an update, or if you need to test something out. That's another great thing about public cloud and, you know, something like Azure, is that you can actually instantiate the newest version of the product to do your testing against in order to be successful.
It solves that lab problem, right? Like, larger customers, many of you that are regular viewers of the show, you have labs, or even maybe licenses specific for your labs. There's a discounted license for that. But being able to say, "Do I want to? Let's do a quick eval. "I've used that a million times"-- or especially for like batch updates. Like, maybe you have several different integrated products. Is there a single feature that's good enough in one of these that I want to go ahead and do the upgrade? Or do I want to just keep track and batch 'em? It's really handy for that. But getting back to this, I love that our page for SolarWinds products that are available in the marketplace is so long that you have to actually scroll. And many of these are products that our customers have relied on for years, and three of these even, have been in here for some time.
Right. But yeah, tell you a bit more information about, obviously, what's going on. But the key thing that I'm going to want to do because I know I want to install it, I'm going to click create. And immediately, it's going to instantiate the configuration, or the baseline configuration. The key things that the script needs to know in order to go and deploy its Server & Application Monitor. In fact, that's my first screen. So, first of all, it's given me a suggested name, samserver, I'm going to create a little password here.
Password123?
Don't tell everybody. I'm going to choose this subscription into which I wish to install this particular application. I'm going to use my MSDN account. Resource group. Now this is a great thing, because obviously with a resource group on Azure, you can put in all your components, so that if you are doing DevTest, it makes it just that much easier for management control and at the end of the day, if you need to do some cleanup as well.
As a best practice, and I know it's not in this particular screen right now, but in my resource groups, especially if I'm doing testing, or if I'm doing solution development, I'll go and tag, using Azure tags, my deployment with the user who deployed it. So I will force the tag for the user that deployed it, the date today it was deployed, and maybe a tag as to whether or not it's a dev, test, prod. And that way, when I, at the end of the month, when I export all of my resources to a CSV file, I can parse it and say, "Well, this test was six months ago. Is it still valid?" That way we don't end up using Azure resources or paying for Azure resources that you don't really need anymore.
I love tagging, it's something that took, I was late to use tagging for cloud and it was funny thinking about, there's a Log Manager Lab episode a while back where tagging is a part of that product now. And I want to do a whole episode on tagging because if you like custom properties, tagging lets you take that to a whole new dynamic place. But anyway, so that's an aside about that.
But it ties in really nicely with your product in terms of, it ingests it and actually reports it back in a meaningful way.
Right.
Right. And you can also see that the, just in terms of where do I want to deploy this, I mean, Azure has locations across the globe. In fact, you know, why is this also important for SolarWinds? Well, in fact, we surveyed our customers. 55% of our customers across the world are using Azure as their public cloud. And so, yep.
Well I mean it's, but that's always been the case. I mean, you look at SolarWinds customer base, the two vendors that you see over and over again with the widest support for, are Cisco and Microsoft, and the reason is that that is what many of you are using. So for the system side it's with Microsoft, and obviously it would be Azure.
Right, anyway, you saw all the places you can deploy it. So, you know, if you already have something set up in your home base, and you want to expand out into other countries where you may have offices, and so on and so forth, it makes it a lot easier just through this console. So I've entered my baseline information, and, of course, I just click OK and it's going to take me to the next pane. So it's going to, in this case look at infrastructure information. So we are deploying it in an infrastructure as a service model, so we're actually installing it on top of Windows Server. So once I'm in here again I can select username, give myself another password, if I can remember how to type.
Password345?
Shush, you're telling all my secrets. Anyway, Azure actually comes back and makes sure that I have a strong password. That's one of the nice things. Some of us don't like strong passwords but obviously that's a key thing to be thinking about.
We should all like strong passwords.
We should all like strong passwords.
Or at least long passwords.
Yes, or actually passphrases backed with MFA.
There we go. One of the things, we do recommend or provide recommendations on what virtual machine size you want to run this on, but you can see from here and you have a huge selection and choice in exactly what you want to deploy it on. And of course, all these have been tested out with, working with Microsoft. So all these applications, once they do appear in the marketplace, are actually Azure certified. It's been tested, it's been validated, and nothing gets up in there without that certification process taking place.
And for people that are deploying this in their subscriptions, take note of the cost per month. Because really sometimes, especially if you're in a dev or in test or in eval mode, you really don't want to deploy to a G2 family of machines.
The thing that's really nice about that too, and that sort of curation of instance size, and to your point about cost per month, is that part of understanding cloud is learning how to understand that. And it should be really obvious, but we have decades of experience with CapEx, on-prem, rack server. We can say, this application with this expected level of performance, based on these speeds and speed data for all the dependent infrastructure that's going to operate that application. You can make that call between performance and cost. We know how to do that almost in our sleep, on-prem. But when you go to cloud, especially because the performance of these underlying instances is increasing over time, it's really handy to just see that number upfront and say, OK, I'm now going to balance expected performance against that number, and it takes care of that problem of not understanding, or in fact not wanting to understand what the actual infrastructure is that's operating it.
And in case of doubt, go low because you can always up it later if the performance is not where you're expecting it.
Yeah, and if it's a lab, if you're just playing with it and you want to do an eval, set it real small. Only make sure you put it in a resource group because then it's easy to delete that by just eliminating that resource group.
Yeah, I was going to say, cost is a very important thing. We do have a free tool, Azure Cost Monitor. We'll cover that in a separate session, but definitely something to check out if you are concerned about cost. And with public cloud, frankly, you do need to be concerned about cost. So I'm going to click OK. So we're in our Settings pane. So from here I can select which operating system. Windows Server 2016 or Windows Server 2019, I want to put it on. I can select whether I want a standard or in fact, a standard hard drive or a standard SSD drive. It's going to give me a bit more performance. And then if I have a Windows license, otherwise that's going to get consumed through the pricing on the back end. Network settings, we're not going, we'll just choose the defaults but obviously you have some choices there as well. The last thing it's going to come up with is just to, do you want to support scalability engines, and so that's just a way to be able to extend out the monitoring breadth and scale of the Orion Platform, which is the baseline for SAM.
And I love the way these tiles that are coming up now are Orion-specific, right. So this us as a part of putting it in the marketplace. That preconfiguration and this flow, to make sure that you're getting all of your config settings the way they need to be for the install, is built into this. So that's another advantage here is it's going to walk you through it.
And that's part of the validation of putting an app in the marketplace is that those panes are actually there and working and testing.
One of the things we just announced earlier this year was our support of Azure SQL Database and so that's obviously one of Microsoft's PaaS services for SQL. You can instantiate your own Microsoft SQL as an IaaS instance as well but for speed and performance, we're going to go with the Azure SQL Database.
Speed, performance, and actually cost.
There you go.
Typically, typically for equal performance the Azure SQL is a little cheaper than the SQL running on a VM. Mostly because you're forgoing the licensing cost and some of the compute cost on those instances.
Yep, so definitely a great choice. If you're interested in looking at the ARM template, then you can certainly open it up as I have here. You can download it. You can change it for your own particular environment if you wish to use automation on the back end. Obviously, I'll leave you to play around with that.
Or, I don't know, save that somewhere so that you can go back in time and say how is this originally configured.
Actually, you can add that to your library so that you can deploy it again in the exact same fashion.
Unfortunately passwords are not in there but that's a separate issue. So I'm going to put my phone number. I'm not really going to put my phone number in. Patrick, I'll put yours. So anyway, there's my contact information, terms of use, and literally talking about instantiating. Create, off we go, and it's off to the races immediately. Azure is leveraging that ARM template, is out taking the software image and putting it into the subscription and the resource group that I've just specified and then just in a few more minutes it will be complete, and off we can go and start using our new SAM deployment.
What kind of typical spin-up times do you see?
It very much varies by regions, but it can be as little as five to 10 minutes. A lot of it comes down to the speed of the underlying platform. I mean, something like SAM, the Orion Platform, it can be a relatively complex installation.
But it's generally pretty predictable and however you figure it, based on the configuration you use you're going to usually see the same configuration time every time.
You've got it, yep. Yeah, again, regardless of region, it's pretty consistent.
And then the nice thing with also this being based on an ARM template is if when you're looking at the status of your deployment you can actually drill into it and see which parts are actually being deployed if you've got Azure SQL, your VM, and the information about it, and see where you stand so you know if you have time to go get yourself a cup of coffee.
Yes, and so yeah, in fact here's that exact screen here, so you can see what components have actually been created, what their status is, and just drill in. But obviously when it is finally complete you're going to get a notification. You can see it just right there it started to add in a few additional components, but that's busy operating away and we can go get that cup of coffee.
That is an alert that you definitely do not want to filter out. So notification for complete installation for cloud resources is really nice because then you just wait, it pops up in your mailbox or in Slack or wherever, and you can see it. OK Sacha and Pierre, here's the question then. I mean this looks super easy and I probably stand up 60, 70 instances of these products a year for demos and working with customers and everything else. It's just really convenient. I spin 'em up in the cloud. Half the time they fall under free tier, it's budget-friendly good stuff. So this looks like the only way to do this. Why wouldn't you do this, and the answer is there's a lot of good reasons why. So let's talk about that for a second. When is this not the right approach, or maybe a modified version of this is the right approach?
Well I think a lot of it, I mean, like you just said, technically there's no reason why you can't do it. Really, I think it comes more to your corporate policies or your own preference.
Compliance.
Compliance, that's a--
Depending on which vertical you're in you may have some restriction as to where you store your data.
Right, well I mean, and if you look across everywhere that is definitely softening in terms of where you save your data. But a lot do have security and/or compliance concerns that say, "No, I want to keep it on-premises." Especially governmental institutions, but then there's other opportunities for that in the cloud. Other things could be that, I mean, maybe you've already got your main environment set up on-premises and you're just not at that point ready to make that transition into public cloud. But the great thing is, once you deploy in public cloud you can still point it back to monitor whether it be your Azure resources, resources in other public clouds, in other hosted clouds, or back on-premises. It's really, it's a central point of command and control that can reach out like a hub-and-spoke model.
So it's a truly hybrid type of deployment. So you can deploy it in the cloud but still monitor, review, scan all of your on-prem resources.
And that in fact is the way that most of our customers who reach that point, we've talked about it in another episode, sort of that tipping point that you get to where you're, "I'm on-prem, I'm never going to the cloud. "OK, well now I've got some hybrid stuff." And then sooner or later you kind of enter that data gravity where most of it, or most of your workloads are actually in the cloud. Is that most of our customers are also using our network management products and a number of other modules that are about making sure that the service delivery all the way down to the desktop on campus, WAN, troubleshooting, BGP, and that kind of thing, that absolutely is the reason why they will almost always, typically they'll put a remote polar on-prem or they'll use an agent on-prem, but they will run it from a cloud instance, but they will absolutely connect back and monitor lots of resources on-prem that way.
And if you happen to be on the golf course when something goes wrong and you get the phone call and you need to log on to the console to see what actually is going on, well, being in the cloud means you can access it from anywhere without having to deal with VPN clients or certificates.
Yes, and talking of accessing anywhere, I mean, again, you may have a multi-regional organization and you may want to stand up different instantiations of the Orion Platform and connect them using our Enterprise Operations Console for that single view, single point of management. So a lot of different options that you can leverage, whether you're deploying on- premises and/or in the cloud. But I think you hit the key thing is that it's designed as a hybrid IT environment monitoring solution, looking at it across from the infrastructure all the way up into the application, into SaaS services. We have some new templates for Office 365, for some of the PaaS services as well as other commercial off-the-shelf applications.
So the net net here is that the reason these applications are being offered inside of the marketplace is for the same reason that customers are monitoring increasingly cloud resources, which is that's just what hybrid does. You start on-prem, you start consuming cloud resources, and sooner or later, you start to see the tools that you've relied on forever just start to show up in the marketplace. So is that almost like an indicator of where IT is in that progression? Like if you see a vendor that's offered an app forever that you install yourself, suddenly shows up in the marketplace, is it a little reassuring that you're not the only one that now needs to be able to kind of be thinking about that?
There’re different ways of thinking about that, but that is definitely one of them. The other way I look at it too is because I talk to a number of companies and clients worldwide. There's a lot that are still, well no, my workloads are not, they're not needed in the cloud, they're inward-facing, but I need stuff, tools to monitor and back it up and update, and all of the operational activities that we need to do. But I don't feel like I need to deploy A complete infrastructure inside my own infrastructure just to do that. So now I'm starting to use cloud services, which is basically the low-hanging fruit. So you don't have to move your workloads over, but you can still pull in those cloud services to make your life so much easier. So monitoring is one big one. Backup, business continuity planning.
SCM is one of the ones that's in there that's our change monitor for servers. And that was one where customers said, look, we have best practices on-prem for the way that we're monitoring the configuration of our servers. We would expect that would extend into a hybrid environment.
And it should.
And it should, right.
And it should.
So a lot of times, do you feel like there's, you can almost see when you look at the list of applications that vendors include together, is it they're almost providing, it's not best practice, but sort of these things work well together in cloud. Like it's almost a recommendation. These are things that you're going to need to think about in the way that cloud's different?
Well cloud is different, but you really have to think about it as just as extension of your own data center. So it's your own stuff. It's your own services. It's just not running on-premises.
It's okay to say, "I'm tired of managing infrastructure, "I just want to run applications and deliver services," is that kind of?
Well racking servers sometimes can be fun.
I still have some scars from speed rails.
Yeah, those are fun.
I like the lights. [laughs]
Blinky lights, I'm a server hugger.
All right, so any, Sacha, any gotchas here, specific to SolarWinds that you kind of want to be aware of? I know we've done episodes before on migrating your, I think at THWACKcamp last year we did a whole session on migrating your Orion Platform instance to the cloud. There's documentation out there, there's articles inside of THWACK. I think there's even a how-to guide inside of the Customer Success Center that kind of walks people through. So we won't go over all of those details, there's a ton of resources out there and we'll throw 'em into the show notes. But anything in particular that we should let 'em know about?
Well I think, you know, there's going to be multiple different situations that you can run into. You mentioned some of the migration opportunities. So effectively what you can do with a platform on-premises you can do up in the cloud as well. You know, ultimately, we do provide all that information on our Customer Portal as well to people trialing the product. And we also have a very rich Customer Support team as well as our huge THWACK community, in order to be able to help get answers as quickly as possible. So it's very much a self-serve or you can reach out to us and we'll kind of help guide you through to address some of those challenges when and if they come up.
And then Pierre on the Microsoft side, I mean, our customers have a broad spectrum of different licensing, where maybe it's enterprise or it's bring your own license or whatever else and so you saw as we walked through the configuration steps there's some options there. Like is it Azure SQL or is it your instance? So you'd recommend really learning a little bit more about licensing options there?
Well yeah, especially when you're looking at licenses in the cloud. When we picked the server option there was a radio button for, do I have my own licenses. So there's been some changes lately into the licensing. I am not a licensing expert, by any stretch of the imagination.
Is anyone on this planet a licensing expert?
We actually have licensing experts that every time I talk to them, they blow my mind.
Former attorneys or, you get it.
And really, I am not authorized to interpret your licensing agreement. This is my go-to line.
Oh yeah, yeah. No I mean, but in terms of just in general, when you're looking at Microsoft licenses there's a lot of different options. So a recommendation might also be, just take a little time and you know, look at the licenses, the licensing that your company uses because that'll help inform your decision about how to fill out those forms when you deploy.
Absolutely, and whether or not you have software assurance with license mobility. Do you have a DevTest subscription where the cost of licensing is already reduced because you're not allowed to actually run production workloads in there, it's just literally for development and tests?
But hey, can you take advantage of that and set up an amazing lab--
Absolutely.
To really learn about features and products that you have.
And absolutely, and there are some ways where using ARM templates and deployment methodologies, where you could actually simulate your on-prem or your real production environment in a way where every time you basically blow away that environment you need to test something else, you hit the deploy button, it deploys it every time exactly the same. Because I remember when back in the days where we had our production environment on-prem and then we had the dev environment on-prem, DevTest.
It was usually--
The idea was to have it--
That wasn't under--
Exactly, but the idea was to have it exactly the same, but the versions of AD weren't the same, the services that were turned on weren't the same. Nothing was exactly the same. By doing it in the cloud and having it in an ARM imperative scripting mode, then you don't have to worry it's always going to be exactly the same. So you're deploying something on there, makes your testing and your evaluation of any product more consistent.
Awesome. Well gentlemen, thank you so much for being a part of SolarWinds Lab. This has been really great. I hope this has been helpful for all of you. This is a really great development, many of you have actually been, as I mentioned before, using DPA out of the marketplace for a while. We would love to get your feedback. Hopefully you're with us live. You can provide live feedback there, but if you're not, make sure you swing by our homepage which is lab.solarwinds.com, look at the schedule for upcoming events and make sure you're with us live so that we can get a little bit of feedback from you directly. Anything else?
Well actually I did want to show the final deployment. Well actually it's not the final deployment. Here's one I created earlier. It's actually, if you deploy the product it's not going to have all the data in it. But this is actually our online demo which is running in the public cloud. And so you can actually access that yourself and play around with it. Or of course go to the Azure Marketplace and actually trial it yourself.
You just couldn't let us get out clean without coming to the demo.
I just had to get back in. I mean, it speaks for itself.
It really does.
And really, showing a brand-new deployment with no data in it doesn't have the same hmph.
Yeah.
Well I mean you're going to get sample maps. You're going to get all the admin access that is maybe not a part of this demo. I mean that's the main reason for setting up an eval is that you're an administrator and then you can start running discovery and pulling in your resources. And then it's you. That first view, it's the things that you need to see.
It's you.
And you can start working with them.
And more importantly, I forgot my password so I'm going to go and just reinstantiate it again. But of course it's only going to take me, you know--
No in the inside of the console you're just going to do admin, reset.
I can do that as well. Multiple ways to get back in to what I need to, again using the--
The point is you don't have to redeploy.
Exactly.
Awesome. Well Pierre thank you so much for being on Lab and just everything that you do for SolarWinds.
Well thank you very much for having me.
You bet. I'm Patrick Hubbard.
I'm Sacha Dawes.
And I'm Pierre Roman. Thank you for watching. [upbeat electronic music]
