Provides timely insights that help prevent network outages and support critical infrastructure decisions
What is our primary use case?
My main use case for SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is proactive monitoring, which allows the network team or the NOC operations monitoring team to know when there are downtimes or possible issues with a service provider's links or a branch. This capability helps us provide remediation actions long before major operational issues occur. When there are links down or degraded or there's a service issue, I come in the morning wanting to see the state of the network just by viewing one pane of glass. Therefore, I frequently create dashboards for monitoring and generate reports for management.
I remember a specific time when we had complaints of slow links. In my current institution, we have over 500 branches, and we observed various complaints regarding slow links, prompting us to investigate the issue. Initially, complaints came in singly, and we escalated them to service providers. However, after analyzing the reports at the end of the day, we noted over-utilization on the ISP backhaul at the HQ, and SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability provided this insight due to the frequent reports generated. We caught this issue and upgraded the backhaul links by engaging the service providers to change from 1 gigabit interfaces to 10 gigabit interfaces while ensuring proper negotiation.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability also helps us see the health statistics of devices. Recently, we picked up on high CPU and memory utilization on our internet routers using SolarWinds, which reported this through the SNMP credentials. We were able to raise a ticket with Cisco to solve the issue, making it another valuable use case for us.
What is most valuable?
The best features of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability include its various monitoring tools and excellent dashboards. It is one of my favorite tools because it allows teams to see and monitor multiple locations at a glance, such as our 500 branches, creating interactive dashboards that clearly indicate what actions to take through color codes. The second major advantage is its superior reporting capabilities. SolarWinds produces clearer reports than average monitoring tools, allowing us to make strategic comparisons and create custom reports that enhance our insight.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability offers great ease of use, and I have utilized it alongside integrations with Sophos and various other partners such as Fortinet. The ease of use regarding integrations has been very handy since we can monitor various third-party infrastructures. However, we experienced issues recently with integrations with Huawei, which is fast-growing in the African market. We noticed that the integration with Huawei was not providing as much information via SNMP compared to the flexibility seen with Cisco and other third-party integrations.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability has positively impacted my organization by improving our reporting capabilities, allowing us to send regular reports to management for constant analysis and visibility of the network's state. It has also helped reduce downtime and meet SLAs, achieving over 99% uptime for services, internet links, and spoke sites. We proactively identify issues before they occur. For example, when a site with two links has one link down, we ensure the second link is operational, which maintains service uptime, leading to an overall increase in uptime statistics and better visibility for management.
What needs improvement?
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability could be improved, particularly regarding integrations with Huawei solutions. Given Huawei's rapid growth in the tech and network space, the integration with Huawei is not meeting the standards set by integrations with other providers such as Cisco. This is essential for the continued effective use of SolarWinds in the African market.
SolarWinds has excelled in its user interface and reporting capabilities regarding custom report creation. However, communication on how to create those custom reports can be enhanced. While many of us figure it out after time, a smoother process for creating custom reports would significantly aid engineers.
I chose 9 out of 10 partly because I have recently had issues with integration with Huawei, which is quickly becoming a significant player in the market. Since we operate a majority of our spoke sites with Huawei, SolarWinds tends to lose some advantages because the SNMP criteria for monitoring Huawei devices are not providing the comprehensive reports we need, leading me to deduct one point.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working in my current field for about six to seven years across various institutions.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is stable. I have used it in other environments with success, though in my current environment, we have experienced instability likely due to the deployment not meeting required standards. Consequently, we have had to perform frequent server refreshes before it becomes usable again. Despite this, my previous experiences affirm its stability when appropriately deployed.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is great. We recently worked with a third party, Tigalogic, to increase the number of servers provisioned for SolarWinds, leading to fewer breakdowns and enabling us to carry out more activities by utilizing new resources.
How are customer service and support?
Customer support from SolarWinds is generally great, though it could improve in understanding the challenges faced in the Nigerian market. The complexities and internal processes in approvals necessitate a more tailored support approach, ensuring that assistance is relevant and timely. Recently, we have encountered issues where the support provided did not meet our expectations, underscoring the need for knowledgeable personnel familiar with our circumstances.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Previously, we used different solutions, including PRTG, which is SolarWinds' closest competitor, and ManageEngine. Although PRTG was a good solution, SolarWinds offered better dashboards and superior reporting capabilities, facilitating easier connections and support. I have also tried the Netis iOps tool for Huawei, which excels in analytics but falls short in monitoring. Overall, SolarWinds remains a superior choice, though it seems to be losing ground due to its monitoring limitations with Huawei devices.
What was our ROI?
I have certainly seen a return on investment with SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability because the product does what it claims to do. The primary return comes from its effectiveness, leading to significant cost savings, especially since we can create tenants and allow multiple countries to utilize the nodes through shared tools. Additionally, we have observed a reduction in downtime by at least 15%.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
Regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing, we engaged with SolarWinds through a partner, and negotiations were conducted by our procurement team. We received a discount initially, but noticed that pricing changed upon renewal, leading to some confusion. The new pricing models lack clarity in communication, bundling services that we may not actually need, leading to unnecessary costs. This issue is more pressing in Africa, where companies prefer to pay in local currency instead of dollars, though I understand the pricing rationale.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I evaluated other options before choosing SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, including Netis iOps, which is a Huawei monitoring tool. We conducted a proof of concept but found it to be more investigative rather than a monitoring tool, leading us to reject it. Other options included ManageEngine and PRTG, which were also considered, but SolarWinds outperformed these competitors in reporting and dashboard visibility, ultimately guiding our selection.
What other advice do I have?
I advise others looking into using SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability to explore its licensing models to identify the best fit for their needs while consulting a partner for advice. Ensure deployment uses the standard required resources to avoid frequent breakdowns in applications and track licensing effectively for timely renewals to enjoy the service fully. Support is available, and following these points should lead to a positive experience. I rated this product 9 out of 10.
Real-Time Visibility and Effortless Monitoring
What do you like best about the product?
I like SolarWinds Observability because it provides me with clear, real-time visibility into my customers' environments, making it easy to identify issues quickly. It simplifies monitoring, reduces troubleshooting time, and helps me support clients more efficiently.
What do you dislike about the product?
Sometimes SolarWinds Observability can feel limited in customization, and certain features still need more maturity. A few areas may be slow or require additional steps, which can prolong troubleshooting time.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
SolarWinds Observability enables me to quickly identify performance issues across applications, servers, and networks in one centralized location. It reduces the time I spend troubleshooting, improves visibility for my customers, and allows me to proactively identify problems before they impact their environment. This helps me deliver faster, more reliable support.
Has improved cross-team collaboration with unified performance insights and faster issue resolution
What is our primary use case?
We used SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability for monitoring purposes. I was into server monitoring earlier. In that team, we had airline accounts and banking accounts. For server monitoring purposes, we used the HCO of SolarWinds for network performance monitoring and other tasks.
This was primarily a monitoring job. When I was in the monitoring team, we had different sets of teams working in shifts. Everything was installed, and we were the operators. At that time, we handled network performance monitoring, server application monitoring, database observability, log management analysis, cloud infrastructure visibility, and other insights.
What is most valuable?
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability offers excellent features. It has end-to-end visibility, flexible deployment, and hybrid support from the support team. AI ops, scalability, and enterprise features for distributed environments, such as more polling engines, web servers, and high availability are very good in the HCO.
Before HCO, many organizations used multiple SolarWinds modules such as NPM, SAM, and WMAN. With SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, they gained a unified, single pane of glass view for the network, server, databases, and cloud resources. It reduced monitoring silos and enabled fast root cause analysis to easily identify what occurred during incidents. This improved collaboration between network, infrastructure, and application teams.
Reduced downtime and faster issue resolution are significant benefits of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability. Features such as PerfStack, NetPath, and intelligent maps allow organizations to visualize dependencies and pinpoint problems quickly. Mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to resolve (MTTR) have dropped significantly. Fewer war room calls and blame games occurred as teams now act on collaborated data instead of guesswork. One enterprise user reported an average incident resolution time improvement of 40% after consolidating their tools into HCO.
What needs improvement?
Currently, SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability monitors AWS, Azure, and virtual environments, but it is primarily built on the traditional Orion platform. I think deeper integration into Kubernetes, serverless functions, and cloud-native tracing can be implemented as these matter to many organizations. Additionally, the user interface and modernization of the UX can be developed.
For how long have I used the solution?
I used SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability for approximately two to three years when I was in a different project.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I have not experienced any stability issues with SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability. It performs well.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
For SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability's scalability, SolarWinds publishes scalability engine guidelines for large deployments. A single polling engine with enterprise supports up to 100 additional polling engines, monitoring up to 100,000 elements per instance. For large users, web servers and polling engines can be scaled. There are case studies of real customers showing growth and their ROI. The enterprise scale edition helps with scaling.
How are customer service and support?
The customer support for SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is excellent.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Other tools from SolarWinds were used before SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability. Netcool and other solutions were also utilized.
What was our ROI?
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability helped save time, money, and resources.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I do not have information about pricing, setup cost, and licensing for SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability because those aspects were handled by a different team in the organization.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Before choosing SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, we evaluated IBM's solutions. Kyndryl, being a spin-off from IBM, provided other options. The product is made up of IBM, so they were explored.
What other advice do I have?
Start with clear visibility goals, size your environment properly, start small and then expand, and invest in the database layer. I would recommend all these things to anybody who is trying to implement SolarWinds HCO.
On a scale of 1-10, I rate SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability a 9.
Smart alerts have reduced downtime and improved proactive monitoring across environments
What is our primary use case?
After joining Accenture company, I have been directly using SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability for monitoring purposes for all network devices.
We are using SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability for network purposes to monitor network devices such as Cisco and firewall equipment.
We use SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability to monitor our network devices such as routers, switches, and firewalls. For example, if a router CPU or interface utilization goes above the threshold, SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability sends an alert. We then check the device's status, review performance graphs, and identify what's causing the spike, such as high traffic or a faulty interface. This helps us to take quick action before it impacts the user or they lose some connectivity on the interface.
Apart from monitoring network devices, we also use SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability to track our performance, check application health, and review traffic trends. It helps us quickly find the root cause of issues by showing details, metrics, and logs in one place. We also use it to generate reports and share updates with the team.
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability has helped our organization stay on top of network and system performance. It allows us to spot and fix issues quickly, reducing downtime and keeping us happy. The clear dashboard, alerts, and reports make monitoring easier and save our team a lot of time. Overall, it has improved efficiency and given us better visibility across both cloud and on-premise environments.
What is most valuable?
All-in-one visibility in SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is one feature that stands out. It lets you monitor every server, application, cloud, and on-premises from a single dashboard. This is the main benefit. Smart Alert is also a valuable feature. We get a notification whenever any utilization goes high, an interface is down, a circuit is down, or BGP is down.
Smart Alerts in SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability has been really helpful for our team. For instance, one day, a switch interface started hitting high utilization, which would have caused slowness in network traffic. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability sent an alert immediately, so we could check the devices and fix the issue before users noticed any problem. Without Smart Alerts, we might have found out much later, causing downtime or performance issues.
The dependency mapping feature is another notable aspect. It shows how devices and applications are connected, which helps us quickly find the root cause of a problem instead of guessing. We also find the reporting and historical data very useful. It helps track our trends over time and plan for capabilities or upgrades.
With SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, our team has been able to respond to issues much faster. Alerts let us fix problems before users are notified, which has significantly reduced downtime by around 30 to 40%. The dashboard and reports also save our team approximately two or three hours per day that we can now spend on other tasks. Overall, it has made our network management more efficient and proactive.
What needs improvement?
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability could be improved in several ways. It feels slow sometimes, especially when handling large amounts of data. The initial setup and configuration can also be complex for new users. If it were faster and easier to set up with simple dashboards for quick insights, it would be even better.
Customer support could be quicker and more responsive with urgent issues. Integration with third-party tools could be smoother, making it easier to connect with other systems we use. The dashboard could also be simpler for quick insights. More guidance or templates for new users would be helpful during onboarding.
Report customization is another area that could be improved. While the built-in reports are useful, being able to create more flexible and tailored reports would enhance our experience.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability for two years at Accenture, where I joined as a fresher in the networking field.
What other advice do I have?
I would rate SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability eight out of 10 due to issues with speed and setup.
In our organization, SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is deployed in a hybrid cloud setup. It monitors both our on-premises systems and our cloud environments, such as AWS and Azure.
We use both AWS and Azure with SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability. Currently, we use Azure slightly more for our main workload, but AWS is also monitored for specific applications and servers. This allows us to keep track of performance and issues across both cloud environments.
We acquired SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability directly from SolarWinds, and it's connected to our cloud and on-premises system. Our company does not have any other business relationship with SolarWinds besides being a customer. We are not a partner or reseller.
It's easy and quite simple, but SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability could improve the interface to make it more useful. We should have an option for speed also. Overall, it's good.
All Round Monitoring - Out of the box
What do you like best about the product?
It is a comprehensive solution that covers a wide variety of monitoring requirements. From network devices, to traffic, to servers. Other aspects like storage, web performance, etc.
Secondly, the simplicity of using the product from a user perspective. It does not require you to edit any config files, or keep a track of files to set up and modify your monitoring needs
What do you dislike about the product?
Technical support or other resources available do not provide enough information or support for integrations using the SWQL studio. There should be resources available to learn, implement and troubleshoot integration issues.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
So far we dont have evey feature and capability of HCO being utilized, but the fact that it sits at the center of our ITSM, network, and other systems and provides a wide visibility of the infrastructure.
Longtime SolarWinds user & Thwack member.
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of use and vendor agnostic useability.
What do you dislike about the product?
Setup can sometimes be confusing but, for the most part, is rather straightforward setting up.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
I like being able see view my environment easily within a single pane of glass.
Effortless monitoring of a vast environment from a single, unified platform
What do you like best about the product?
SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) is like a stop for IT engineers for keeping an eye on everything on environment (like server, backup, storage, network, AP, Sensors, UPS etc) setup—either platform is running on-prem, in the cloud, or somewhere in between. Solarwinds pulls together monitoring for networks, infrastructure, apps, and cloud services into one easy-to-use and manage dashboards. We are currently managing 35K + devices and components under a single monitoring roof. It's becomes way simpler because of flexible licensing and smart alerts, it saves time and cuts down on admin work. If someone doesn't have hand-on experience on scripts and languages then he can easily use the manually features (like alert creation, report, any modification). HCO completely transformation and gives better visibility, on license, issues and keep things running smoothly.
What do you dislike about the product?
*here is a limitation from the tool that Dell does not expose much volume information over WMI hence we are unable to monitor the disk operations on the dell servers.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
* Flexible deployment options—on-premises, cloud, or hybrid
* Flexible Licensing (Combines multiple modules like Network Performance Monitor (NPM), Server & Application Monitor (SAM), Log Analyzer, IP Address Manager (IPAM), and more into a single platform)
All-in-One Monitoring Made Easy with SolarWinds
What do you like best about the product?
What I like best about SolarWinds Observability is the unified view it offers across infrastructure, applications, and logs — all from a single dashboard. It's incredibly helpful to correlate metrics, traces, and logs for root cause analysis, especially in hybrid environments. The customizable dashboards are intuitive, and the AIOps features help reduce alert noise, making it easier to focus on real issues. It's a huge time-saver for monitoring complex systems.
What do you dislike about the product?
The initial setup and configuration can be overwhelming, especially for teams new to observability tools. Some documentation is outdated or unclear, and onboarding large environments requires time and effort. Also, pricing can escalate quickly as more nodes or features are added. Lastly, customer support response times could be improved.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We use SolarWinds Observability to monitor app performance and server health. It helps us trace bottlenecks in code, monitor infrastructure metrics, and reduce troubleshooting time by correlating everything in one place.
Effective Network Visibility and Web Performance Insights with SolarWinds
What do you like best about the product?
We've been using SolarWinds NPM and WPM extensively, and the experience has been genuinely positive. The visibility that NPM provides into our network infrastructure has helped us proactively address performance bottlenecks before they impact users. Real-time monitoring, intuitive dashboards, and intelligent alerts make day-to-day operations much more manageable.
WPM, on the other hand, has been incredibly valuable for monitoring our critical internal and external web applications. Being able to simulate user interactions and catch slow load times or page failures before end users report them has improved our service reliability and user satisfaction.
Overall, SolarWinds has helped us move from reactive to proactive monitoring. The integration between modules, ease of customization, and the depth of insights we get have made a noticeable difference in how we manage our environment.
What do you dislike about the product?
The user interface, while functional, could use a more modern and responsive design. Some views feel cluttered and less intuitive compared to newer platforms.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Web URL responses and performance monitoring is effective and we are planning to move web monitoring from other tools
SolarWinds Observability is a good product.
What do you like best about the product?
It is a great cloud monitoring platform.
What do you dislike about the product?
SolarWinds needs to add more modules to their platform.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Monitor and alert when things are not working the way they should.
