Unlocking Cloud-Native Observability: Kubernetes and Cloud Monitoring in SolarWinds Observability SaaS

tony.johnson 3 months ago 4 minute read time

Welcome to the final blog in our series on SolarWinds^®Observability SaaS and how it helps you keep your on-premises and cloud environments up and running in tip-top shape. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud-native architectures, monitoring Kubernetes clusters and cloud services has become essential for maintaining application performance, security, and cost efficiency. In this final post, we explore how SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides deep insights into Kubernetes environments and cloud infrastructure, helping you stay ahead of performance issues and ensure operational excellence.

Comprehensive Kubernetes observability

Kubernetes introduces dynamic, ephemeral workloads that require a new approach to monitoring. SolarWinds Observability SaaS simplifies this complexity by providing real-time visibility into clusters, nodes, and workloads, ensuring you can track performance and troubleshoot issues quickly.

Let's take a closer look at some of the key capabilities.

Cluster health monitoring: Get an overview of all your clusters, including node availability, CPU and memory usage, and pod status.

Workload and pod performance: Monitor the health of deployments, replica sets, and pods, helping ensure your applications run efficiently.

Event correlation and troubleshooting: Quickly detect failing pods, image pull errors, or scheduling issues by correlating Kubernetes events with performance metrics.

Automatic service discovery: As new workloads are deployed, SolarWinds Observability SaaS automatically discovers them.

Cloud infrastructure monitoring

Managing cloud-based infrastructure requires continuous visibility into virtual machines, storage, databases, and cloud-native services. SolarWinds Observability SaaS extends its powerful monitoring capabilities to major cloud providers—Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure (Azure)—offering a unified view of your cloud resources. Monitoring for Google Cloud (GCP) is currently available on SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted and will soon be coming to SolarWinds Observability SaaS.

Multi-cloud monitoring: Get a single pane of glass view for AWS and Azure, tracking performance across regions and services.

Compute and storage insights: Monitor virtual machines (EC2 and Azure VMs), disk performance, and storage utilization.

Cloud service metrics: Gain visibility into key cloud services like AWS RDS and Azure SQL.

Bringing IT all together: Unified observability for hybrid environments

With hybrid cloud architectures becoming the norm, organizations need a seamless way to monitor on-premises infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, and cloud services. SolarWinds Observability SaaS enables:

Cross-platform visibility: Monitor cloud-native and traditional workloads side by side.

AI-driven insights: Detect anomalies and potential outages before they impact users.

Out-of-the-Box and custom dashboards: Take advantage of out-of-the-box dashboards or build tailored views for application performance.

Conclusion

Over the course of this blog series, we’ve explored how SolarWinds Observability SaaS empowers organizations to gain deep visibility into their entire network, infrastructure, and applications—from traditional on-premises environments to modern cloud-native architectures.

Whether you're running Kubernetes workloads, managing multi-cloud deployments, or maintaining a hybrid environment, SolarWinds Observability SaaS delivers the visibility you need to optimize performance, troubleshoot faster, and help ensure reliability.

In blog post #1, we focused on device coverage and network discovery, demonstrating how SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides out-of-the-box support for a wide range of network devices, enabling rapid onboarding and simplifying network monitoring.

In blog post #2, we explored service delivery assurance and troubleshooting with the NetPath feature, highlighting how end-to-end critical path analysis helps IT teams detect and resolve network connectivity issues faster.

In blog post #3, we delved into network traffic analysis and bandwidth optimization, showcasing how visibility into network flows and application traffic helps ensure optimal performance and resource allocation.

With this final post, we’ve taken the next logical step—expanding visibility into Kubernetes and cloud environments. As organizations continue their journey toward hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, having a unified observability solution is essential to ensure performance, security, and cost efficiency.

Why full-stack hybrid cloud observability matters

By consolidating network monitoring, infrastructure health, application performance, and cloud resource management into a single platform, SolarWinds Observability SaaS delivers:

End-to-end visibility: Monitor everything from network devices and SD-WAN links to Kubernetes workloads and cloud services.
Faster troubleshooting: Reduce mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) with AI-driven insights, anomaly detection, and intelligent alerting.
Simplified operations: Eliminate the complexity of managing multiple tools with a unified observability platform that automates discovery, monitoring, and reporting.
Scalability for modern IT: Whether you’re managing traditional infrastructure, migrating to the cloud, or running containerized applications, SolarWinds Observability SaaS scales with your needs.

With full-stack hybrid cloud observability, IT and DevOps teams can move beyond reactive monitoring to a proactive, predictive approach—helping ensure networks, applications, and services run smoothly in today’s dynamic digital landscape.

What’s next?
We’d love to hear your thoughts! Are you currently monitoring Kubernetes or cloud services? What challenges do you face in managing hybrid environments? Drop a comment or share your experience.