SolarWinds Day has consistently been one of the most enlightening events of the IT year, offering rich insights into technology, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), and more. This quarter's event, SolarWinds Day: Observability Anywhere. Precision Everywhere, tackled the complexities of IT infrastructure observability. I was delighted to host the panel discussion; here’s my overview of the key talking points.
Sizing Up the Challenges of Hybrid IT Observability
SolarWinds CMO Brian Goldfarb began by urging attendees not to compromise when it comes to observing hybrid IT environments: “Don't let the complexity of your hybrid IT landscape be the barrier to your success. SolarWinds helps you achieve results you can only get with comprehensive full-stack hybrid IT visibility, whether your environment is on-prem, cloud-native, or, most likely, a combination.” He also underlined the importance of deployment flexibility: “Ensure your observability solution is future-proofed with the ultimate in flexibility and scalability to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Don't let your observability vendor dictate how to deploy and manage your solution.” Finally, Goldfarb announced that SolarWinds observability solutions were being united under the umbrella of SolarWinds® Observability, a single solution available in two deployment options: SolarWinds Observability SaaS and SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.
An Observability Solution Designed for Maximum Flexibility
It was time to hear from our panel of experts. I was thrilled to be joined by GVP of Product Management Jeff Stewart and Senior Director of Product Marketing Abigail Norman. Norman delved into the rationale behind the revamped SolarWinds Observability. "SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted now has a lot more capabilities to look up into the cloud; SolarWinds Observability SaaS has a lot of capabilities to look down into those on-premises environments. Either solution can really deliver this rich visibility across hybrid IT environments, but they also have unique aspects that are specifically designed for nuances that they may have in their environments."
An In-Depth Look at the SolarWinds Observability Dashboard
We took a tour of the SolarWinds Observability SaaS dashboard, exploring everything from our Health Score feature to the NetPath™ and PerfStack™ functionalities for enhanced network management. Stewart and Norman highlighted the benefits of Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) and Application Performance Monitoring (APM) for cloud-centric customers. Of the Platform Connect feature, Stewart said: “Today, it provides the benefit of anomaly-based alerting, but in the future, it will also offer advantages from other SaaS services that benefit our Self-Hosted offering.” Next, the panel explored SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted. The conversations touched on Intelligent Mapping, Azure interoperability, and improvements in the vulnerability and risk dashboard, as well as integrations with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer and SolarWinds Service Desk. Alert Stack™ was highlighted for its ability to reduce alert noise by correlating events and avoiding multiple alerts for related issues.
Integrating Cloud Services and Asking the Big Questions in AI
No SolarWinds Day would be complete without special guests. I sat down with THWACK® MVP Jake Muszynski, a Senior Systems Engineer at Nationwide Children's Hospital, to discuss challenges and strategies related to integrating cloud services into existing IT infrastructure. “When you have things like SaaS offerings, which the more you do this, you're going to start adopting technologies you don't really have control over, but you need to gather some information out of them, deliver service metrics back to the organization so they know just how well that SaaS is performing, tools like NetPath, or even your, you know, SAM (application monitoring) tools with the API (application programming interfaces) monitors can be really useful for those technologies.”
Later, Doug Bennett, Senior Global Alliances Manager of the Center of Excellence at Amazon Web Services, reflected on the finer points of observability and artificial intelligence (AI): “How do we ask questions that are both broad and open-ended to get a nuanced understanding of the data that the AI provides to us? But how are we succinct enough that we don't get a massive hallucination? It's an interesting problem. We know that SolarWinds has spent a great deal of time and is committed to spending a great deal more time and effort to be able to get us the broadest data sets possible. And I think, or at least I hope, that AI is the answer to broadening that even further, answering the questions that you have in a much better way.”
SolarWinds is a proud partner of Amazon Web Services. We’ll be appearing at AWS re:Invent from December 2-6. Come by booth #2159 to see how leveraging the strengths of SolarWinds and AWS together; your organization can achieve greater operational efficiency, reduce complexity, and accelerate your digital transformation journey.
A Solution To Meet Every Need
SolarWinds CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna closed the event by returning the focus to SolarWinds customers: “Our customers' feedback is very clear. While some customers will move to the cloud and plan to be fully in the cloud, most will remain hybrid. We have the solutions to meet them wherever they may be in their hybrid IT journey, and serve their current and future needs. We've worked incredibly hard over the last three years to build an observability solution that does exactly that. My commitment to all of you is that we will continue to retain the best of what made us a leader in IT performance management, continually evolving, listening, learning, and growing to address your needs better than anyone else.”
Remember, these are just a small taste of the insights shared at our latest SolarWinds Day event. You can get the full SolarWinds Observability dashboard breakdown and catch up with all the other highlights right here.
