Cloud

Review: Simplify With SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability

This easy-to-understand platform fully tracks and optimizes elements within complex environments.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

Many state governments are in various phases of digital transformation projects, with some legacy applications served by on-premises equipment while others move to hybrid clouds. And, it’s entirely possible that a single state or local government, especially one with a more federated IT environment, might even employ multiple cloud providers and different cloud types.

All of that freedom is great for getting the best deals on infrastructure, but it can make for a very complex computing environment consisting of different types of clouds, assets and dependencies. The SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability platform is designed to map it all out — displaying it visually so that IT staffers can easily understand how their entire enterprise network is performing — and to optimize connections by troubleshooting problems or bottlenecks.

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What Makes SolarWinds Complex, Yet Simple?

For such a feature-rich platform, SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is surprisingly easy to use. Right from the start, the platform is able to find both on-premises and cloud-based assets such as servers and databases, mapping their interdependence with very little user configuration needed.

Once that initial process completes, the SolarWinds platform displays an easy-to-understand visual interface that turns raw network data into a colorful command center. At a glance, the dashboard makes it easy to see how a network is performing in real time.

For example, the interface will show how many users are currently connected and interacting with every asset a state government owns, how many assets have completed recent backups, the total uptime percentages for the network and how individual assets are performing. It can even track how many performance issues have been reported or highlight which have not yet been fixed or addressed by the IT staff.

SolarWinds Creates a Rich And Knowledgeable Experience

But SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability is much more than just a pretty interface. For one, it’s possible to drill deep into network operations to monitor the performance of individual assets. Armed with such a wealth of details, knowledgeable IT teams can get to work optimizing the performance of assets and networks both — and the SolarWinds platform can even help out with that.

By incorporating powerful artificial intelligence that evaluates performance alone and in relation to historical trends, the SolarWinds platform can generate an alert and provide suggested remediation options if something seems amiss. This ensures that the enterprise it’s monitoring runs as smoothly and efficiently as possible, even as new assets are brought online.

SPECIFICATIONS

PRODUCT TYPE: Cloud and enterprise asset observability platform
SUPPORTED ASSETS: Onsite and cloud servers, applications, physical or virtual hosts, databases, virtualized devices, networks, network paths and SD-WANs
VIRTUALIZATION: Realtime performance dashboards alongside historical asset tracking
USER INTERFACE: Top-level performance stats at a glance with the ability to drill down
LICENSE: Annual per node for unlimited expandability options

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SolarWinds Addresses Both the Big and Small Issues

When an administrator really looks at what the SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability platform can do — tracking and helping to visualize entire enterprise computing networks, assets and dependencies, plus diagnosing and fixing problems — it’s really amazing that it’s so easy to use. To test its functionality with diagnosing and fixing both glaring network and asset problems and more furtive ones, I loaded it up in our enterprise test network.

SolarWinds offers both a free trial of its platform and an interactive demo. The free trial is fully functional for 30 days if IT teams want to see how well it might work in their unique environment.

For this evaluation, I used a test network with both hybrid cloud-based and on-premises assets. Several customer service applications from previous StateTech reviews were also employed, as well as a few back-end databases and a hodgepodge of networking hardware and software.

The test network was nowhere near as big as what even a local government might employ, so almost instantly the SolarWinds platform was able to discover and map out everything. It was so fast, with very little user intervention needed, that it should not take too much longer in a more complex deployment.

The dashboard clearly displayed all computing assets, networking hardware, applications and hosts in use, as well as the dependencies among them. For the first test, I deliberately added a misconfiguration to a router used to connect a database with an application.

The SolarWinds platform identified the problem almost instantly, noting the increased time it was taking data to travel along that network path. It even helped to diagnose the problem, describing in general what was wrong with the equipment I had sabotaged for the test.

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Because another path was available, the platform suggested rerouting network traffic until the issue could be fixed. I did that, and when I later removed the error, the SolarWinds platform informed me that I could use that original path again to save a few milliseconds on each packet transferred.

I injected several other errors into our test network’s workflows, and the SolarWinds platform was able to identify and track them each time, going so far as to suggest fixes or workarounds to keep the data flowing.

Beyond real-time tracking of computing assets, the SolarWinds platform also quickly configured the front-end dashboard with the information I thought would be the most useful. IT teams should be able to easily build out their dashboards around their most critical applications so they can see at a glance how those systems are performing.

The platform will track every asset as well as any problems that crop up, but putting the most critical items up front on the dashboard can be helpful and maybe add some peace of mind for overworked IT staffers.

The SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability platform was so easy to use that even more junior IT professionals could employ it to troubleshoot most problems. Meanwhile, more advanced technicians could drill down to fine-tune more precise optimizations or use it to conduct threat hunting.

Given the complexity of the average state and local government computing network these days — especially as agencies work on massive digital transformation projects — a powerful but easy-to-use tool like the SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability platform could quickly become an invaluable asset that helps keep everything running smoothly at all times.