SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability

At this point in our plan to move 100% of workloads to the public cloud we have many hybrid applications that exist partially in the new environment and the legacy virtualized one. SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability allows us to manage these applications effectively while they continue to exist in this state before we eventually move them entirely to the public cloud.

• Helps us maintain application availability
• Helps us shorten unplanned downtime
• Provides these benefits at a fair price

Splunk Application Performance Monitoring (APM)

AppDynamics, Azure Monitor

The organization maintains a vast array of resources requiring real-time event monitoring and alerting. The requirement was to identify a product that could monitor the entire technology stack from physical hardware to applications for on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud workloads and also provide application and database performance metrics, growth patterns, and usage patterns. HCO allows us to monitor not only these basic metrics but also provides functionality that goes beyond our initial requirement. Some examples are the ability to monitor the state and health of Active Directory, Exchange, and Sharepoint. Other extended capabilities that we are utilizing are the Application and Database performance analysis and Office365 and Azure workloads.

• Vast array of native monitoring templates.
• SAML capability.
• Holistic environment and dependency monitoring out of the box.

• Provided the opportunity to offboard a number of monitoring tools that are no longer required.

PRTG Network Monitor

Windows Server, Microsoft 365

- It's used for day-to-day alerting on our infrastructure so that relevant teams can take action items before becoming a problem. - Its main use is for infrastructure monitoring, server and network equipment & is used lightly with some application monitoring. - The Long term goal is to make more use of the product, as we have a number of modules that are currently not being taken advantage of.

• Server / Network Monitoring.
• Alerting + Basic Reporting.

• In a crowded market, it's getting less and less easy to say Solarwinds is considerably better value for what you get compared to other industry leaders.
• The release of the new Observability product is pricing itself in line with products like Datadog and Dynatrace but these are typically tools users are getting away from due to the cost. The advantage of SW was it was always the best value for your $$.

Datadog, Dynatrace, Micro Focus SiteScope and AppDynamics

Datadog, Micro Focus SiteScope, OpsRamp

Having all modules under one license makes

licensing renewals easier. We were running several instances of Orion, across multiple

sites and authorities, this made overall management of the platform complicated.

In addition, we required multiple additional web pollers.

Using the conventional licensing system meant budgets and POs needed to be

arranged when a new poller was required.

Observability licensing addresses these issues and gave a

lot more functionality, as observability has a complete suite of modules, for

example, unlimited APEs and web Pollers (node count permitting) NetFlow, device tracker,

Ipam…etc. The observability platform gives us a complete holistic view

of the network and devices,

With the use of additional polling engines is required, we

can use all the modules to help troubleshoot, for example,

If we had a device with a malicious event/log detected by our

security team, we can use device tracker to locate the device and shut the switch

port, we can also use NetFlow to identify what traffic an src and DST IP

addresses. Another example is how useful Ipam is, when static ranges

and DHCP are added to Ipam, this will detect scope usage and duplicate IP

addresses.

• Ipam
• APEs
• device Tracker
• NCM
• SAM

• one license requiring 1 PO to be raised
• sharing costs between departments for monitoring under one platform using APEs

Cisco Catalyst 9800 Series Wireless Controllers, Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI), CheckPoint