Vendor Briefing: SolarWinds

I last talked to SolarWinds at my first TechField Day event, way back in 2013. I remember being impressed with the depth of geekiness at the company. Their people have deep math skills to help the product analyze the data that it gathers. Today’s briefing was with my friend Gina. She recently joined SolarWinds as part of the Server & Application Monitoring (SAM) product marketing team. The first thing is that SolarWinds have a suite of products, in fact, three suites. The product set that we looked at was the one for deployment inside enterprises, with an overarching name of Orion. The Orion part is a unified management console for the main enterprise products, of which SAM is one. SAM looks like a pretty good tool. It delivers lots of actionable information without getting too stuck in the mire of metrics. There is an application template concept. A pre-built set of configuration for monitoring common applications. The templates allow customization but are based on a set of standard monitoring best practice for each application. Even better, in the SolarWinds Thwack community, you can share templates. I also like monitoring tools that make it easy to take corrective action. Rather than just informing you they allow you to fix issues from within the monitoring tool. Simple actions like restarting services are built in, as are more complex actions like resizing VMs. Some actions can also be scheduled, so a VM can be resized during the maintenance window. I would like to see this closing of the loop more automated. Having the monitoring system restart services or migrate VMs automatically will speed up fault resolution or avoidance. Naturally, there will need to be rules around automated changes to VMs and applications. But in the end, we must accept that machines can follow rules better than people. People still need to set the rules to suit the business needs.
The whole SolarWinds Orion suit looks really nice. I hope to make time to get some of the products deployed into my lab this week and may have more to say soon.

© 2016, Alastair. All rights reserved.