According to a survey of the SolarWinds THWACK® user community of over 150,000 registered members, over half (53 percent of respondents) use Azure, but many organizations are just beginning their migration journey. Most operate some applications or workloads in the cloud, but much of IT remains on-premises. This highlights the need for comprehensive, full-stack visibility across the entire hybrid IT environment, regardless of where an organization is in its digital transformation journey.
As noted by Forrester®, users leverage cloud platforms to serve a wide range of functions1, yielding enhanced productivity, security, and operations for tech pros. The latest portfolio updates are designed to help tech pros more effectively manage everything from cloud and hybrid IT infrastructures to commercial, custom, and SaaS applications, empowering them to see clearer, scale faster, and perform better.
“For 20 years, SolarWinds has helped tech pros navigate the challenges of highly performant environments, while avoiding the distractions of the hype cycle. Because of this strong legacy, we’re uniquely positioned to help these same tech pros as they embark on their journey to the cloud,” said Sandy Orlando, senior vice president, products, SolarWinds.
“Today’s tech pros require greater flexibility, enhanced security, and improved full-stack visibility to successfully manage the web of applications and workloads spanning on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments, like Microsoft Azure,” she continued. “These new features and solution enhancements announced today reinforce our commitment to and focus on what matters most to customers: solving IT management problems the way tech pros need them solved and delivering solutions compatible with the environments they use today—and where they’ll grow tomorrow.”
Expanded full-stack visibility to optimize the performance of hybrid IT and Azure environments
To meet this important customer need, SolarWinds announced updates spanning both its SaaS-delivered APM suite, and the SolarWinds® Orion Platform, which scales to encompass monitoring of on-premises and cloud environments, including Microsoft Azure, with support for monitoring Azure IaaS (Windows® and Linux®) and PaaS services, as well as Office 365®:
- AppOptics™ and Pingdom® (part of the SaaS-delivered APM suite): Included in AppOptics is the capability to monitor key Azure services and extended support to provide powerful application performance monitoring with tracing and code-level troubleshooting for applications running on an Azure App Service. Combined with the integration between AppOptics and Loggly®, this extends its full-stack traces-to-logs support to provide comprehensive monitoring of Azure, applications running on Azure, and the logs created by those applications. Pingdom also extends support of Azure through the recently released Pingdom API 3.1, which makes it even easier to capture performance and availability data from Azure web applications.
- Database Performance Analyzer (DPA): Adds new database performance analysis and recommendations for Azure SQL Database Managed Instances and adds support for the latest versions of popular databases including SQL Server® 2019, Oracle® 19, MariaDB® 10, and MySQL® 8.
- Server Configuration Monitor (SCM): Provides an improved ability to monitor and alert on changes made within Windows systems running on Azure IaaS and adds support for detecting and tracking changes on Linux servers.
- Orion Maps: Includes editing capabilities to deliver improved context and relevant visualizations with background images, and more.
- SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD): Integrates with the Orion Platform for streamlined IT Service Management (ITSM) governance and workflow. This integration improves time-to-resolution by automatically creating IT incident tickets in SWSD when an Orion alert is triggered.
- Cost Calculator for Azure: Identifies total spend for cloud services across one or several Azure subscriptions as a free tool for tech pros.
Enhanced flexibility and deployment options
To ease customers’ public cloud migrations, SolarWinds and Microsoft have partnered to certify the Orion Platform and its modules for Azure, and make them available within the Azure Marketplace. SolarWinds has added support for Azure SQL Database Managed Instance as the Orion database, helping customers reduce management overhead and total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with traditional database deployments.
“SolarWinds customers can now enjoy the benefits of cloud when choosing Azure for their network and systems management products,” said Wisam Hirzalla, director product marketing for Azure at Microsoft. “We’re delighted to have SolarWinds enable customers to run their IT operations solution in the Microsoft cloud."
With this support for running on Azure, SolarWinds empowers organizations with the deployment flexibility they need in today’s hybrid environments. Through the Azure Marketplace, customers can easily deploy the SolarWinds industry-leading2 systems and network management software on Azure in typically as little as 30 minutes, and existing customers can migrate on-premises deployments of the Orion Platform and its modules to Azure-deployed instances.
Broader ability to monitor and manage cloud and hybrid IT environments with security in mind
Digital transformation journeys typically require companies and tech pros to invest in multiple management consoles to maintain security across their entire hybrid IT environment. Included in this wave of updates are the latest versions of Security Event Manager and Access Rights Manager, helping simplify the process of creating a reliable security posture for tech pros:
- Access Rights Manager (ARM): Delivers simplified provisioning of users to Azure Active Directory®, the hub of identity and access management for many applications like Office 365.
- Security Event Manager (SEM): Modernized security monitoring platform to simplify assuring the security of your applications, servers, and infrastructure.
SolarWinds Orion Platform
The Orion Platform is a modular and scalable architecture built to deliver powerful network, infrastructure, and application monitoring and management capabilities across on-premises, hosted, and public cloud environments. The common framework combines a web-based dashboard, centralized user management, unified alerting and reporting, and consolidated metrics—enhancing collaboration between teams. In addition to the PerfStack™ dashboard improvements and centralized upgrades, the latest release of the Orion Platform also adds SAML authentication support, enabling Single Sign-On (SSO) to the Orion Web Console.
The SolarWinds Orion Platform holds the May 2019 Gartner® Peer Insights™ Customers’ Choice2 distinction for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics and the May 2019 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice2 distinction for Best Application Performance Monitoring. TrustRadius, the most-trusted review platform for B2B technology, has also recognized SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), Server & Application Monitor (SAM), Network Performance Monitor (NPM), and Virtualization Manager (VMAN) with its 2019 Top Rated Product distinctions3.
SolarWinds at Microsoft Ignite® and VMworld® Europe
SolarWinds will be exhibiting at both Microsoft Ignite and VMworld Europe to demonstrate how the SolarWinds IT operations management portfolio, built on the SolarWinds Orion Platform, and its SaaS-delivered APM Suite can help centrally monitor and manage applications and infrastructure across modern, multi-cloud, and multi-premises architectures through an integrated single pane of glass.
Thomas LaRock, a SolarWinds Head Geek™ and 11-time Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), will also be presenting a breakout session, Happy Little Clouds – Application Migrations Done Right, on-site at Microsoft Ignite.
“Understanding how to migrate and manage applications in the cloud is critical as hybrid environments continue to be the reality for today’s tech pros,” said Thomas LaRock, Head Geek, SolarWinds. “Our latest portfolio updates and broadened platform support for Azure environments empowers tech pros to better monitor, manage, and secure hybrid applications and infrastructure, and I look forward to sharing additional cloud migration best practices during my presentation at Ignite.”
- Microsoft Ignite (Booth #935)
- Who: Head Geeks™ Thomas LaRock and Patrick Hubbard, and other technical experts
- When: November 4 – 8, 2019
- Where: Orlando, FL
- VMworld Europe (Booth #B524)
- Who: Head Geeks Leon Adato and Sascha Giese, and other technical experts
- When: November 4 – 8, 2019
- Where: Barcelona, Spain
Additional Resources
- AppOptics
- Pingdom
- SolarWinds APM Suite
- Database Performance Analyzer (DPA)
- Server Configuration Monitor (SCM)
- SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD)
- Storage Resource Monitor (SRM)
- VoIP & Network Quality Manager (VNQM)
- Cost Calculator for Azure
- Access Rights Manager (ARM)
- Security Event Manager (SEM)
- SolarWinds Orion Platform
Connect with SolarWinds
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#SWIevents
About SolarWinds
SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI) is a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software. Our products give organizations worldwide—regardless of type, size, or complexity—the power to monitor and manage their IT services, infrastructures, and applications; whether on-premises, in the cloud, or via hybrid models. We continuously engage with technology professionals—IT service and operations professionals, DevOps professionals, and managed services providers (MSPs)—to understand the challenges they face in maintaining high-performing and highly available IT infrastructures and applications. The insights we gain from them, in places like our THWACK community, allow us to solve well-understood IT management challenges in the ways technology professionals want them solved. Our focus on the user and commitment to excellence in end-to-end hybrid IT management has established SolarWinds as a worldwide leader in solutions for network and IT service management, application performance, and managed services. Learn more today at www.solarwinds.com.
The SolarWinds, SolarWinds & Design, Orion, and THWACK trademarks are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates, are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other SolarWinds trademarks, service marks, and logos may be common law marks or are registered or pending registration. All other trademarks mentioned herein are used for identification purposes only and are trademarks of (and may be registered trademarks of) their respective companies.
© 2019 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
1 Paraphrased findings from Forrester Research. Benchmark Your Enterprise Cloud Adoption. Dave Bartoletti. October 22, 2018. https://www.forrester.com/report/Benchmark+Your+Enterprise+Cloud+Adoption/-/E-RES117042#figure3
2 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.
3 Established in 2013, TrustRadius has become the most trusted site for B2B software reviews. Each month, about 400,000 B2B technology buyers use over 168,000 verified reviews and ratings on TrustRadius.com to make informed purchasing decisions.