[light celestial music] [uptempo music] [logo whooshes] >>Hello, welcome to SolarWinds Day. I'm Cullen Childress. I lead the product organization
here at SolarWinds, and I'm excited to share some of the groundbreaking
innovations we've made in our monitoring and
observability solutions. Many of you have told us
you're constantly dealing with the complexity that
comes from managing a dynamic and evolving hybrid digital landscape. Often it's driven by your
cloud modernization journey. And the tool
s you may be
using can make it worse because they're typically
built for the cloud or on-prem and not for both, which creates
this risky visibility gap. Removing this visibility
gap for both on-prem and cloud workloads from
a single pane of glass can be extremely challenging
for any organization. But why is solving this level
of visibility so important? Simply because you can't
manage what you can't see. Unfortunately, most
providers out there pretend visibility gaps don't
exist in their solutio
ns. They either focus on the cloud or on-prem, and leave you to figure out the rest. Well, at SolarWinds, we believe
you need a complete view of both on-prem and the cloud. Anything less isn't good enough. For 25 years, SolarWinds has
led the way in self-hosted, and we've spent the last decade bringing that same expertise to SaaS. So when we tell you we're
removing the visibility gaps others want you to accept,
you can believe it. With over 300,000 customers and counting around the world, we kno
w you probably
still have a significant business-critical on-prem
presence you care about. You'll probably still have it for a while. And no one provides deeper visibility into your on-prem assets than SolarWinds. We give you the flexibility to manage your hybrid
environment the way you want. Do it from the cloud
with our SaaS Solution, or from behind the firewall
with our self-hosted option. No matter where you want to observe from, our solutions capture extensive telemetry from across your dig
ital estate. We use AI to distill it
into actionable metrics, patterns, and trends. And no matter whether you
choose self-hosted or SaaS, we present it so it's easy and clear to maximize
operational resilience for your on-prem and cloud workloads. In a moment we'll dive deeper into how SolarWinds helps
you see the big picture, and how everything fits. From on-prem infrastructure
to cloud-native apps and even security risks, making monitoring and managing
your hybrid IT simple. But before we move
on, just a reminder that we have subject matter experts here ready to answer your questions. Just post questions
directly in the Q&A panel on your screen. And now I'm delighted to hand things off to our observability experts,
Jeff Stewart and Venky Raman. I hope you enjoy SolarWinds Day. [logo whooshes] >>Thanks, Cullen. My name is Jeff Stewart, Vice President of Product
here at SolarWinds. >>And I am Venky Raman, Head of Products for SolarWinds Observability. As you all heard, Cullen
spoke a l
ot about siloed data, the gap, what we call observability gap in terms of understanding
between what's happening in the on-prem world, in the cloud world, and what's happening hybrid. >>Yeah, and, you know,
interestingly enough, Venky, your team's been very focused
on how we solve this problem for customers through
SolarWinds Observability. So since we've launched
SolarWinds Observability, the team's been busy and focused on how we can reduce this complexity that's been introduced into the world
through modern technologies. >>Absolutely. >>Some of those improvements include improvements to our database portfolio, adding more device database
support across the platform. >>As you all know, the
SolarWinds has been always kind of the leader in terms
of database monitoring, both on-prem as well as in the cloud. We just extended our leadership by adding more support
from Microsoft SQL Server. We extended our support in terms of the open source SQLs
databases that we support. And also we are
extending
that same support into other databases such as Oracle. >>I love seeing the
investment in database. Database is so important
to application performance. It's almost at the center of everything we serve
up around applications. So, improvements on that
totally makes sense. >>Yeah, well, we've made
a lot of enhancements in terms of SolarWinds Observability, starting from application,
performance monitoring, the advancements that we've
done in our dense solution and our run solutions, all t
he way down to our
network and infrastructure. We already spoke about database. The best part about this is
how we all bind this together, and the power of the solution
that really enables you to reduce your MTTR and
your beaten time to detect. >>Yeah, and the power
of the platform, right? >>Absolutely.
>>I think that's the basis for SolarWinds Observability. Our ability to ingest data across all of these data
sources and tech stacks, pull it together in a single place, and then leverage the
pow
er of the cloud, right? >>Absolutely. >>Leading with AIOps and machine learning, and our ability to train
our models as data comes in, and it only gets better as we keep going. >>Absolutely. And it's all built over open
platforms, open telemetry, which is the main ingestion mechanism, which is completely kind of
our leadership position there, and also the amount of integrations that we've added in a very short time. >>I love that. Getting into the extensibility
of the platform, right? Talking ab
out open telemetry,
our ability to ingest that, but also contributing
back to the community. >>Exactly.
>>Something that SolarWinds has done historically, but taking it to the next level. >>Absolutely.
>>And seeing how we can make the community better as a whole through this development. >>Absolutely. So with that, Jeff, do
you wanna see a demo of how this all works together?
>>I'd love the power of everything that you
guys have been working on, and maybe we can walk
through some examples of app
lication performance
issues, take that down the stack, maybe across user experience
into infrastructure and database, and let's really show folks what we've been working on. >>Let's go for it. Right now, I'm in the home screen of our Observability Solution. As you can see, we start off
with a very important view that's really useful for everyone. The first view is how we
show our health score, what is called as a health score. Jeff, can you speak a bit
more about health score? >>Yeah, and I love
this
enhancement to our platform, right? The health score is really
focused on catching your eye and showing you exactly
where you need to focus, what problems may be bubbling
up in your environment. And it's really an algorithm
that looks at all aspects of an entity or an
application or a database, and based on our knowledge and heritage within the space, our understanding of how
those should perform. From there, we're looking
to identify any areas that could be problematic, and bubbling that
up
into, you know, a good, poor, or moderate experience. >>Yeah, and one other very important thing about our SolarWinds platform, that it's completely AIOps driven. As you can see here, we
are showing anomalies. And anomalies is another
very, very important concept. And when you talk about health score, health score is a aggregation
of things such as alerts, what's happening with golden metrics, what's happening with your anomalies. And then anomalies is an important element of everything that
we do, whether it's we look at
how we look at network, what's happening in your network, what's happening in your
application or database. >>And really focused
on that age-old problem of solving alert fatigue, right? Let's get a little bit more sophisticated on identifying the issue. Specifically, avoid all the alert noise and really, you know, pull the users to where they need to focus. >>Absolutely. So let's now take a look at what's happening
within our environment. As you can see, I'm
seeing
some issues here. When I go back here, I want to take a look at one very important webpage of ours, which is by driven by a
service called SWOPPER. So let's get into SWOPPER now. As you can see here, the health of SWOPPER has
dipped a couple of times, and this has really impacted
the health score overall. But before I get more into the health, I do wanna go show you a few other things. As you can see here, you can see clearly where our probes are,
which is really the ones that's monitoring all
what's
happening within our webpage. And this is a critical webpage for us. Let's go get deeper into the health now. I do want to investigate kind of what's pulling
the health score down of just a few minutes back. So let's take a look at this, why the health score dipped by 50 and took it to bad. As you can see here, now, an alert, I got a critical alert. It's on this webpage. And the most important
thing that I see here is that the reason that
the health score went bad is because of my page vi
ew load time. The page view is just a web service. This is a front-end web service that's driven by some SQL activities. Behind the scenes, we have AJAX calls going through microservices
in our architecture. So let's take a deeper look
at what's happening now. As you can see, this
gives me a lot of history. But before, the first thing
that I do want to see here is what are the related entities? And the main reason is, as an SRE, when I look at the webpage, I know what the related
service depends
on. So I don't want to dig deeper and deeper into what's happening here. I know that this front-end
service is the one that usually contributes to
some of these response times. I do want to take a deeper look into it. So I'm gonna click into the front-end just to see what's happening there. So as you can see here, clearly the average response time has started peaking during this time. I do want to see what's
happening behind the scenes here. But before I do that, let
me just quickly go through
some of the other elements. As you can see here in all our dashboards, we show our critical golden metrics. Jeff, you wanna talk a little bit more about the golden metrics? >>Yeah, the golden metrics are the metrics that we've identified at
SolarWinds as the key metrics that you need to monitor to be effective in
full-stack observability. So really highlighting these metrics out of the box with
SolarWinds Observability and placing a stronger emphasis on those, especially when we look at health s
core. >>Absolutely. One of the other key elements is just a visualization of everything. So you get everything
in a single dashboard. You would see here, again, a full topology of what the service looks like. I'm gonna go to a simpler view of this so that you can kind of get a better feel for what the service really looks like. So when I go into kind of what the related services are here, you can see that it depends
on inventory, order, and cart. But let me get a better view for it. I'm going to
go into a map view. Here you can clearly see
that the SWOPPER service has a front-end service. There's an inventory,
there's a order service, and a cart service. These are all dependent And behind the scenes, actually the order
service is also dependent on the inventory service. So usually my suspicion
when I look at the service, since I'm a developer or an SRE that's intimate with what's happening, I would start tracking down
into the critical services that I want to see. >>Thank you. Without
a tool like this, I
mean, how would you identify or know that these services are connected if you're not the developer? >>It's extremely complicated,
as you know, right? So I would have depended on
multiple, separate tools, and looking at individual points, trying to connect the dots together. And that's the power of
Observability, isn't it, Jeff? >>Yeah, absolutely. I love our ability to
connect these entities, show the relationships, and then how they
communicate with each other. >>So let me g
o back to
the list view again. And when you look at the
average response time, which is the one that
really caused that alert, you can clearly see that
it's showing a similar trend between two of them, the inventory service
and the order service. Now, I know that the order service depends on the inventory service, so let's first take a look at
the inventory service here. Again, you see the same
trend happening here. You can clearly see that
there's a peak here. At this stage, I do want to get a
little deeper into transactions. Jeff, do you want to talk a
little bit more about, you know, transactions trace and
how it's all critical for really observing what's
happening in the application? >>Absolutely, and I think
this is where, you know, improvements in technologies have created complexities, right? We've moved from monolithic applications to a world of microservices. And while that's been
fantastic on development and our ability to deploy
in cloud and multi-cloud and have application
performance be so much better, it's created complexities. Our ability to look at
transactions across the application and the calls that those
transactions are making across distributed environments, you know, whether it's the
application, the database, the different microservices, SolarWinds Observability
right here is really kind of, you know, showing you
each of those transactions and how you can look into
the traces across the stack. >>Absolutely. So as you can see here,
let's again go back.
You see you start seeing the same trends as you trace through the system. I can see that, again, as I
look at average response times. Amongst all the key components, there's really 2 areas that's
really creating a spike. There's the ID service and the list one. So let me dig deeper into the list. I want to get a closer look at the traces. And the beauty about this solution is now it's started
showing me all the outliers of what's happening. I want to, let's say, go just select a few of these out
liers. It gives me a list of all the key elements that I need to really pay attention to, and that's really having
a long request time. At the end of the day, what
I really want to understand is what's causing this
response time to spike? And this is based on queries that might be taking a
longer response time, applications that might be
taking a longer response time. So let's get into the details of this. Once you get into the
details, you see what we call as a flame chart. And within the flame
chart, you
are seeing a bunch of things that are stacked together. What you really want to understand is what are the key elements of this that is really causing a system or responses to be slowed down? The first thing that I notice is that the getProducts query is taking a longer time than needed. So I do want to dig deeper
into the getProducts just to understand what's
happening behind the scenes. The nice thing about this is now I'm able to see what's happening from a raw data perspective. I
can actually go into the Code Profiler, and let's say I dig deeper
into the Code Profiler, voila. The first thing that I notice is that someone's left
Chaos Monkey running in a production system. Now, Chaos Monkey is
something that developers, I as a developer, often use because I want to understand if I introduce inputs into my system, what's the output it's gonna be? But it's never meant for something that's put into production. So someone's left this
running in the production, and clearly wh
at it's cost us, over 35%. In fact, the majority of the time is taken by this Chaos Monkey application, which is introducing
latency into the system. The nice thing about our system, and, Jeff, you would love this, is that it takes me into the line of code, into the file that is causing this error, and for me to easily be able to debug. >>That's really amazing
when you think about it. >>And all of this links me to queries, and I can go all the way
through database queries, Jeff, as I kind of tra
ced this by what's happening within the system. >>So, Venky, you just showed
us the power of the platform and the ability to go across
stack to really identify a very specific issue with an application. In fact, you know, someone
leaving on Chaos Monkey in an environment doesn't
seem like a great idea, but this tool certainly
highlighted, you know, your ability to identify that. I thought you were gonna, you know, frankly, I thought it
was gonna end up being a database problem. You know, earlier
you talked about our improvements in database, and it would be great if we could show off some of the new enhancements in database. >>Absolutely. We've added a bunch of
database that we spoke about. As you can see here, right
now we have Postgres, we have Microsoft SQL, we have Mongo, we have a whole bunch
of database solutions that we are monitoring. But let's take a deeper look
into a few other things. As you can see here, we can
clearly look at queries, and these are all top queries that is
happening in the database. And the beauty about this is, again, it's all linked into
things such as wait time, longest queries, queries that
take the most amount of time, and you can start filtering
down issues into the database. >>That's really interesting. So the application that we just looked at is certainly querying
data from a database. You're telling me we
can see those queries? >>Absolutely. Let's say I get into the samples, I wanna see if I can find the query that might have caused this
issue. Strangely enough, around that same time, I see this database
query with this trace ID. So let's click on this to see what's really
happening behind the scenes. And it's brought me back
right to that same query and the same trace that
I'm supposed to see. So the nice thing about this
system, as you pointed out, is that I'm able to
link from an application or from a webpage to an
application to a database, and eventually to an infrastructure issue. >>So, Venky, that's fantastic. Like, full
-stack observability. Application down to the database, and recently infrastructure, specifically network infrastructure. So can we talk about
some of the improvements we've made in network infrastructure? >>We've introduced a lot of capabilities. And the nice thing
about those capabilities is that we've taken
everything that we've done, all for our self-hosted solutions, especially with the way
the devices that we manage, some of the key capabilities
such as performance monitoring or applicatio
n and
network stack, et cetera, and tried to bring some
of the same technology within the context of
SolarWinds Observability into the same application. So let's dig deeper
into the network, Jeff, and see really what's
happening behind the scenes. >>Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that
I'm super excited about with SolarWinds Observability. So, as Venky mentioned, we
have a long-time heritage of being the leaders, the experts, in network and infrastructure, specifically on-premises infras
tructure. And so what we are doing for our customers that are on this journey
of moving to cloud, moving to multi-cloud, having a mixture of, you
know, on-premises and cloud, is giving them the ability to very easily ingest all
of their on-premises metrics and performance statistics
in SolarWinds Observability. And not only are we doing that,
we're making it so simple, it's almost unbelievable the
reactions I get from customers. >>Exactly, and I can't
think of anyone else that can do this in the
most seamless way, and in the most flexible
way for our customers. So as you can clearly see here, you know, using Platform Connect,
we bring our customers, who are ready to move to the cloud, at their own pace in a journey where we can easily
enable Platform Connect that sends their metrics,
sends alerts, et cetera, into the cloud, into
our SolarWinds Platform. We give you the complete flexibility to only send network metrics,
or only send server metrics, and turn it off anytime. And going bac
k to what we
do in the network, again, as you can see here, it's a
very consistent set of themes that we've set up throughout
our Observability solution. Again, when I come back here, the first thing that I noticed
is that the on-prem collector that we set up has
discovered some new entities, or new network elements, and we've automatically
discovered that here. And I can start adding those. But going back, the first
thing that I noticed is naturally I can see the
overall health of the solution,
of what's happening. You can see what's happening
over the last period in terms of a health distribution. And you can also see
all the devices, Jeff. You can see, you know, you
can select on each of these, you can see your Aruba
routers, your Cisco routers, which of them are in a
red state or yellow state. I can see all the alerts on them. And you can see the switches,
wireless controllers, everything that you've done
on the self-hosted solution, all of the same solutions you see here. >>That's
awesome. >>So let's also start taking a look at a couple of other things. For instance, you see
here why something is bad in my network. Let's go back into network, and I can also start seeing all my flows. And this is super exciting
that we are able to bring the same level of flows
and net flows, traffic, all that same capability back into our SolarWinds
Observability solution. You can see what's happening
with top protocols, where the traffic originating from, what are the key endpoints
that
is involved with this. But let's scroll down and let's pick one of these just to see, get a deeper look at what's
happening within this. So when you look here, I've
picked up just one device so you can see that, again, you get a good view of what
are the types of traffic that's coming here? I can use my filter,
and let's say, you know, I just wanna see who is using Netflix from within SolarWinds.
>>From work, huh? >>Yeah, yeah.
>>Alright. >>That'll be strange if
we find someone, you know? Curiou
sly enough, there
is Netflix traffic. And the worst part about this is someone's using this on our MPLS circuit. So not only are they using something that we should not be
using within the corporate, but they're actually using it consuming our MPLS circuit here, Jeff. >>I have a guess which
floor this is coming from. [Venky laughs] >>Yeah, we really need
to talk to that first. Jeff, any parting
thoughts after this demo? >>Well, you know, I love our ability to pull all of this data together, righ
t? Not just on-premises data, which is fantastic to
see in the platform now, but also application,
database, experience, logs, altogether on the single platform, and then backed by the AI capabilities. >>Absolutely. >>You know, I think about it as SolarWinds having your back, right? Whether you're self-hosted
and fully on-prem workloads, whether you have workloads in the cloud, whether you're fully in the cloud, we've got you. >>And we do it with
network infrastructure, database, applications. W
e ensure that there's
end-to-end connectivity with all of this. At the end of the day,
our main goal is to ensure that we can make you more productive, we can ensure that we reduce
your mean time to detect, mean time to isolate, and
mean time to remediate. >>Well, Venky, it's been
a little bit over a year since we launched
SolarWinds Observability. The amount of work and output of that work and what we've seen today is nothing short of
astonishing, amazing work. So I'm really excited about the f
uture and what we're gonna do
next for our customers. >>I'm equally excited. [logo whooshing] >>Now that we've covered our cloud-native observability offering, let's talk about our self-hosted
observability offering. With me today I have Chrystal Taylor, my favorite Product
Evangelist here at SolarWinds. Hey, Chrystal. >>Hey, Jeff, how you doing? >>Doing well, thank you for joining me. >>I'm happy to be here. >>So, self-hosted observability, we launched that about two years ago. It's been a smas
hing
success with our customers. >>I think it's great and, you know, everybody was a bit weary at first. You know, we're all used
to our old module versions and the Orion Suite from the past, and it's been a great transition. I love seeing all the new features and the new functionality that we can add to help bolster that hybrid
monitoring that we really need. >>Yeah, our self-hosted
observability offering is really focused on the
evolution of our Orion modules into a full-stack observability of
fering, allowing customers to
have that visibility, whether it's for their
on-premises equipment, their cloud workloads,
or a visibility gap, everything in-between. >>Yeah, absolutely. And it's really been helpful to have something that can kind of sit/stride that line, right? We need to be able to use it. Most companies aren't fully cloud or fully on-premises anymore, so having something that suits both needs really helps everyone out. >>Some of the features that we've added to our self-hosted
observability offering, like the single-code
base, license flexibility, deployment flexibility,
the alerting improvements, and many, many more things that
our customers have asked for have been really awesome to see. >>Yeah, that's one thing
we pride ourselves on here is listening to the customer base and kind of trying to work out a way to provide them with the
things that they need. >>And for 2024, we've
got a lot of great things that we're thinking about. Enhancements we want to make into the
self-hosted
observability offering. Some of those things that we're
thinking about for futures include how we add device support and next-generation device
support at a more rapid pace. >>Well, people are gonna be really excited when that comes around. >>Yeah, not just for SolarWinds, but we want to give
extensibility to our customers, allowing them to add devices on day zero. So the team's been very
focused on how we achieve this, and we hope to accomplish this in 2024. >>Well, that sounds rea
lly exciting. >>Yep, yep, and that's not it. We're also focused on TCO improvements. So, how do we reduce the overall footprint of the self-hosted observability offering and provide a better TCO to our customers? >>That's great to hear. You know, some of those
resource-intensive kind of features that we have, like PerfStack, which we're gonna show
a little bit of later, really have beefed up
the requirements on this, on the server side of things. So it's nice to hear that
we're continuing to imp
rove. >>Making those improvements, and then focused on how we
can really help our customers, you know, again, reducing that footprint, but really maximizing their
investment in the platform. >>Awesome. >>Well, let's take a look
at self-hosted observability and the functionality
that we've added to it. >>I'm excited to take us
through some of the features. You know, we really wanted to
showcase some of the features that already are in there
that you can use today. And then also some newer things
that have recently come
out in the latest release, so that you can be excited about things that you could be using. Oftentimes we have functionality that kind of gets forgotten about, and you probably already can use it, even if you haven't upgraded
to the latest release. So we wanna make sure that
you know that they're there and you can use them, and
how helpful they can be. Let's start with NetPath. Now, we talked about NetPath a lot, and it's been around
for quite a few years, and it is in th
e self-hosted
observability solution. And one of the things
that's great about NetPath is that you can use this feature to showcase when you're
having problems with your ISPs that they maybe don't want to acknowledge that there's a problem there, and it'll give you the contact information so that you can contact them and say, "Hey, you guys are having a problem. You didn't tell me there was an outage." Or something like that. >>Yeah, as a network
engineer, in my previous life, this is like one o
f my favorite
features in the platform. Really get kind of geeky on this. And that visibility that
you have into networks that you don't control,
it's really amazing to see. >>Well, absolutely, and even
in the network you do control, you can also see if you're using the config management piece of everything. You can also see if a config change potentially caused problems downstream. So we have lots of options there for internal as well as external. You can figure out where
your slowdowns are, wh
ere you're potentially
having packet loss on that on a full route. And one of the things I
really like about this is it does show the full possible route and not just what route that
particular packet is using. >>Yeah, so it's really
cool to see the multi-path that these applications take, and then even the likelihood of, you know, the application taking that path. >>Yeah, absolutely. Like on this example that I'm showing, you can see there's a yellow path here, and you can see that there's a sl
owdown between these two points that you can then go and figure out what that's going on there. And we have other paths that are fine, we have a full clear path. So, you know, maybe you aren't
experiencing a slowdown, maybe they are going the right way. But in case you are and
users are reporting an issue, you can come in and see that. >>Yeah, and when we think
about full-stack observability, you know, and kind of that visibility gap that our users are faced with, this really, really dives into
visibility, into that gap, right? Highlighting, in this example, poor latency on one of the links. >>Yeah, there's a lot of stuff out there that you don't control. But if you have a little
bit more visibility, then you can potentially fix
those issues a bit quicker than if you didn't have any visibility and you had to call someone, call your ISP, call your
cloud service provider, or whatever, and figure
out what's going on because it hasn't been reported. So now let's take a look
at something yo
u mentioned, which is anomaly-based alerting. You know, we've made a lot of enhancements to alerting over the last
year especially, right? We've been moving, pushing things forward. Anomaly-based alerting
requires the Platform Connect to connect out to the cloud. So if you're in an air-gap network, unfortunately, you can't
make use of this feature. But for everyone else, if you have that Platform Connect set up, you can use anomaly-based alerting to help reduce that alert noise, right? And you c
an see right here, we're gonna pick on one
of our newly added support for virtual devices, you can see that we have one
that is in critical state. >>And you mentioned Platform Connect. So I just wanna pause here
and just highlight that. You know, our ability to
connect to our cloud offering and run these algorithms
and machine learning against the golden metrics, and then our ability
to retrain those models to make improvements based on that data. And so, really focused on
how we reduce alert no
ise and alert fatigue and make the lives of IT
professionals a whole lot easier. >>Yeah, and, you know, the great thing about it being cloud-hosted
is that it doesn't require you to do an upgrade to get those machine learning
and those algorithms updated. Those can be updated on
the SaaS side of things so you don't have to upgrade
every time we make a change to those learning algorithms, they're just gonna continue to update. So you can see here we have
a 94% noise reduction here, so it'll tell
you even, you know, you would've had way more alerts instead. So you can go right into it directly from anomaly-based alerts and kind of see what's
going on in that space. >>Yeah, that alert noise
reduction percentage is one of my favorite
things to see, right? Like how I had alerts set up previously, then with this new functionality, the reduction in the number
of alerts I'm receiving based on looking at the
the anomalies instead. >>Absolutely, 'cause if
you have a lot of noise and your users a
re receiving that noise, then they may miss
something really important 'cause they're ignoring the noise. They think everything is
noise, nothing is important. Another alerting feature
that we have implemented is AlertStack, and this is in the self-hosted platform. And AlertStack is creating
clusters of alerts, right? So where you would've had
an alert on something, it can decide that there's a problem, and it'll show you everything that is potentially
related to that problem. So you can quickly
identify where an issue is. You can see in the timeline, you know, how things are behaving. This has been the same
status for quite some time, but you also get a map on
the things that are connected and what is going on there as well. So it's using our intelligent
mapping with feature that we've had for a while, and in conjunction with alerting and correlating metrics together so that you have one place to look rather than having to go bounce around and drill down into a
bunch of different thin
gs. >>Yeah, so these two features
that you just highlighted really focused on identifying
issues faster, but also, you know, getting towards
kind of root-cause analysis and really understanding, you know, what is triggering this
alert, what is causing this, and what could be related
and how we would solve it. >>Yeah, and while we haven't
quite tackled the full, "We can tell you for sure
this is the problem," this is definitely a step
in the right direction of reducing the amount of time
it takes
you to get there. >>Absolutely. >>Next we're gonna go
to our environment view and take a look at a feature
that we call AppStack. And you can see this in
the environment view. So it shows everything that you've got in your self-hosted platform, or you can look at it on
an individual device level or any of these involved steps. You can see everything
that's related to it. But we can select something,
and we'll select this group. >>And this is really where the power of the connected data set
come
s together, right? I mean, historically, customers have had kind of siloed data
sets, or multiple tools, to try to really achieve that
full stack of visibility. And, you know, this is really allowing us to correlate that data and highlight where potential problems
are across the stack. >>Yeah, absolutely. You can come in here at any time and pick something, and then it shows you. You've seen everything
kind of fades a little bit. So you can see that the
ones that are more prominent are all relat
ed, and then you can drill down even further into the device level from here. And then that just gives you
an idea of what's connected and where potentially that
there is a problem at a glance, even if you haven't set up
alerts to notify you of that. >>Yeah, I really couldn't imagine trying to understand this data
and how these were connected without something like this, right? That would take days, weeks, years. >>It used to.
[both laugh] It used to take quite
a bit of time, right? You had to d
rill down and kind of learn those
connections on your own. And there was a lot of that kind of need of knowledge, right? Where you're working and you're like, "Well, I've worked with this before. I know that this could potentially be a server problem over here, and its database is hosted over there." And it really relied on
you having that knowledge versus this being able to
tell you what's connected. >>That tribal knowledge, right? But if I leave, >>It's lost.
>>That tribal knowledge goes away.
>>That's right. >>And so, I think that's the beauty of this particular feature. >>Yeah, absolutely. And now I wanna show you
one of my favorite features, which, of course, is PerfStack, which is our Performance
Analysis dashboards where you can pull together
different data sets that might be related,
or you know are related, and see kind of a real-time view of what those metrics are looking like. Taking a look at this
Performance Analysis dashboard, we can see that it's been
labeled hybrid clou
d front-end, and it has a lot of things
connected to it, right? We've got IOPS down here,
we've got disk queue lengths, we've got response time down here, and we've got IaaS
looking at up here, right? We've got connections. So we have a full kind
of observability view of what's going on with
our hybrid cloud front-end. And you can look at it, like I said, real-time statistics, it's
all right now together. We can zoom in even further. If we select metric, we can
go even farther with it. >>Yeah, a
nd speaking with customers, this is like one of
their favorite features for really troubleshooting
their environment, right? Overlaying time series data
on top of each other to see, you know, where is the problem and is there correlation
between these metrics. >>Yeah, absolutely. I think that it's a great piece. It's beautiful. So you can set up these
dashboards for your management and upper-level when they
need a view into something. They want that edge-view, to know when an office
is gonna go
out-of-sync or something like that, right? We make the joke a lot of
the big green button, right? They just wanna know what the status is. But this is a good alternative view if they want a little bit of detail, and it's very colorful and it looks nice, and they can use that to make
their business decisions. Next I wanna talk about
our SD-WAN capabilities. We have a few orchestrators
that we now support. Prisma being the latest one
that was added support for. >>And as mentioned earlier, like, de
vice support
is a big focus for us, especially around SD-WAN
and this technology set that our customers have been
asking for visibility into. >>Yeah, what I like about
the SD-WAN visibility is that it adds to what
you can already see and you can already get, right? Like, we've got VPN connection status, we've got topology from NPM, from the network performance side of the self-hosted observability solution, we're pulling in those things. And then in addition to that,
we've got our SD-WAN map, we
've got our orchestrator inventory, and kind of have everything
kind of in one place. So we're pulling data, we're just adding to
what was already there, what we could already pull
with our SD-WAN devices. Now, we also have added, we mentioned that this is great for that kind of hybrid approach, right? We have to monitor things
that are in the cloud, we have to monitor things
that are on-premises. And we've talked a lot about things that are more or less on-premises, but what we also have added
is quite a lot of support
for cloud devices. New to this release is
this Azure dashboard built with the modern dashboard
technologies, which we love. >>Yeah, and cloud visibility
is really a focus for us again in 2024 as we continue to add visibility, not just for on-premises
infrastructure and networks, but also, you know, our users are moving some of their workloads to the cloud, and so they're asking for
that visibility in Azure and AWS and GCP. And so we're really focused about on how we can
provide that for them, and this is a step in that direction. >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think the important
thing to note here, like, even though we're gonna
show this Azure dashboard, we can monitor things in
AWS and things as well. So, like, you have one-stop shop versus having to go log into
your individual applications for those cloud providers,
because they do provide that. But having one-stop and it's integrated with all your other data helps
you get the larger picture of what's going on.
>>Yeah, you hit on it, right? It's not just about visibility
through a dashboard, but the connected data set and what we can do with that data to really make improvements. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's where the power is, right? We want to be able to
make those connections where we are not having
to use tribal knowledge and all of that to solve our problems. We need to reach those
solutions more quickly. Patience is at an all time low, so we wanna get there as fast as possible and not have
interruptions to
our users if we can avoid it. And last but not least, a new feature that I'm excited about, which comes with the security integration, with the security event manager and access rights manager
products that we have, is the Vulnerability and Risk Dashboard. We added the ability to pull in CVEs, and this dashboard gives
you a high-level showing of where you're at as far as risk goes with those CVEs, right? Those CVEs already have severity
status assigned to them. So you can come i
n here and quickly see, "Oh, we're not looking great," or, "We're looking good,
what's our risk score?" And all of that. And it's very high-level, but it's that one snapshot view to say, "Hey, quickly, what can we do? What can we address? Can we get it into the plan
to roll out these updates." The great thing about
everything we've shown today is it's all available in the online demo at hco.demo.SolarWinds.com. You can go poke around at everything. You can see some of the guided tours on a few o
f the features, including some of the
features that we showed today. So feel free to go and poke
around and look at things, even if you're not on the latest release. >>Awesome, well, thank you
so much for showing off our self-hosted
observability offering today. I look forward to future conversations about this platform and the offering, and getting feedback from our customers. >>Thanks, it's been great. [logo whooshes] >>The best way forward in
this complex and hybrid world is a holistic soluti
on built
for unparalleled visibility. As you've learned today, SolarWinds is solving what others can't. Proactively monitoring and observing your entire digital estate, making it easy to visualize
complex distributed environments and accelerate issue resolution. Whatever mode is best
suited for your journey, self-hosted or SaaS, our integrated AI capabilities move you from reactive to proactive, and helps ensure your
infrastructure performs its best and your applications
are always available. If
you're already using
SolarWinds monitoring products, we make it very easy to move
to our observability solutions, and we give you the ability to leverage your existing investment
to increase collaboration across your IT Ops and DevOps teams. Making the most of observability
means continuous learning. So we invite you to connect
with your counterparts and our experts to share insights and engage in discussions
by joining THWACK, our user community of
over 200,000 members. Stay up to date with
th
e resources available at SolarWinds.com, And register for our upcoming
webcasts and virtual events, including THWACKcamp, which is happening on April 17th and 18th. Thank you for spending time with us today. And remember, SolarWinds is
ready to meet you where you are on your evolving hybrid cloud journey, and help you get to
wherever you're going next. [uptempo music]
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