UPDATED 17:29 EDT / MARCH 16 2017

CLOUD

SolarWinds updates tools to simplify multi-cloud complexity

SolarWinds Inc. is buffing up its hybrid information technology management portfolio with updates announced Wednesday to several flagship products as well as its Orion unified monitoring platform.

The company said the new features will help IT organizations better pinpoint performance and availability issues in complex hybrid cloud environments by enabling multi-cloud visibility along with on-premises monitoring and a new, drag-and-drop visualization dashboard.

The company, which grew rapidly through acquisition prior to being taken private in a leveraged buyout last year, is betting that hybrid cloud is here to stay. That position is backed up a research report it released last year that found that 60 percent of IT professionals believe it’s unlikely that all of their organizations’ infrastructure will ever be migrated to the cloud.

That fact is creating a growing number of integration issues as organizations struggle to combine multiple internal and external services. Chief among them is performance problems that become difficult to pinpoint when multiple service providers and handoffs are at work.

Companies “need a way to correlate that data so they can break down the walls between functional roles, service providers and cloud vendors, eliminate finger-pointing and solve hybrid performance problems faster,” Christoph Pfister, executive vice president of products at SolarWinds, said in a prepared statement.

One pane of glass

The company’s Orion platform enables unified monitoring and management of cloud, on-premises and hybrid IT services through functions such as server, application, network and database monitoring. New enhancements provide for cloud infrastructure monitoring from within the SolarWinds Server & Applications Monitoring module. Orion now plugs in to Amazon Web Services instances and volumes via the Amazon CloudWatch API, providing more visibility into cloud applications and infrastructure.

The Database Performance Analyzer has also been enhanced with support for Microsoft Azure SQL and AWS Aurora relational databases. This enables database administrators and developers to tune cloud database performance and reduce infrastructure requirements, the company said.

Network management has been improved with support for Cisco Systems Inc.’s Meraki wireless access points. These can now be fully cloud-managed, enabling network engineers to fine-tune network behaviors rather than individual network components, the company said. A single SolarWinds platform can be used to monitor both local and cloud-managed wireless access points. Enhanced network path monitoring provides visibility into network performance and path analysis with a single-page view of devices, applications, networks and vendors that tracks every network hop and provides a time-based view of latency.

SolarWinds also announced the general availability of PerfStack (pictured), a dashboard that enables IT administrators to selectively drag and drop real-time and historical metrics from Orion-based products into a single, customizable and shareable chart to visualize the relationship between suspect elements. PerfStack is included in the latest versions of the company’s Network Performance Monitor, Server & Application Monitor, NetFlow Traffic Analyzer, SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, Storage Resource Monitor and Web Performance Monitor tools.

Pricing of individual components ranges from $1,875 to $2,995. The company publishes a full pricing schedule here.

Image: SolarWinds

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