Target Platform: SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (Advanced / Enterprise Scale)
1. Executive Summary & Context
Enterprise, public sector, and telecom customers (such as PTCL, Nayatel, and banking/defense institutions) are rapidly shifting toward modern, microservice-based application architectures. While SolarWinds currently provides robust deep code distributed tracing and real-user transaction monitoring inside SolarWinds Observability SaaS, these critical capabilities are missing natively in SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.
Due to strict regulatory compliance, data sovereignty laws, and core national security policies, these customers cannot stream internal application code, live database queries, or end-user transaction traffic out to a public cloud SaaS tenant. Therefore, to achieve full-stack observability without violating security mandates, we urgently request SolarWinds to bring true end-to-end application transaction tracing to the Self-Hosted platform.
2. Detailed Feature Requirements Requested for Self-Hosted
We request the migration and native deployment of the following APM capabilities into the self-hosted architecture:
- Native Distributed Tracing (Code-Level Visibility):
- The ability to deploy self-hosted APM libraries/agents or ingest standard OpenTelemetry (OTel) data completely within an on-premises data center.
- Capture full, end-to-end transaction paths across multi-tiered or microservice environments (Java, .NET, Node.js, PHP, Python, Go) without requiring the "Platform Connect" bridge to the public cloud SaaS.
- Waterfall Transaction Visualizations:
- An interactive visual waterfall trace view embedded directly into the Orion/Self-Hosted Web Console showing sub-services, internal RPC calls, and messaging queue delays.
- Trace-to-Log & Trace-to-Query Correlation:
- The ability to automatically pass a local Trace ID into local application logs and tie slow transaction spans directly into on-prem database queries (SQL Server, Oracle, etc.).
- On-Premises Synthetic End-User Transaction Monitoring:
- Expanded multi-step user workflow recorders that can simulate actions like Log In -> Database Query -> Third-Party API Call with localized playback agents completely isolated from the internet.
3. Business Value & Customer Justification
- Unlocking the Secure/Regulated Market: Critical infrastructure operators (Telecoms, Finance, Gov/Defense) representing massive licensing revenue are fundamentally blocked from using the SaaS version. Providing these features in the Self-Hosted version opens up an entirely unserved tier of premium accounts.
- Tool Sprawl Elimination: Currently, self-hosted customers are forced to look at competing architectures (such as on-premises Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or open-source setups like Jaeger/Grafana) to satisfy transaction tracing requirements. Bringing this to the SolarWinds Self-Hosted console delivers a true single-pane-of-glass experience.
- Parity and Competitive Edge: Competitors are aggressively marketing their on-prem APM/Tracing variants. Securing transaction features natively inside the Self-Hosted platform cements SolarWinds as the definitive hybrid cloud champion.
4. Impact of Non-Availability
If transaction tracing remains strictly locked behind a SaaS deployment model, customers operating enclosed, high-security on-premises domains will be forced to restrict their SolarWinds deployments to basic infrastructure KPIs and look to third-party vendors for deep application and transaction performance assurance.
We kindly request that the SolarWinds Product Management team reviews this requirement for upcoming roadmap inclusion (e.g., in the next major releases of SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted). We welcome a dedicated technical roadmap discussion with your product engineering leads at your earliest convenience.
