Cloud Discovery Improvements – Phase One

With the latest release of SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability (2023.1), customers will begin to see a new discovery flow when adding cloud objects to the platform. This new flow takes the existing process and refines it with new UI elements as well as additional granularity to give you greater control of what you are observing when you onboard cloud objects to the platform. This new flow also sets a better foundation for us to add support for new cloud objects and providers in subsequent releases.  

Let’s take a quick walk through the improvements! To get started you can navigate to one of two locations: 

My Dashboards -> Home -> Cloud -> Getting Started Widget -> “Monitor My Cloud Instances” 

Or 

Settings -> All Settings -> Product Specific Settings -> Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring Settings -> Add Cloud Account 

Select a provider 

The first screen is very similar to the old process. Simply select which cloud provider you would like to connect to: 

Enter your credentials 

For this walkthrough, I have selected AWS as my cloud provider, but the process will be nearly the same for Azure other than the slight differences in how the providers refer to the aspects of their credentials. 

You can either click the button that allows you to test the credentials, or you can simply click Next to move to the next screen. (The credential test will occur either way) 

Select which regions you would like to target 

One of the new additions to the discovery workflow is the ability to select specific regions you want to target. You can specify as little as one region, a select set of regions, or all regions. It is also possible to enable Gov Cloud (link to Gov Cloud KB) regions if you have resources located there.  

Monitored Resources 

Another improvement in the new flow is the ability to have more granular control over the specific resources that you want to monitor. In the old flow you were limited to monitoring all resources that were supported and visible to the provided credentials. Now you can specify which service and which instances of those service(s) you wish to onboard to the platform. You can also still simply say “Monitor All Supported Resources” and move forward. 

Review and edit  

The final step will drop you back at the Cloud Account Management page where you can see your newly created account and if needed edit the settings.  

What’s next? 

We plan on adding some additional features and refinements to this flow over the next couple of releases. The most prominent among those is an additional section that will allow you to use the tags you have configured in the cloud provider to filter what gets selected for monitoring. We will also be adding net new cloud objects such as cloud databases and load balancers. And finally, we are hoping to add support for Google Cloud in the not-too-distant future.