The global digital world is constantly changing and growing, and with it the need for IT management solutions is accelerating. Bharat Bedi explains how SolarWinds has responded to customers' need for comprehensive observability solution that provides visibility over both their on-premises and cloud-native ecosystems.
The SolarWinds leave funded for several projects including SaaS and self-host solutions across organization. Finally, Bedi was sharing new AI capabilities of the company - AI-Machine Learning Anomaly detection - as well as AI based integrations and highlighting relevance of given solutions to Indian business digital transformation enabling security and efficiency.
Observability Redefined
What differentiates SolarWinds from other observability solutions, and how does it position itself to capitalize on the growing demand in India?
SolarWinds offers end-to-end visibility where you need it whether in the cloud or on prem, and, likely, both. We also have two different application deployment options depending on your needs and resources with the self-hosted and SaaS options.
Observability Self-Hosted was built through 25 years of experience monitoring and observing on premises infrastructure and designed for hybrid environments. Observability SaaS is the cloud-native option designed to observe cloud and on prem infrastructure. Whether you have compliance and/or business needs that require you to have software hosted internally or a mandate requiring you to look at a SaaS option, you can still get fantastic end-to-end observability of your hybrid environment.
Over those 25 years, SolarWinds has earned the trust of our customers worldwide by delivering powerful, affordable, and secure solutions. We will continue to build on this relationship and support customers in India and beyond with comprehensive and future-proof solutions that help overcome the IT challenges IT Professionals are facing to accelerate their digital business transformation with time to value.
What are the most significant new capabilities introduced in the latest version of SolarWinds Observability?
In the October release of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, we expanded our cloud monitoring capabilities to include Azure Managed Instance, Azure MySQL, Azure PostgreSQL and Amazon RDS for SQL Server; added the ability to change status for CVE vulnerabilities for individual devices; added support for Fortinet SDWAN, Meraki switches, Fortinet wireless access points (WAP), Ruckus WAP, Juniper WAP, Arista WAP, Extreme Networks WAP, Dell PowerStore T, and Dell PowerScale; along with notable improvements to the intelligent mapping and dashboard functionalities.
What deployment options are available for SolarWinds Observability? How do they cater to different IT environments?
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted can be deployed on premises or on cloud-hosted servers (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
Can you provide examples of how SolarWinds Observability's AI/ML capabilities are used to identify anomalies, predict performance issues, or optimize resource allocation?
SolarWinds uses AI/ML capabilities in a number of ways: AlertStack works to correlate entities to reduce alert noise, Anomaly-Based Alerting works to identify outliers in critical metrics based on normal behavior to reduce alert noise, Virtualization Recommendations look at resource utilization over time to determine when resources are unbalanced and can recommend when they be shifted elsewhere to improve efficiency, and, similarly, the Capacity Planning features seek to give a timeline based on normal behavior for when resource allocation changes are needed.
How customizable are the AI/ML models, and can they be tailored to specific industry verticals or customer requirements?
Several of the capabilities are based on how that device is behaving so it’s learning over time based on it’s utilization and application in your environment rather than being based on an arbitrary industry standard.
Additionally, for the Anomaly-Based Alerting, for example, you can selectively use that for critical devices and critical metrics, and it can be somewhat tailored to the needs of those types of devices such as setting a pre-determined threshold in addition to its being anomalous.
How does SolarWinds ensure the security and privacy of customer data, especially when dealing with sensitive information?
Security and privacy are incredibly important to us at SolarWinds which is why we developed our Secure by Design framework, and, more recently, our AI by Design framework. I encourage everyone to investigate the details through our Trust Center and Secure by Design resources. We are continuing to improve, innovate, and share our learnings in this space.
How does SolarWinds Observability integrate with other SolarWinds products and third-party tools in the IT ecosystem?
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted integrates with several of our other products including Database Performance Analyzer, which provides deep database monitoring, determines anomalies, and provides recommendations; SolarWinds Service Desk, which intakes data to provide more information to the technicians working the tickets and works hand-in-hand with the alerting in Observability Self-Hosted; and provides Security Observability by pulling in key information and dashboards from our security portfolio including Security Event Manager, Patch Manager, Access Rights Manager, and ties that together with network and server configuration management, as well as providing a risk dashboard with CVE information. There are myriad ways that we can work with third party products, but one of the critical integrations we have is with Service Now which works with the Observability Self-Hosted alerting to create incidents.
SolarWinds Observability SaaS supports many integrations designed to support data ingestion, ITSM, and notifications. Similarly to Observability Self-Hosted, it supports integration with both SolarWinds Service Desk and ServiceNow for ticket creation.
Are there robust APIs available for custom integrations and automation?
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted uses the SolarWinds API and has an SDK that allow for the building of automation and custom integrations. SolarWinds Observability SaaS has a public REST API designed to grant access.
Can SolarWinds Observability handle large-scale and complex IT environments, including those with thousands of servers and applications?
Whether using SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted or SaaS, it was built with complex environments in mind. On the self-hosted side, we utilize additional polling servers and additional web servers to distribute the load while maintaining a single front end. We also offer High Availability servers to maintain connectivity and data collection in the event of an outage.