Exciting times here at SolarWinds. We’re uniting our self-hosted and SaaS observability offerings under a single umbrella, SolarWinds® Observability, and announcing a host of enhancements that will allow us to go even further to meet our customers' hybrid IT needs. Let’s take a look at what’s in store.
The Ins and Outs of Hybrid IT
While the advantages of the cloud are self-evident, it’s a rare business that can leave its entire on-prem architecture behind and go 100% cloud-native. Visibility, compliance, and security considerations, often accompanied by significant and long-standing investments in legacy on-prem infrastructure, lead most companies to opt for a hybrid approach. Legacy systems often harbor critical applications that can’t easily be replicated or are incompatible with cloud environments. Financial, compliance, and security considerations also play a role in retaining some on-premises infrastructure, leading most businesses to adopt a hybrid approach.
The Observability Gap: The Classic Hybrid-IT Trade-Off
A hybrid IT ecosystem lets IT departments choose the best environment for each application or workload, helping their organization remain agile in a volatile tech world. But this brings challenges in maintaining a comprehensive view of system health and ensuring optimum performance. Intricate dependencies between on-premises systems and cloud services create blind spots. The sheer volume of data produced, each with its unique context and format, complicates efforts to form a cohesive picture. This fragmentation can reduce efficiency, increase the risk of downtime, and contribute to a poor experience for end-users. Over time, issues like these amount to lost revenue, reputational damage, and decreased customer satisfaction. Perhaps worst of all, they take a negative toll on IT team morale, while the sheer volume of data produced makes it tricky to form a cohesive picture.
To make matters worse, teams are often forced to compromise when finding an observability solution to meet their needs. Frequently, they face a choice between a SaaS offering with poor on-prem monitoring capabilities or a legacy solution that struggles to provide visibility over cloud environments. Often, they wind up juggling multiple tools from various vendors–a recipe for frustration, waste, and inefficiency.
Lessons From a Quarter-Century in IT Management
SolarWinds has been in the monitoring and observability game for 25 years. We've learned that the most efficient way to achieve the deep visibility you require over your hybrid IT environment is through a unified solution from a single provider capable of effectively monitoring both cloud and on-premises infrastructures. Today, this is possible with SolarWinds, no matter how you want to deploy your observability solution. We have greatly expanded the ability of our Self-Hosted observability option to monitor cloud environments. At the same time, we have made massive improvements to the on-premises network and infrastructure monitoring capabilities of our SaaS option. And we’ve built more intelligence into our solutions, leveraging AIOps and Machine Learning.
Observability Anywhere, Precision Everywhere.
So, what’s new? Today, we are announcing bringing our market-leading network and infrastructure monitoring capabilities to our SaaS Observability. Capabilities like network performance monitoring, traffic flow and path analysis, and infrastructure monitoring for both physical and virtual servers are now part of our SaaS Observability. That means you can do all of the following from SolarWinds Observability SaaS:
- Scan, discover, and map devices and applications to gain performance metrics to improve your network health and performance
- Gain end-to-end critical path visibility and insights into devices' performance, traffic, and configuration details
- Proactively address potential application performance decline, network congestion, and security concerns through in-depth analysis of traffic flow information.
We have also greatly expanded cloud infrastructure monitoring capabilities across both our self-hosted and SaaS observability options. There is more coverage for AWS and Azure cloud services, more cloud dashboards, more coverage for containers, and more cloud databases. We have also significantly expanded coverage for SD-WAN, including Meraki, Viptela, VeloCloud, Prisma, Aruba Silver Peak, wireless access points, and devices covered within our Vulnerability and Risk Dashboard for our Self-Hosted option.
Finally, we have also introduced a host of new AI and AIOps-driven capabilities. We have integrated generative AI into our service desk product to improve incident resolution, customer responses, and reporting. We have improved both our ML-based anomalous alerting and our intelligent alert clustering to help reduce mean time resolution. And we have added ML-based log pattern analysis to be more proactive in recognizing and alleviating potential performance bottlenecks.
In line with these new innovations, we are also combining our self-hosted and SaaS observability solutions under a single name and umbrella–SolarWinds Observability. Customers have the choice to purchase and deploy SolarWinds Observability as an on-prem software or as a cloud-native solution.
The Customer Decides
We’re proud of these upgrades, but it’s the flexibility of our deployment that truly sets us apart. At SolarWinds, we recognize that no two organizations are at the same stage of their digital modernization journey. A financial firm may keep customer-facing apps on the cloud but find that regulatory requirements mean core financial systems must stay on-premises. Healthcare providers may use the cloud for patient portals while storing medical records in-house. Manufacturers often deploy cloud solutions for supply chain management and keep production control systems onsite.
SolarWinds believes that your observability solution should fit your technology environment and not the other way around. How you deploy and manage your observability solution should never be dictated by your vendor. We meet you where you are, helping ensure you get the most from your investment with us, today and tomorrow.
To learn more about how SolarWinds Observability can help you gain a comprehensive understanding of your hybrid IT infrastructure,
click here.
