SolarWinds, a provider of IT management software, has released an all-new product and two advanced product updates in a major evolution of its SolarWinds Cloud Software as a Service (SaaS) portfolio.
The new capabilities expand the company’s current capabilities for comprehensive, full-stack monitoring with the introduction of AppOptics, a new application and infrastructure monitoring solution; updates to Papertrail, providing faster search speeds and new log velocity analytics; and enhanced digital experience monitoring (DEM) functionality within Pingdom.
Collectively, the company says, the new SolarWinds Cloud portfolio gives customers broad visibility into logs, metrics, and tracing, as well as the digital experience. It will enable developers, DevOps engineers, and IT professionals to simplify and accelerate management and troubleshooting, from the infrastructure and application layers to the end-user experience. In turn, it will allow customers to focus on building the innovative capabilities businesses need for today’s on-demand environments.
The new capabilities are important, said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products, SolarWinds., because application performance and the digital experience of users have a direct and significant impact on business success. With the stakes so high, the ability to monitor across logs, metrics, and tracing is essential, he added.
AppOptics
Available now, AppOptics is aimed at addressing the challenges customers face from being forced to use disparate solutions for applications and infrastructure performance monitoring. For a unified view, AppOptics’ distributed tracing, host and IT infrastructure monitoring, and custom metrics all feed the same dashboarding, analytics, and alerting pipelines. SolarWinds designed the solution to simplify and unify the management of complex modern applications, infrastructure, or both. This allows customers to solve problems and improve performance across the application stack, in an easy-to-use, as-a-service platform.
For application performance monitoring, the distributed tracing functionality can follow requests across any number of hosts, microservices, and languages without manual instrumentation. Users can move quickly from visualizing trends to deep, code-level, root-cause analysis. AppOptics bridges the traditional divide between application and infrastructure health metrics with unified dashboards, alerting, and management features. The host agent runs Snap and Telegraf plug-ins, enabling drop-in monitoring of key systems. The solution also integrates with a range of systems to support heterogeneous infrastructure environments.
Papertrail
The latest version of the cloud-hosted log management solution includes log velocity analytics, which can instantly visualize log patterns and help identify anomalies. For example, customers now can visualize an increase in total logs sent by a server, a condition that could indicate imminent failure, or something out of the norm.
Also, new to Papertrail is “lightning search,” which will enable developers, support engineers, and systems administrators to search millions or billions of log messages faster than ever before, and then immediately act on information found within the log messages.
Pingdom Digital Experience Monitoring
Pingdom helps make websites faster and more reliable with uptime and performance monitoring functionality. Available on November 27, the company says, Pingdom solution’s latest enhancements for digital experience monitoring include three new dashboard views: a Sites View that lets customers quickly locate a user experience issue on any monitored website; an Experience View that allows customers to filter users and identify those affected by performance issues; and a Performance View that allows customers to explore the technical cause of an issue and identify opportunities for performance improvements.
The latest updates to the Pingdom solution’s digital experience monitoring will enable customers to know first when issues affect their site visitors' experience, and quickly surface critical information needed to enhance the overall experience.
SolarWinds Cloud
The announcement of SolarWinds Cloud continues the company's plan to deliver a set of full-stack monitoring solutions built upon a common, seamlessly integrated, SaaS-based platform. Since 2014, SolarWinds has expanded its cloud portfolio and capabilities through a series of acquisitions, while making integrating these acquired solutions, including Pingdom, Librato, Papertrail, and TraceView, under a common sales and operational model.
According to SolarWinds, AppOptics builds on the technology and feedback SolarWinds put into Librato and TraceView since their introductions. Now, the company says it has integrated and enhanced this functionality within a single solution to advance its strategy to unify full-stack monitoring across the three pillars of observability on a common SaaS-based platform. The ultimate goal, says SolarWinds, is to enable a single view of infrastructure, applications, and digital experience.