This past October, we had the pleasure of meeting with 11 IT leaders from diverse industries—including healthcare, financial services, education, telecom, logistics, and technology— as part of our inaugural SolarWinds Customer Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. The CAB is an exciting initiative for both myself, and our GVP of Customer Success, Anselm Peng. Not only does the forum give us an opportunity to hear from inspiring thought leaders and valued customers of SolarWinds, but it also provides us with an opportunity to learn about their top concerns and initiatives for the future.
I was particularly encouraged by the discussions and the great feedback we received on our SolarWinds
® Observability roadmap, as well as some great ideas for how we can further optimize our product strategy toward our customers’ needs. The following are a few of my main takeaways:
Make IT Easy
Our members agree, bringing all of their data—across networks, applications, systems, and databases —into a unified platform is the gold standard. They want to solve infrastructure monitoring and observability challenges comprehensively. Other necessities are for a solution that’s easy to migrate and manage while offering simple data consolidation and correlation. CAB members really want to allow their teams to view everything needed in one place.
Make IT Smart
Instead of wasting time sifting through alerts, their engineers want to receive intelligent alerts which identify the root cause and speed their time to resolution.
One of our members put it this way: “We’re on a journey to get a better handle on monitoring, alerting, and self-healing. We want to quiet the chatter. A lot of alerts across tools drive people crazy and don’t lend to good customer service. With observability, we can find alerting thresholds that better define an actual problem, proactively respond to alerts, and keep potential problems from becoming outages.”
Instead of their teams waking up in the middle of the night to resolve an issue, they want their platforms to have some “self-healing” machine learning capabilities to resolve problems intelligently. With the right alerting rules, they can be notified about only the issues which matter most, thereby minimizing the alert barrage contributing to alert fatigue.
Make IT Reliable
Minimizing downtime is a top priority. Among members, vulnerabilities and downtime concerns were most commonly noted among the things keeping them (and their teams) up at night. Our members want the monitoring peace of mind to know the reactive cycles are contained while reducing the time spent on-call. And finally, they want to see health scores and business insights aligning with their individual needs and organizational nuances.
Make IT Flexible
Many of our members have a mix of on-premises, private, and public cloud environments to manage. They require a platform capable of full-stack monitoring and single pane-of-glass observability across the entire IT infrastructure. Every customer also has a different deployment need—they want whatever tools or platforms they use to be agile enough to set their systems up to meet their specific business priorities.
Always Listening
Creating the CAB has been one of several initiatives at SolarWinds focused on embracing our core value of customer centricity. We believe this program is another step in increasing the value our customers receive from their continued partnership with us, and we look forward to implementing many of the ideas and innovations our CAB will bring in the future.
If you haven’t yet discovered our
SolarWinds Platform, please look at some of our top resources below. We believe our unified platform vision and strategy give customers the choice and flexibility to begin their observability journey.
Learn More About the SolarWinds Platform :
•
How SolarWinds Platform Products Work
• The Orion® Platform and the SolarWinds Platform: What’s the Difference?
•
Explore the SolarWinds Platform 
