SolarWinds amps up observability software with AI

SolarWinds added AI-based enhancements to its observability solutions that will enable IT teams to more easily monitor complex, distributed on-premises and cloud environments from anywhere. The upgrades promise to provide visibility into gaps created when workloads are moved from on-premises to cloud environments, helping IT teams spot and prevent performance incidents.

SolarWinds Observability is a SaaS offering that the company says provides visibility across the cloud-native, on-prem, and hybrid technology stack to speed problem resolution and reduce the noise of multiple system alerts for IT professionals. It also can deliver a view across multi-cloud environments, alongside on-premises network and infrastructure assets.

“We are giving our users the ability to not only have cloud visibility but also that on-premises network and infrastructure visibility by connecting those together,” says Jeff Stewart, field CTO and vice president, global solutions engineering, observability at SolarWinds. “Giving our customers insight into that level of detail even across the telco networks has been pretty significant.”

As part of its Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) capabilities, SolarWinds supports Azure and AWS and is able to see into those environments, letting IT teams look at what is happening outside of their own networks. Whether IT professionals are being mandated to move workloads to the cloud or they are doing it naturally, SolarWinds will be able to give them a view into activity between on-prem and cloud environments. “We provide visibility into applications that are cloud-native but also the performance connected down to the end user themselves,” Stewart explains.

SolarWinds observability can provide visibility across on-premises and cloud network devices, virtual machines, hypervisors, containers, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-a-service resources.

“SolarWinds also recently upgraded their cloud-native Kubernetes and container support. This helps with the expansion to CloudOps and cloud-native-centric teams and buyers,” says Stephen Elliot, Group Vice President at IDC.

With this release, AIOps-enabled pattern recognition and anomaly detection can provide insights into correlated alerts and events to accelerate root cause analysis, helping IT teams to be more productive. SolarWinds also extended its observability capabilities by adding query explorer and visual explain plans.

“Built into the AI-based platform, we are doing things such as health score analysis, which looks at all the entities of a particular day, application stack, or technology stack, and provides a score based off of performance,” Stewart explains. “We are also applying AI and [machine learning] to look at nominal anomalies and seasonality to really try to reduce what IT teams must focus on to the most important things. Essentially, here’s what is healthy, and here is what you need to look at more closely.”

The recent updates point to SolarWinds’ efforts to expand from a product company to a platform provider, according to industry watchers.

“SolarWinds is moving from a product to a platform capability story.  They are expanding their communities from IT operations to include a plethora of buyers across technology domains (site reliability engineers, DevOps, security, server management, CloudOps),” Elliot says. “The company has been transforming business functions across product and pricing models (from perpetual to SaaS and subscription delivery models) under CEO Sudhakar Ramakrishna who joined just over three years ago.”

The updated capabilities are available now, with both perpetual and subscription licensing options for customers. “We have also made enhancements to the licensing and deployment model allowing flexibility and simplicity for customers,” Stewart added.

SolarWinds will share more details about the enhancements to its observability solutions including hybrid on-prem and cloud visibility capabilities during its virtual event, SolarWinds Day, this week.