“For all of its benefits, the nearly universal shift to a hybrid IT strategy that links internal and external IT services can lead to complex, multi-faceted performance issues that span across systems and networks owned by an organisation, their service providers, and their cloud vendors,” said Christoph Pfister, executive vice president, products, SolarWinds. “As a result, IT professionals need comprehensive visibility into every aspect of their hybrid environments that may impact application performance. They then need a way to correlate that data so they can break down the walls between functional roles, service providers, and cloud vendors; eliminate finger pointing; and solve hybrid performance problems faster. Today’s SolarWinds Orion platform and product enhancements enable just that: end-to-end hybrid IT management.”
End-to-End Hybrid IT Management from SolarWinds
According to the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2016: The Hybrid IT Evolution, a mere 7 percent of UK organisations have not migrated any infrastructure or applications to the cloud, yet 65 percent stated they will likely never transition all services offsite, making hybrid IT the reality for IT departments today and for the foreseeable future. The survey also found that, while the cloud is key to business success, the challenges of hybrid IT environments are many. Increased management complexity brought on by combining cloud and on-premises services, along with a lack of control over and visibility into cloud services, ranked among the most prevalent issues faced by IT professionals.
The latest enhancements to these products, powered by the SolarWinds Orion platform, include:
· Cloud infrastructure monitoring from within the SolarWinds SAM module. The SolarWinds Orion platform now monitors Amazon® Web Services (AWS®) instances and volumes via the Amazon CloudWatch API, providing more visibility into cloud applications and the cloud infrastructure that supports them. This enhances what is already provided by the agent-based and agent-less capabilities in the product.
· Support for Microsoft® Azure® SQL and AWS Aurora™ RDS databases within SolarWinds DPA, enabling database administrators and developers to get maximum performance from their cloud databases and reduce infrastructure requirements using Multi-Dimensional Performance Analysis.
· Support for Cisco® Meraki® wireless access points within SolarWinds NPM. Cisco Meraki wireless access points are 100 percent cloud-managed, enabling network engineers to focus on configuring network behaviours rather than individual network components. SolarWinds NPM now provides a single robust tool for monitoring both locally managed and Cisco Meraki cloud-managed wireless access points.
· Enhanced network path monitoring within NetPath in SolarWinds NPM, which provides visibility into network performance and path analysis across the internet. View devices, applications, networks, and vendors in single-page path analysis to track every hop, and view latency historically or in real-time.
Drag-and-Drop Correlation in a Powerful Dashboard for Hybrid IT Environments
Also, new today is the general availability of the SolarWinds PerfStack™ dashboard, enabling next-generation capabilities for hybrid IT troubleshooting. PerfStack is a significant new capability available in the SolarWinds Orion platform. It is a highly customisable, yet simple-to-build dashboard. PerfStack allows IT administrators to selectively drag and drop critical real-time and historical metrics from virtually any SolarWinds Orion-based product, including cloud and on-premises performance data, into a single customisable chart to visualise the relationship between suspect elements. This enables IT professionals to identify, isolate, and troubleshoot hybrid IT performance problems in ways never before possible with this level of simplicity.
Making PerfStack even more powerful is the ability for administrators to collaborate with others by easily sharing the custom PerfStack charts they have created, helping break down the functional silos within their IT organisations and solve performance problems faster.
As a new component of the SolarWinds Orion platform, PerfStack is included in the latest versions of SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (12.1), SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (6.4), SolarWinds NetFlow Traffic Analyzer (4.2.2), SolarWinds Virtualization Manager (7.1), SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (6.4), and SolarWinds Web Performance Monitor (2.2.1).
