We’re excited to announce a new release candidate for the SolarWinds^® Platform, SolarWinds® Hybrid Cloud Observability, and the Network and Systems modules. Version 2023.4 is now available for all customers under maintenance, so log in to your customer portal to download it. Release candidates are fully tested and supported versions designed to update your current environment. Want to see everything new? Check out the release notes.

Greater visibility for simplified SD-WAN monitoring

This release includes information about SD-WAN tunnels and WAN attributes like Service provider, packet loss, latency, and jitter.

 Real-time visibility into SD-WAN network and tunnel performance metrics is included to assist network administrators in accelerating troubleshooting and implementing preventative measures.

Benefits of included Packet Loss, jitter and latency Metrics—

• The Packet loss helps to determine which tunnels have experienced the highest percentage of dropped packets.
• The jitter helps to determine which tunnels experienced the most jitter— jitter can be caused by congestion across the LAN, firewall routers, access link bottlenecks, load sharing, route flapping, routing table updates and timing drifts.
• The latency helps to determine which tunnels have experienced the highest transmission delay, generally as a result of congestion.
• Service Provider in conjunction with Packet Loss, jitter and latency Metrics helps to implement preventative measures. 

AIOPS

Anomaly-Based Alerts (Hybrid Cloud Observability Advanced only)

Anomaly Based Alerts now includes a new visual representation of the normal operating range (NOR) of a device’s metrics. The entity detail page contains NOR chart for every observed metric present for the entity of Anomaly-Based Alert. 

Anomaly-based alerts now supports virtualization entities. See the list of supported entities with their metrics below:

• Orion.VIM.ClusterStatistics:
  •  AvgCPULoad
  •  AvgMemoryUsage 

• Orion.VIM.HostStatistics:
  •  AvgCpuLoad
  •  AvgMemUsage
  •  AvgNetworkUtilization  
    
    
• Orion.VIM.VMStatistics:
  •  AvgCPULoad
  •  AvgIOPSRead
  •  AvgIOPSTotal
  •  AvgIOPSWrite
  •  AvgMemoryUsage
  •  AvgNetworkUsageRate 

AlertStack^™

AlertStack is now present under “Alerts and Activities” menu.

The AlertStack cluster detail page now supports filtering of occurrences together with map. Occurrences can be filtered based on the Status and Element Type. Accordingly, the map nodes reflect this filtering as well.

AlertStack now supports creation of incidents in SolarWinds® Service Desk (SSD) for AlertStack clusters. This action can be done for clusters in open or suspended state only. 

New Functionality in Intelligent Maps

As part of our continued efforts to improve intelligent maps we are delighted to announce the introduction of these much-anticipated features.

• It is now possible to edit other users' maps.
• We have created a new widget to show all maps for a given node allowing you to see which maps the node is used on making it easier to identify relevant maps.
• Maps can now be filtered based upon entities within the maps making it easier to find relevant maps when troubleshooting an issue.
• There is now a maps widget for Modern Dashboards. The 1^st new widget for modern dashboards since its introduction, it is now possible to display Intelligent Maps within a modern dashboard.

Vulnerability and Risk Dashboard

In this release, as part of Security Observability, we are introducing a new dashboard page that enables customers to identify risks in their environment based on vulnerabilities. The vulnerability information is available for Cisco, Juniper, Windows and Linux devices.

This feature gives customers a new view to identify risks and vulnerabilities within their infrastructure. This will assist them in prioritizing and reducing risk in important assets by enabling them to comprehend the severity of the risk. Risk-based prioritization is the benchmark for managing mounting cyber threats and remediating the most significant risks.

In this release, the risk score is calculated based on vulnerabilities (CVE scores) for each node, and the infrastructure risk score is calculated by aggregating all the individual node scores. We also have filtering/search capability to view the vulnerability information by OS, severity, CVEs or node names.

SRM – Maintain history when migrating NetApp devices to new API

You can now maintain your data history when you change polling methods for NetApp arrays to take advantage of the new AIQUM API.

Security Always

We focus on securely coding, building, and delivering software to you, as we shared in our blog post, SolarWinds Aims to Set New Standard in Software Development With Next-Generation Build System. The choices we made in forging the SolarWinds Platform align with our Secure by Design philosophy, enhancing our ability to execute this vision now and in the future.

How to Download

The 2023.4 release candidate is fully tested and supported and is ready for you to install on a new server or update your current one.

• For all current Hybrid Cloud Observability customers, the release is available now. You can log in to your customer portal and download it.
• For all current module and bundle customers, the release is available now. You can log in to your customer portal and check to see if it’s available for download.
• If you don’t own Hybrid Cloud Observability but would like to try it or one of its new features, there are a couple of options for you:
  • Download a 30-day free trial and install it on a new server.
  • If you’re a current module or bundle customer, upgrade to 2023.3 first and use the new instant evaluation feature to try Hybrid Cloud Observability for 30 days with the a click of a button. And don’t worry; you can switch back to your modules anytime.

What’s Next?

The 2023.4 release of the platform and products is another step forward, but there is always more to do. Check out our What We’re Working On post for what’s coming next for the SolarWinds® Platform and products.

—The Hybrid Cloud Observability Team