SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

What do you like best about the product?

I really like how deeply SolarWinds Observability can tie into the environment. We can get visibility into almost every device and collect a huge amount of useful data from one platform. The single-pane-of-glass views are probably one of my favorite features because they let us see the health of the environment without constantly jumping between different tools. I also like being able to correlate information across infrastructure, applications, network, and other systems, which makes troubleshooting and identifying trends much easier.

What do you dislike about the product?

One of my biggest frustrations was the initial onboarding guidance around the SolarWinds Agent. We were originally led down the path of deploying the agent to essentially every node we monitored. As questions and issues came up, there seemed to be some uncertainty within support about the recommended approach, and it took a significant amount of time before everyone aligned on the best practice. Our ticket history reflects some of that back-and-forth.

We now have a much better understanding that the agent is a valuable tool, but it should be used selectively, primarily where we need more granular monitoring or data from a particular node. I just wish that distinction had been part of our education from day one. It would have saved us considerable time and made the initial implementation much smoother.

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

SolarWinds Observability is helping us bring visibility across a large and complex environment into one place. Instead of relying on multiple tools or manually checking individual systems, we can monitor our network, servers, applications, and other infrastructure through a single pane of glass.

The biggest benefit is the amount of data available to us when something goes wrong. We can quickly drill into a device, look at performance and historical data, correlate issues, and get a much better picture of what is actually happening. That helps reduce troubleshooting time and allows us to move from simply knowing that something is down or degraded to understanding why.

It also helps us be more proactive. Trends around utilization, capacity, performance, and availability can identify potential problems before they become larger incidents. Overall, SolarWinds Observability gives us better awareness of the health of our environment and helps our team make faster, more informed decisions. We are now at the point of rebuilding our environment to assist us with our new community connect partners with the rollout of EPIC EMR.

What do you like best about the product?

Reporting capabilities and that shows graphs and excel reports

What do you dislike about the product?

The system is sometimes slow to load pages.

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

Network monitoring and producing reports to management

What do you like best about the product?

Most helpful: Single-pane cross-stack visibility, NetFlow + traffic analytics for capacity planning, AI-assisted root-causing

Upsides: Reduces guesswork in incident response, Supports long-term capacity planning from historical trend data

What do you dislike about the product?

Complex setup and custom configuration can be difficult

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

Supports forward planning with capacity and project planning, removes guesswork when something breaks

What do you like best about the product?

SolarWinds Observability is extremely easy to use and gives our users quick access to performance information. I’ve had many customers praise how simple it is to find what they need and to see the status of devices in SolarWinds. They often compare it to other applications used within the company and point out how difficult it can be to locate information in other monitoring tools.

With SolarWinds, they can identify issues in the environment just by looking at the dashboards. It also helps them narrow down potential solutions and quickly confirm whether an issue is resolved after applying a “fix.” We don’t use all the modules in SolarWinds Observability due to corporate directives, but I believe it would be even easier if we did.

I also love how customizable everything is for reports, dashboards, and alerts through custom properties. Overall, I would highly recommend SolarWinds Observability because I’ve seen how much it has simplified our customers’ jobs.

What do you dislike about the product?

The main issues I have with SolarWinds in our environment are around consistency and support. Many users have the ability to add devices, set up alerts, create reports, and modify dashboards, and everyone tends to do it differently. Because of that, I’ve had to build a lot of reports and widgets just to monitor what users are doing and to educate them on how they should be entering and maintaining information in our environment.

When we run into issues with SolarWinds itself, the response we get from SolarWinds often takes a long time before there’s a fix. In the meantime, I end up digging around to find a solution on my own, which pulls time away from my normal work assignments.

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

Before SolarWinds, our network team had very little visibility into the performance of our network devices. SNMP traps were sent to our previous network monitoring tool, but alerting wasn’t reliable because SNMP traps aren’t a guaranteed method of communication. Other teams that owned network appliances also lacked visibility into how their devices were performing, so they would log into each device’s GUI whenever they needed to check performance.

With SolarWinds, everyone now has a single platform to use for performance information, along with a way to determine whether devices in the environment have issues that could affect their own devices. SolarWinds also lets us provide different teams with scheduled monthly reports on their devices—something they didn’t have access to before. Overall, this gives us much better visibility into the health of our environment.

What do you like best about the product?

Unified visibility. Intuitive dashboards with hybrid systems and a good alert system which are complemented by AI in their new versions.

What do you dislike about the product?

Currently, I have not experienced any type of opportunity with the tool.

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

I have total observability of the infrastructure status, so I can resolve alerts/events that arise at the moment and prevent any negative impact on the network.

What do you like best about the product?

I use SolarWinds Observability to monitor all my infrastructure in networking, servers, and applications. I really like the audit security feature. It works well for me, and overall, this space is something I enjoy. The initial setup was so easy.

What do you dislike about the product?

I find the connection to monitoring WAN on SD-WAN services potentially problematic.

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

I use SolarWinds Observability to monitor my infrastructure, reducing issue response time and improving audit security.

What do you like best about the product?

The ability to bring together telemetry from different parts of a complex environment into a single view, making it easier to detect issues early, troubleshoot faster, and improve operational reliability. This aligns closely with CBA's broader observability strategy of standardisation, improved data quality, and faster insight into system health.

What do you dislike about the product?

My main concern is that the volume of telemetry and alerting can become overwhelming without strong standards and governance. The platform is most effective when data is consistently instrumented and managed across teams.

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

SolarWinds Observability helps solve the challenge of monitoring complex applications and infrastructure by providing centralised visibility into system health, performance, and operational telemetry. For CBA, this supports faster incident detection and resolution, improved service reliability, more consistent observability practices, and reduced operational complexity through standardised monitoring and insights

What do you like best about the product?

Accelerate digital transformation through a multi-OEM ecosystem, enabling ubiquitous network connectivity, simplified management, and enhanced digital experiences. Drive greater agility and operational efficiency while minimizing IT investment and complexity.

What do you dislike about the product?

he solution is technically sound; however, the commercial investment required for SolarWinds, when integrated into the end-to-end managed services offering comprising hardware and services, exceeds the targeted business case thresholds

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

For on-premises networking environments, SolarWinds provides comprehensive monitoring and management of network nodes through a centralized NOC (Network Operations Center). It enables remote visibility, proactive fault detection, performance monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting, helping IT teams improve operational efficiency while ensuring network availability and reliability

What do you like best about the product?

Unified observability platform for metrics, logs, traces, and alerts
Strong hybrid cloud and multi-cloud monitoring capabilities
Powerful APM and distributed tracing features
Intuitive user interface and visualization tools
Scalable SaaS architecture

What do you dislike about the product?

Costs can increase significantly in large-scale deployments
Some advanced features require additional tuning and expertise
Initial setup of custom monitoring scenarios may take time

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

SolarWinds Observability is a comprehensive cloud-native monitoring and observability platform that provides organizations with deep visibility across infrastructure, applications, networks, databases, and end-user experiences. It combines traditional monitoring capabilities with modern observability features, making it a strong choice for businesses looking to simplify IT operations and improve service reliability.

What do you like best about the product?

SolarWinds Observability is also good with monitoring multiple services and resources in one central dashboard, that allows us to act proactively instead of constantly reacting to situations.

What do you dislike about the product?

I have not used it long enough to discover serious dislikes that would be worth meantioning.

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

instead on monitoring manually all servers and services SolarWinds Observability when configured to do so, can monitor and restart those services if they go down for example.