Recapping Our Inaugural SolarWinds Day Event

Our inaugural SolarWinds Day event was a smashing success! From the announcement of our SolarWinds^® Observability solution—which was built fully in the cloud—to important updates to our on-premises SolarWinds^® Hybrid Cloud Observability solution, this was our biggest day of product launches since the founding of SolarWinds. It was exciting to be a part of the event and to see so many people participate and engage in the discussion. We received some great questions from attendees I’ll address at the end of this blog. But first, I want to discuss event highlights and share some on-demand recordings in case you missed it (or just want to watch it again). Over the last couple of years, SolarWinds has focused on a transformation from monitoring to observability. Our inaugural SolarWinds Day is a large step in the continuation of this journey. Our president and CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna opened the event, reminding us of the journey SolarWinds has taken and why we’re in a unique position to unite the hybrid IT capabilities customers now demand. As he stated, “We aim to provide solutions that are incredibly simple, secure, and scalable enough for the enterprise.” The release of SolarWinds Observability and the updates to Hybrid Cloud Observability are great examples of how we’re going above and beyond our competition. As Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer Rohini Kasturi stated, with SolarWinds Observability, we’re fulfilling our promise to provide observability solutions to all, with options for on-premises, hybrid, private, or public cloud use cases. For us, observability is about enabling organizations to evolve from monitoring, supporting our customers’ growth, and helping them reduce costs through the consolidation of their monitoring and data analysis tools. With SolarWinds Observability, customers can visualize, analyze, remediate, and automate as they move from monitoring to observability and on to autonomous operations. Benefits of SolarWinds Observability:

• Unparalleled deployment flexibility (private or public cloud and multi-cloud)
• Flexible APIs and OpenTelemetry support to integrate your existing environments seamlessly
• Built on SolarWinds Secure by Design principles and driven by AIOps to help futureproof your investment

Finally, GVP of Product Brandon Shopp, VP of Product Management Josh Stageberg, and I took to the stage to answer some frequently asked questions and discussed how we take feedback from our customers to improve our products and solutions. We also provided some short demos on how to maneuver and complete specific tasks. Additionally, we spoke about how simple the deployment of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is from the SolarWinds Platform. Whether you’re starting a 30-day trial or going all-in with the solution, you can simply click a button from your Orion^® Platform modules on the SolarWinds Platform and launch it within seconds. Using Hybrid Cloud Observability Essentials and want to try Advanced? Click a button to activate a 30-day trial. After 30 days, the trial will end automatically without any effort on your part. If you choose to purchase and continue to use it, you won’t have to take any additional steps to continue to use the paid version. Having tried deployments from the SolarWinds Platform myself, I can truly say it’s one of the easiest deployment processes I’ve ever experienced. Finally, my favorite feature is the integration of AIOps to reduce alert fatigue through anomaly detection on metric-based data. With AIOps, Hybrid Cloud Observability continues to transform and address the needs of our customers. We plan to continue to develop our artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) integrations to continue to develop our solutions and automate tasks. Be sure to watch the on-demand videos above for more in-depth information on what we covered. To wrap up the event, Rohini provided an overview of the self-actionable insights provided by Hybrid Cloud Observability. He also reiterated our dedication to security by building our solutions and connecting them to our SolarWinds Platform, which is built using Secure by Design principles. Benefits of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability:

• Gain a unified platform with single-pane-of-glass usability to eliminate tool sprawl, resolve problems faster, and proactively manage hybrid environments
• Coordinate problems that happen at the same time on related devices with intelligence driven by AIOps, employ customizable alerts to reduce alert fatigue and risk, and increase automation by focusing on issues truly impacting your environment
• Prepare for growth with flexible licensing and further your cloud modernization efforts with support for on-premises or cloud deployment
• Be cloud-ready with a clear migration path to SolarWinds Observability

We truly believe observability is a key step in your transformation journey. SolarWinds has the insight, experience, and knowledge to build products capable of increasing your productivity for an excellent return on investment (ROI). With SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability and SolarWinds Observability, we’re providing the tools necessary to observe everything, observe from anywhere, and provide immediate cost reduction. Finally, Sudhakar concluded the event by stating just how important our customers are to SolarWinds. Without your feedback and experiences, our solutions couldn’t be as effective as they are. The SolarWinds Platform allows us to continue enriching your SolarWinds experience and providing solutions that fulfill your needs now, as you continue to evolve, and in the future.

FAQs

I wanted to take a moment and answer some of the most asked and important questions we saw during the event. If your question isn’t addressed here or there’s something else you’d like to ask, please reach out to our team or your account representative. When is SolarWinds Observability (software as a service; SaaS) going to be available?
It’s available now! Where’s a recording I can share with my team/manager?
Here’s a link to the on-demand recording. Does SolarWinds have a FedRAMP accreditation for cloud monitoring for private/secure cloud monitoring?
We’re working on FedRAMP for SolarWinds Observability right now. It’s expected to be accredited by the second half of 2023. What’s on the roadmap for Hybrid Cloud Observability?
See what we’re working on for Hybrid Cloud Observability here. Will (insert cloud provider/device type/technology) soon be supported by Hybrid Cloud Observability or SolarWinds Observability?
We’re always working on adding the functionality and support our customers need. Please check out the feature requests pages for Hybrid Cloud Observability here and SolarWinds Observability here, vote, and add anything you see missing. Are there any plans to make it so you can customize the install if you don’t want certain modules installed on a server?
For Hybrid Cloud Observability, each tier includes all the features listed for those tiers, and we don’t have a current plan to change that. For a more à la carte approach, the Orion Platform products are currently available in that mode. Is end-to-end application performance management (APM) tracing available in SolarWinds Observability?
Yes. SolarWinds Observability can monitor services for applications running on the following languages: PHP, Java, .NET, Node.js, and Ruby. See the SolarWinds Observability Introduction to Services for more information. Will APM be part of Hybrid Cloud Observability in the future?
We can’t make promises about future functionality, but we’re always listening to customer feedback and needs. APM is available now in SolarWinds Observability and will work even if your applications are on-premises, provided they’re instrumented using APM language libraries. But for now, APM capabilities are available in SolarWinds Observability, and you can target applications in the cloud or on-premises. What’s the licensing model for SolarWinds Observability? Also, are the other modules not using node-based licensing still going to be separate from Hybrid Cloud Observability? For example, SRM.
SolarWinds Observability licensing is based on what’s being observed, i.e., how many hosts, containers, database instances, and application instances are being observed; how many synthetic checks are being utilized; the number of network devices; and how much log data is being ingested. SolarWinds Observability is licensed separately from Hybrid Cloud Observability. Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) and Web Performance Monitor (WPM) integrate with Hybrid Cloud Observability to supplement the functionality, but they’re licensed and sold separately. Apart from being a SaaS offering, what’s the difference between SolarWinds Observability and Hybrid Cloud Observability?
I would say the main difference is the target audience. SolarWinds Observability has advanced APM, digital experience monitoring, database monitoring, and cloud-native infrastructure monitoring—it's really geared toward DevOps, software engineers, and site reliability engineers (SREs). The capabilities of both SolarWinds Observability and Hybrid Cloud Observability work well for on-premises and cloud environments, but Hybrid Cloud Observability is geared more toward ITOps. How can Orion Platform customers upgrade, such as a customer who owns only NPM and NTA?
The upgrade process is the same as if you were doing an Orion Platform upgrade apart from converting to a Hybrid Cloud Observability license. Reach out to your account representative for details. Is it possible in Hybrid Cloud Observability to restrict which devices sync to the cloud SaaS offering? For instance, can you allow all Windows servers except domain controllers?
Currently, no. This may be something we look at in the future. Will SD-WAN be available in the Orion Platform (modular) or just Observability?
Yes, it’s available in Network Performance Monitor. More details can be found in the announcement here. What’s the link for the public demo?
Here’s a link to the Hybrid Cloud Observability demo. SolarWinds Observability doesn’t have one yet, but stay tuned or register for a free trial here. With the SaaS platform, do we still have polling engines to concentrate flows, or does each agent communicate with the SaaS platform?
In SolarWinds Observability, we have a platform connector in the Orion Platform/Hybrid Cloud Observability deployment acting as the polling engine to concentrate flows. There are agents for servers and an on-prem collector for network data. You can even use Hybrid Cloud Observability as a collector for the SaaS tool. Contact your sales team, and we can talk you through the particulars. Does this mark the end for on-premises applications? We've had a few other vendors trying to get rid of on-prem software.
No; we’re actually expanding our on-prem offerings with the addition of Hybrid Cloud Observability. Is the difference between on-prem Orion Platform modules and on-premises Hybrid Cloud Observability just the licensing your company has arranged?
Hybrid Cloud Observability was built from the foundation of the Orion Platform, but it’s a separate product and has its own roadmap. With the tiers we've designed, you’re truly gaining full-stack visibility, the ability to be ready for the cloud, and new features exclusive to Hybrid Cloud Observability, such as AIOps. How does Hybrid Cloud Observability integrate with SolarWinds Observability?
Hybrid Cloud Observability can feed networking data it collects into SolarWinds Observability today, and our plan is to add more Hybrid Cloud Observability data into SolarWinds Observability over time. Is there an API or terraform module to programmatically provision devices/entities?
The provisioning of entities on SolarWinds Observability is automatically inferred from the ingestion of telemetry data. The plan is to add an API for adding devices and entities as well as—eventually—Terraform providers, Chef recipes, and Ansible playbooks.