SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

What do you like best about the product?

There are two products here - Solarwinds Observability SaaS and Solarwinds Observability Self Hosted. This review is for Self Hosted because it's the product I'm most familiar with. We've used Orion/HCO/SWOSH for nearly 10 years and it's been the cornerstone of our monitoring for customers. Once you learn how to drive it you can get all the informationabout your estate that you need, with more and more functionality added as time has gone one. The reporting is good and the ability to create your own dashboards based on node metrics is straightforward. If you learn the SWQL query language and Solarwinds Information Service for Powershell it gets more powerful allowing you to completely customise the end-user experience.

I can't currently say that I like anything about Observability SaaS.

What do you dislike about the product?

For Self Hosted my only bugbear at present is that the search widget can't be turned off per user account - it's a global setting which prevents us from allowing customers read-only access to their estates because of the risk of data leakage.

Observability SaaS has many major holes, not least the gaping security hole that is a public API key being allowed full access to the platform. Admin/Member/Viewer permissions are weak and not suitable for a multi-customer environment, though I believe this is being worked on. Lack of nested groups is also causing issues as you can't properly group customer environments. The reporting is nothing like we're used to with SWOSH because it's literally a PDF of a dashboard. The documentation is poor with the concepts and various component relationships not explained, how metrics are made up is poorly explained and elements of the GUI keep moving during updates. This week I lost my custom dashboards in a meeting because how they're accessed changed from last week to this. The product seems to be updated monthly, and to my mind is a cloud-first application that has had VM and on-prem solutions bolted to it. The network collectors are poorly thought out and include a lot of features like AppInsight which can be applied to nodes on that collector, but the metrics will never surface in the SaaS Portal because there isn't a 1:1 relationship between the two. Finally, API polling is restricted to GET requests only which means they're useless to us as we use POST requests with a JSON body. I believe this is being worked on too.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Observability SaaS is *causing* problems, see above. Self Hosted on the other hand just sits there and works and our customers are happy with the data they're presented with in service meetings.

What do you like best about the product?

It is very adaptable to complex network and application designs. I have found it easy to use, but you still need an understanding of monitoring, using solarwinds, and general knowledge of networking, applications, ITSM, and what is important to the business, not just the techies. SolarWinds provides integrations via API allowing you to link to other software, not just for data collection, but data sharing. This is powerful as you can put data in into PowerBI for example. Combining multiple data sources while still relying on SolarWinds to perform its main job of monitoring. The performance of Solarwinds has improved dramatically over the past ten years. Upgrades in a multimodule environment with additional polling engines used to take days as often as not. Now, I can scale a much larger environment, and the integrated installer upgrades them everything in about two hours. The ability to run more efficiently on the same server hardware specifications has improved too. The scale of element counts per server has increased a lot. This not only reduces cost of ownership as fewer servers are required, but makes maintenance and upgrades simpler too. The pricing has changed and it is hard to compare pure node count per module to the newer method of overall node counts. The combination of modules into a single product does make licensing simpler though, and the ability to split your licensing into multiple instances of SolarWinds is quite a benefit from years ago. For new users, the support and onboarding experience has changed for the better. There are learning pathways for new users and the onboarding experience gets organizations up and running quickly now. The SolarWinds Academy and the instructors do not get the love, respect and notice that they deserve. They are very knowledgeable and willing to get you answers even after a session. Finally we are seeing AI and improved anomaly detection. While anomaly detection is standard in the industry, SolarWinds has had a version for years, and it has only improved. The AI that is available now and coming is truly amazing and shows that they are not just keeping the lights on, but actively trying to integrate new technology in a way that is useful and not just for marketing. The AI can help with tasks, and create useful intelligent reports on the fly. This is a time saver. Knowing what to do with the data is one thing, but having the time and skill to curate and present that data for engineers to act on? This is a timesaver, especially when critical production is down and you want to find early indicators or correlate event timelines. The ability for users to self serve with the AI does not remove the skilled SolarWinds analyst, but frees them up to work on more urgent tasks. My only wish - I had this feature ten years ago....

What do you dislike about the product?

This is a hard question to answer as I generally like the product. Licensing is probably one of the bigger headaches for any vendor. This is no different. The on premise version has legacy use cases that do not translate easily into the new model. I have heard about difficulties with this, but the subscription model will keep you current and provide updates, support, and new features. One feature that I want to see more of... DARK Theme.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The ability to tag nodes with meta data provided an early CMDB and asset functionality that did not exist elsewhere. People assume that custom properties were just for alerts. Nope, you can do so much more with them. I was able to eliminate many thoughts of custom tables and programming with heavy usage the custom properties feature. I was able to define reports, reassign alerts, create custom dashboards much quicker by simply leveraging custom properties. SolarWinds talks about them, as do many users and there is good reason for this. USE THEM. This one feature will enhance everything that you do with SolarWinds. Also, look at the other modules of aspects of the monitoring capabilities. You will find the ability to monitor a lot more than what you expect. You can define custom API calls, custom snmp gets, custom WMI calls, etc to generate more data, data that your org needs, to keep things running. It is also not just alerting, CMDB and Asset tracking from the SolarWinds Observability stack that can be overlooked. You should be using the data to generate performance graphs and utilization for future hardware requirements. This is actually an out of the box capability too. I have had to stop engineers from powershelling their afternoons into usage charts and tell them to use SolarWinds. The data is there, the trend lines are there, just open the web site and start looking. You can create a report to download too. Stop the madness.

What do you like best about the product?

The best thing about SolarWinds is how easy it is to use.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main thing that is a current dislike is not being able to use the SaaS solution due to data sovereignty restrictions.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

SolarWinds is currently helping us monitor a very vast network

What do you like best about the product?

Rolling all the modules into the product has definitely improved and we're seeing improvement of new product releases (features not bug fixes) in recent releases. There has been a definite uptake in feature requests being ticked off that we hadn't seen for some time, so this is good.
AI additions are good but focus needs to remain on the many requests still outstanding from the community.

What do you dislike about the product?

Licensing tiers and cost is offputting, and competitors have had time to catch up.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Bringing all the observavility and monitoring into one tool without the hassle of tying in different components. The advantages of having the option to integrate Incident Management is also a plus.

What do you like best about the product?

I like that it’s user-friendly, and that when I run into a problem, I can investigate the source of the issue on THWACK.

What do you dislike about the product?

The interface includes so many features that it can sometimes be difficult to quickly locate specific settings.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Real-time change notifications and configuration back-ups of network devices.
Network security compliance.
Syslog monitoring.
Tracking EOL&EOS of software and hardware.