What’s Next for Cloud Support in Hybrid Cloud Observability?

We know almost all our customers are branching out into the cloud in one form or another, and we want to ensure we provide the tools you need for your environment and situation. The journey into the cloud can be a long one, and we want to meet you wherever you are in this journey and partner with you for the duration. With our recent transformation of the Orion® Platform and launch of SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability, many customers have asked for an update on our general direction in observability in relation to cloud providers and the products they provide to customers. Hopefully, this blog will shed some light on our ideas and general direction for cloud monitoring over the next several releases of Hybrid Cloud Observability. 

Improved wizard for connecting to the cloud and selecting resources to monitor 

Those who’ve used the legacy Orion Platform modules for any length of time are likely aware there are already some cloud monitoring capabilities in the platform. However, the process of entering your credentials and selecting objects to monitor in the cloud has been relatively basic and has lacked many of the fine-grain controls customers are seeking. One of the first new things you’ll see in Hybrid Cloud Observability related to the cloud is a visually revamped and functionally improved cloud onboarding wizard. 

Two things our customers consistently told us the existing wizard lacked was the ability to focus on specific regions and the ability to filter what’s monitored based on the tags assigned to the objects. We’ll add support for these two items and the ability to specifically choose individual objects for monitoring. The existing wizard lacks these controls and simply pulls back everything the associated credentials can access, which has been frustrating and has led to clutter in the monitoring interface when non-critical objects are added to the monitoring views. With the new workflow it will now be possible to say, “I only want VMs from the US-East region that are tagged with ‘Production.’”  

Increased breadth and depth of monitoring and analysis of cloud objects  

We’ll also focus on much-improved depth and breadth in monitoring. What this means is we’ll add many new objects to be recognized and onboarded automatically to Hybrid Cloud Observability. In the current platform, you can monitor VM instances, attached volumes, site-to-site connections, vNets, and DNS zones. We look to increase this list greatly to include the most common and popular objects provided by each of the cloud providers. Below is a table of some of the more heavily requested cloud objects we’re prioritizing for inclusion in Hybrid Cloud Observability: 

Though the table above isn’t a comprehensive view of everything we intend to support, hopefully, it shows we’re focused on many different areas of cloud technology. The added breadth will make it possible to deeply analyze more objects with all the great platform tools you know (AppStack, PerfStack, maps, alerting, reporting, etc.) and some of the exciting new tools we’re adding to the platform, like AIOps and anomaly detection. 

Adding a new provider to the mix 

We also plan to add a new cloud provider to the mix: Google Cloud Platform (GCP). One of the most consistent customer requests related to cloud is native support for GCP and the objects available there. It’s our intention to introduce this support and quickly ramp up feature parity to what’s already available for objects in AWS and Azure.  

Connecting on-premise monitoring with SaaS-based monitoring  

Together with all the great new additions above, we’re also working on an exciting new feature designed to help you to begin the transition from fully on-premises monitoring to a future including software as a service (SaaS)-based monitoring. Whether you intend to move to a fully SaaS-based approach or remain firmly ensconced in a hybrid model, Cloud-Connected Infrastructure will pave the way.  

In closing… 

I hope this provides some insight into what we’re thinking about and what’s coming soon for Hybrid Cloud Observability. We’re always listening for feedback about our products, and this is no exception. Please reach out or comment below if you have any questions or ideas about how we can further improve what we’re working on. Thanks!