SolarWinds Observability SaaS - Q1 Highlights
We're excited to share the latest advancements in our SolarWinds® Observability SaaS platform for the first quarter of this year. Significant effort and focus have been invested into expanding our capabilities and making observability more intuitive and actionable for our customers.
Our mission remains the same: to provide full-stack visibility of your environment and enable faster troubleshooting and proactive issue resolution to help you with greater efficiency, reduced downtime, and deeper insights into your systems.
We remain committed to delivering even more powerful features in the coming months. Log in to SolarWinds Observability SaaS today to experience the latest enhancements firsthand and stay tuned for future updates.
Network, Infrastructure, and Cloud Observability (NICO)
Maintaining visibility across complex, distributed environments is more critical than ever, and this quarter, we've made substantial strides strengthening our network, infrastructure, and cloud observability capabilities.
A major enhancement this quarter is the expanded monitoring support for on-prem Storage Arrays and their associated entities, such as Storage Pools, LUNs, and NAS Volumes. Storage infrastructure plays a critical role in enterprise environments, and ensuring its performance, availability, and capacity is vital to preventing disruptions. Our new monitoring capabilities provide deep visibility into storage utilization, performance, and potential failure points in real time.
We've expanded monitoring support for key SD-WAN solutions, allowing teams to onboard SD-WAN Orchestrators and Edges for Aruba EdgeConnect, Meraki, Prisma, Fortinet, and Extreme Networks Cloud IQ directly from our SaaS platform. This enables comprehensive WAN performance insights, allowing customers to optimize network traffic and improve application reliability.
We now support Cisco ACI devices and their network fabric components, providing granular visibility into data center network performance, and fabric health to streamline troubleshooting and maintain operational efficiency.
Enhanced integrations between Cloud and Kubernetes components provide a more seamless view of hybrid environments, further strengthening our observability. We now support Azure Data Factory monitoring, providing insights into data pipeline performance and movement efficiency. Kubernetes-specific upgrades include Kubernetes Manifest Differences and Kubernetes Config Maps, enabling teams to compare configuration versions easily as well as track and manage configuration changes effectively.
Database Observability (DBO)
Efficient database performance is crucial for maintaining smooth application operations, and this quarter we've introduced key enhancements that empower customers to optimize queries and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks with ease. Our query performance analysis capabilities provide insights into query execution times, resource consumption, and inefficiencies, allowing teams to pinpoint and resolve slow queries before they impact end-user experience. By visualizing query execution plans and identifying costly operations, database administrators can fine-tune performance, reduce latencies, and optimize database workloads effectively.
Complementing this, our new AI Query Assist leverages machine learning to offer intelligent query recommendations, helping you to automatically optimize database queries. Whether suggesting index optimizations, rewriting inefficient queries, or predicting potential deadlocks, AI Query Assist empowers engineers with actionable insights, reducing troubleshooting time and improving overall database efficiency. These enhancements help ensure customers proactively address performance challenges and maintain seamless database operations, even in the most demanding environments.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
As application environments become increasingly dynamic and service-oriented, we are continually enhancing our Application Performance Management (APM) tools to provide unparalleled depth and clarity regarding application behavior.
We have launched a new Queries section that delivers comprehensive insights into the database calls made by the service. This feature presents performance metrics such as total duration, number of occurrences, average execution time, and error counts and correlates queries with their respective database instances. This enables users to achieve clearer visibility into the backend systems their services depend on, allowing for the analysis of relationships and performance characteristics of these dependencies in one centralized location. Users can explore other related entities connected to a service, offering a holistic view of service behavior and its dependencies.
We have improved the Trace Details view, which automatically assesses each request and highlights valuable context, including the root request, total number of spans, any errors encountered, and a breakdown of execution. These enhancements facilitate streamlined analysis during troubleshooting, providing immediate clarity on how requests traverse through the system. The database spans within traced requests have also been enriched with more detailed information and drill-down capabilities, empowering developers to swiftly investigate query-level issues within the context of full-stack application behavior.
To simplify the onboarding process for APM, we have implemented Auto Instrumentation for application services running on Kubernetes, utilizing a Kubernetes operator. Through Kubernetes monitoring, the auto instrumentation library provides auto-discovery of Kubernetes application services.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
Delivering a smooth and reliable user experience remains a top priority for digital teams, and we've expanded our Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) capabilities to provide deeper insights and control.
This quarter, we introduced a new Availability Dashboard that expands visibility into website entities, giving users a clear, real-time overview of service uptime and health. Real User Monitoring (RUM) data has also been split onto a dedicated dashboard, allowing teams to assess actual user interactions and performance trends independently from synthetic monitoring.
We've introduced a new concept of Outages, which identifies and categorizes failures in monitoring results. Websites and URI entities now support expanded status indicators such as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘paused’, and ‘in maintenance’, enabling more flexible reporting and visualization across dashboards.
To give teams more control over synthetic tests, we now support pausing synthetic monitoring. This allows users to temporarily suspend monitoring specific transactions as needed without deleting configurations.
The onboarding flow now includes greater flexibility to define what constitutes an outage for websites and entities, with support for availability thresholds and location-based conditions. These granular options help tailor monitoring logic to match business-critical use cases more accurately.
We’ve deployed additional probes in existing locations and introduced a new probe location in Oregon to enhance our monitoring network.
Availability Schedules have been introduced to give greater flexibility in sharing monitoring reports with internal teams and external stakeholders. Reports are embedded directly in the email body, allowing recipients to quickly grasp key performance insights.
Finally, our Public API has been extended to expose additional metrics and event attributes. Customers can easily pull richer telemetry into their custom workflows, reporting pipelines, or third-party integrations with ease.
Logs Monitoring
SolarWinds Log Observability is now dedicated to accelerating a smooth transition for our SolarWinds PaperTrailTM users. We are actively working on achieving feature parity and providing a seamless billing experience. As part of this initiative, we have introduced log group permissions, API support, and additional log source options, including port 514 support. Our goal is to effectively serve all our users, including those on the free plan, by providing a focused log-only experience, which is now also available in the APAC data center.