THWACKcamp™ 2022 is a wrap, and the consensus is in: this was our best THWACKcamp yet.
We really couldn’t have asked for better participation and engagement from our global community of technology professionals. Now in its tenth year, THWACKcamp has continued to grow and serve as an annual milestone event that captures the zeitgeist of the IT industry. And this year, we gathered some interesting insights from the in-session polls we’ll share below.
If you missed our virtual THWACKcamp 2022 event this year, be sure to check out our On-Demand page, where you can access recordings and related content for all our sessions. Each session is packed with insights, tips, and best practices gathered from our resident experts and Head Geeks™. This year’s keynotes also provided a transparent view into what SolarWinds is working on next.
The two-day THWACKcamp 2022 event also had the strongest global reach in the event’s history, with the online format allowing for over 28% of participants to attend and engage outside of the U.S. See below for a recap of some of our most popular sessions, along with some learnings we gathered from IT professionals like you.
From Monitoring to Observability—Any Size, Anywhere
THWACKcamp 2022: From Monitoring to Observability—Any Size, Anywhere
With more than 40 products covering almost every aspect of IT—network and infrastructure monitoring, application performance management, database management, service desk, and security compliance tools—the evolutionary next step for SolarWinds involves a shift toward a unified platform model. As Rohini Kasturi, EVP, chief product officer at SolarWinds, explains in the “From Monitoring to Observability” keynote, the journey to full-stack observability will involve the introduction of the SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability) platform as well as a cloud-native Observability platform ecosystem. Kasturi also provides details on the company’s plans to provide simplified pricing through a new subscription model.
Secure by Design: Setting the New Standard in Secure Software Development
THWACKcamp 2022: Secure by Design: Setting the New Standard in Secure Software Development
Aiming to set a new standard in secure software development, Timothy Brown, chief information security officer (CISO) and Paul Gray, GVP of architecture, provide details on the SolarWinds next-generation build system and its triple-build methodology. Incorporating lessons learned from cybersecurity experts, open-source thought leaders, and customers, the new build system is composed of four central tenets:
- Base the system on ephemeral operations
- Produce deterministic artifacts
- Build in parallel
- Verify every build step
With security at the top of customers’ minds in light of today’s new climate, there’s been an extremely positive reception toward the SolarWinds Secure by Design initiatives. For further details on our next-generation build process, refer to our technical whitepaper, Setting the New Standard in Secure Software Development: The SolarWinds Next-Generation Build System.
The Future of AIOps
THWACKcamp 2022: The Future of AIOps
In this session, SolarWinds Distinguished Engineer Karlo Zatylny explains how the team is working together to teach systems how to do the great things we as humans do—spotting trends, spikes, and patterns to determine causation—but at the speed and scale with which we process data in today’s business environments. To explain what SolarWinds is aiming to do with its AIOps features inside of monitoring and observability, Karlo offers an analog to Kubernetes, where common problems with scaling and restarting services are automated through an orchestrator built to apply and learn from a rule set. He talks about what SolarWinds is aiming to do with its AIOps features inside of monitoring and observability, where AIOps features will be able to apply and learn from rule sets around remediation to suggest and automate solutions for the network or database engineer.
What Does Network Monitoring Mean in the Cloud?
THWACKcamp 2022: What Does Network Monitoring Mean in the Cloud?
With the market trending toward more cloud adoption, the metrics for network performance are shifting. Brandon Shopp, GVP of product, and Satish Grandhi, GVP and fellow, office of the CTO, discuss the changing climate. With businesses giving more focus to the end-user experience, simplistic up/down statuses are no longer sufficient. Managing the customer experience has become difficult, however, now that there’s shared responsibility of this experience with the cloud service provider. This is why hybrid cloud architectures, services, and apps are driving the need for network performance monitoring tools to support end-to-end views of transactions in hybrid and cloud environments. Broad adoption of SDN and NFV technologies such as SASE, SD-WAN, and others are driving organizations to automate provisioning and forcing performance management to follow.
Practical Examples Using the Orion API
THWACKcamp 2022: Practical Examples Using the Orion API
Kevin M. Sparenberg, THWACK® technical content manager, kicks this session off by sharing his philosophy on network administration tasks:
- Do something once. It’s fine to do it by hand.
- Do something twice. Start thinking about how to script it.
- Do something three times. It’s really time to start asking why and develop some scripting.
To get started developing automation with the Orion® API, Kevin provides some helpful recommendations. For non-programmers, SWQL Studio helps you avoid JOINs by providing an interface through which you can browse and navigate across data sets. Using PowerShell, Kevin then gives a thorough walk-through for automating some common routines around entity management, imports and exports, and alerting.
This popular session was extremely well received by participants, and we received some clear feedback they’d like to see more scripting examples in PowerShell (36.7%) and Python (32.8%). I know our team will keep this in mind for future content postings on THWACK.
A preview chapter from an upcoming eBook and the script samples he used in the session (as well as others) are now available here.
A State of Transformation and Collaboration
The participation and engagement we received during THWACKcamp 2022 was impressive, and taking a step back to identify some of the common themes, I think the results tell a story about the state of enterprise IT. With the desire to gain observability across platforms, the heightened management and responsibilities around security, and the need admins are feeling to scale themselves, the industry is striving to work smarter and more effectively through collaboration.
If you’re not a member of THWACK, take a moment to register and join our strong technical community of more than 180,000 folks just like yourself. THWACK is a place where customers and users congregate to solve problems, share efficiencies and best practices, and provide feedback that shapes the development of our product features and roadmaps. Our thought leaders and experts frequently post new content and even templates and shortcuts you can use across your toolset.
Once you’re registered, feel free to use this link to connect with my account and send me a direct message. I hope to see you there, and thanks for making this THWACKcamp our best one—until the next one, that is.
-Kevin
