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.

I would not use this product for an environment that was 100% public cloud or 100% virtualized as it works best for hybrid workloads like those we are currently running. In the future, when we reach our goal of 100% public clouds for our workloads, we may rethink our usage of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability.

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.

For mid-market and larger, HCO provides a highly available single pane of glass. The user and group management provides a granular ability to deploy to the various areas of the support and engineering teams. Integration to ITSM platforms ensures that information from the platform flows in real time to the right people.

- 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.

- For small teams serving big organizations - it's a really simple tool to install and set up relatively quickly. - the new installer is also great - I don't have to understand what modules need to be installed; it's all streamlined. - The HCO Licensing allows you to run the Additional polling engines at a scale where the previous licensing model didn't. We can deploy APEs in locations now, which would not have been worth the investment in previously as there weren't enough devices in that location/region to spend the $$$$ on an APE License.

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.

For example, tracing malicious devices. 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 as well as device config backups, site maps, wifi monitoring