Building Blocks for the Future

More data != more insights

More data isn’t always better. A point of view that may seem out of place from a company where collecting metrics is a major component of the value we deliver, but hear me out. We (as technologists, as problem solvers, as humans striving for improvement) are deeply ensconced in a “death by data” quagmire, and the more we struggle, the harder it is to get out.

Look down at your wrist. Are you wearing a “smart” watch? Do you use a “smart” phone? Somewhere, some clever marketer decided to tell us that more information == smart. A little device on our wrist can tell us our heart rate, pulse ox, and step count in addition to the time. Tracking the numbers may help us feel like it’s impacting our health, but is the data really helping us understand what’s going on? Does it know about the indulgences or challenges potentially impacting our health? Can it alert us if something is off-kilter, or is it up to us to keep an eye on the numbers? And does it understand when something is off for us that might be considered normal for someone else? Is it the right data to begin with?

At SolarWinds, we do believe you can gain better visibility with more metrics, and having a more complete view of your environment can help you solve problems faster. This is why we’ve spent the past 20 years building products on or integrating into the Orion^® Platform to help you build a more complete picture of your environment. But it’s also necessary to be able to filter through the noise and view the metrics in context with each other and within each environment. That was the driving force behind features like SolarWinds^® PerfStack^™, AppStack^™, NetPath^™, and Intelligent Maps…all designed to make sense of the data and help you to understand the WHY behind how your environment is behaving.

From What to Why

Digital transformation is accelerating, and the technology landscape is becoming more complex and distributed than ever. The data is important, but it’s merely a building block into something better, faster, smarter. The time has come to take the next step, beyond features to a complete platform designed around enriching monitoring data by delivering true, full-stack Observability for hybrid IT and cloud environments.

It’s time to complete the shift from reactive to proactive. From what to why. To enrich the monitoring data we gather from across disparate data types and deliver actionable insights to solve complex business problems. It’s time to expand beyond features to a full dynamic platform based on automation, observation, visibility, and proactivity and build on our commitment to simplified IT.

Meeting You Where You Are

To deliver this, our product and engineering teams have been busy behind the scenes developing our new Observability platforms, designed to meet you wherever you are now, and stay with you wherever you plan to be in the future. We’re preserving all the features and functionality you know and love from the Orion Platform, with greater efficiencies and more security. We’re simplifying the licensing, streamlining quoting, and expanding the reach, so you can cover more of your environment more easily, while simultaneously delivering business insights, so you can solve problems easily, quickly, and at scale.

This new SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability solution is available now to current Orion Platform customers who choose to upgrade and convert and is planned for general availability later this year. Hybrid Cloud Observability maintains the flexible deployment options from the Orion Platform and can be deployed in private or public (self-hosted) cloud, hybrid deployment, or fully on-premises.

Connected in the Cloud

We’ve also heard some of you say you need to be more cloud-forward. Your environments are evolving, and as you respond to a changing IT landscape, you must update your approach to your organization’s services. To support you on your journey, we’re also developing our SolarWinds-as-a-Service platform ecosystem, which we’re building from the ground up on the latest and greatest technologies to be cloud-native, available through hyperscalers. For customers who are making the transition from on-premises to cloud, or who need to maintain a hybrid model to support their business, we plan to offer functionality for you to use the Hybrid Cloud Observability and SolarWinds-as-a-Service solutions to best match your needs and still see a single, summarized view in the cloud. You can also push data from Hybrid Cloud Observability or SolarWinds Orion Platform modules into the SolarWinds-as-a-Service cloud to fully mix and match data from all your products for truly comprehensive observability across your entire environment.

Built-in Intelligence

It’s great to understand why something is happening, but the question that commonly follows is, “What are you going to do about it?” Our new Observability platforms are designed to help you visualize, observe, remediate, and automate your environment. Built-in intelligence will help you automatically identify and resolve common IT issues, such as detecting anomalies to identify abnormal conditions, correlating events to assist with root cause analysis, and delivering predictions to assist in capacity planning, optimization, and automating routine tasks. We believe this will help you to ensure service levels, accelerate issue resolution, and reduce alert fatigue, so you can gain the productivity and agility you need to accelerate your digital transformation journey. From here, we intend to continue delivering more automation and actionable insights and plan to add an integrated machine learning platform service designed to enhance our current AIOps and extend across Hybrid Cloud Observability and SolarWinds-as-a-Service.

What It Means For You

If you have questions about what this means for you or want to hear more, please reach out. In the meantime, check out this short video to hear directly from my fellow Solarians about why we’re excited about this new chapter, and see some sneak peeks into the new SolarWinds-as-a-Service platform. Then, if you want to hear more about our vision, check out the THWACKcamp^™ keynote from our chief product officer, Rohini Kasturi, From Monitoring to Observability – Any Size, Anywhere.