In today’s digital age, cloud services have become the backbone of modern business operations. As organizations increasingly rely on cloud infrastructure, effective monitoring becomes crucial to help ensure optimal performance, security, and cost-efficiency. SolarWinds® Observability Self-Hosted, formerly known as SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability, offers a comprehensive cloud monitoring solution tailored to these needs. This blog explores the benefits, fundamental principles, supported cloud services, unified access capabilities, and practical examples of using SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted for cloud monitoring.
Benefits of Cloud Services Monitoring Using SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted
- Comprehensive Visibility: With SolarWinds Observability, organizations gain a unified view of their entire cloud infrastructure, including multi-cloud and hybrid environments. This holistic visibility simplifies management and troubleshooting.
- Enhanced Performance and Reliability: SolarWinds provides real-time insights into the performance of public cloud services, helping organizations identify and resolve issues before they impact end-users. This proactive approach ensures high availability and reliability of critical applications.
- Cost Optimization: By monitoring resource utilization and identifying underused or over-provisioned resources, SolarWinds helps organizations optimize their cloud spending. This can lead to significant cost savings without compromising performance.
- Scalability: SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted is designed to scale with your business. Whether you’re monitoring a few cloud services or a vast multi-cloud environment, SolarWinds can handle the load, helping ensure consistent performance and reliability.
Fundamental Principles of Cloud Monitoring in SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted is designed with core principles that help ensure effective cloud monitoring:
- Proactive Monitoring: SolarWinds emphasizes proactive monitoring to detect and address issues before they escalate. This involves continuous monitoring of performance metrics and resource utilization.
Figure 1: An overview of an Organization’s Microsoft Azure environment.
- Unified Visibility: SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted provides a single pane of glass for monitoring cloud services from multiple providers, along with your on-premises networks and systems. This unified visibility simplifies management and enhances operational efficiency for monitoring and management of hybrid and muti-cloud IT environments.
- Centralized Monitoring: SolarWinds Observability integrates data from multiple cloud platforms and offers summary dashboards with a user-friendly high-level view, giving key at-a-glance information, along with the ability to dig into necessary details.
- Automation and Intelligence: SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted leverages automation and intelligent analytics to streamline monitoring processes. Automated alerts, anomaly detection, and predictive analytics help organizations stay ahead of potential issues.
- Scalability and Flexibility: SolarWinds offers flexible and customizable monitoring and observability options to meet the unique needs of different organizations. Users can tailor dashboards, alerts, and reports to align with their specific requirements.
Types of Cloud Services Supported by SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted consolidates extensive data from AWS and Microsoft Azure, with Google Cloud recently added, into a single solution. It supports a wide range of cloud services, with the supported cloud services categorized into four key areas – Compute, Network, Storage, and Database – helping ensure comprehensive monitoring across all critical components of cloud environments (Note: Coverage for Google Cloud currently encompasses Google Compute Engine (GCE) monitoring and is expected to increase in future releases):
- Compute: Monitor virtual machines (VMs) and cloud-based compute instances across leading providers. SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted tracks key performance metrics such as CPU usage, memory utilization, and uptime to ensure optimal workload performance and resource efficiency.
Figure 2: An overview of VMs in an AWS environment.
- Network: Gain visibility into the network infrastructure of your cloud environment. SolarWinds monitors network traffic, latency, throughput, and availability for critical components like virtual networks, load balancers, and site-to-site connections. This helps ensure smooth connectivity and rapid identification of potential bottlenecks.
Figure 3: An overview of the network activity in a cloud environment.
- Storage: Keep a close eye on various types of cloud storage resources. By providing you with insights into storage usage, read/write performance, latency, and capacity trends, SolarWinds helps you avoid overages and optimize data management strategies.
- Database: Monitor cloud-hosted databases like Microsoft Azure SQL Database and AWS RDS. SolarWinds tracks vital metrics such as query performance, connection activity, storage utilization, and replication status to ensure high availability and efficient database operations.
Figure 4: An overview of the databases monitored in a Microsoft Azure environment.
By organizing supported services into these intuitive categories, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted simplifies monitoring, making it easier for IT teams to identify and resolve issues while managing cloud resources more effectively.
Simplify the Monitoring and Management of Your Cloud Environment with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted
- Streamlined Operations: SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted simplifies cloud monitoring by providing a centralized platform for all monitoring activities. This reduces the need for multiple tools and interfaces, streamlining operations.
- Actionable Insights: With advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted delivers actionable insights that help organizations make informed decisions and drive continuous improvement.
- Reduced Downtime: Proactive monitoring and automated alerts enable quick identification and resolution of issues, minimizing downtime and helping ensure business continuity.
- Compliance and Governance: SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted helps organizations demonstrate compliance with industry regulations and internal policies with comprehensive monitoring and reporting features.
- User-Friendly Interface: SolarWinds provides an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easy for IT teams to set up, configure, and manage cloud monitoring.
SolarWinds Makes it Easy
Adding cloud service monitoring to SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted is a straightforward process. Here’s a step-by-step guide:
- Log in to SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted: Access the Observability Self-Hosted dashboard using your credentials.
- Add a New Cloud Account: Navigate to the cloud monitoring section and select the option to add a new cloud account.
- Select Cloud Provider: Choose the cloud provider you want to monitor (e.g., AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).
- Configure Credentials: Enter the necessary credentials and permissions to allow SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted to access your cloud account.
- Set Up Monitoring Parameters: Define the specific services and metrics you want to monitor. Customize thresholds and alert settings based on your requirements.
- Deploy Monitoring Agents: If required, deploy monitoring agents to collect data from your cloud services.
- Review and Save: Review the configuration settings and save the changes. SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted will start collecting and displaying monitoring data in the dashboard.
- Monitor and Analyze: Use the SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted dashboards to monitor the performance, security, and cost metrics of your cloud services. Leverage the analytics and reporting features to gain deeper insights and optimize your cloud environment.
Figure 5: SolarWinds makes it easy to select a Cloud Service Provider.
By leveraging the powerful cloud monitoring capabilities of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, organizations can ensure the performance, security, and cost-efficiency of their cloud services. Whether you’re managing a single cloud environment or a complex multi-cloud infrastructure, SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted provides the tools and insights needed to succeed in the cloud era.
Look out for additional blogs in this series, where we will go into more detail on monitoring and observability for Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure environments.
