What is AppStack?

AppStack is a new technology that brings multiple SolarWinds products together in a new innovative way. AppStack provides visibility to the different infrastructure elements that are supporting an application deployed in production, but most importantly how they are related to each other.

For instance, a typical multi-tier application will be deployed on multiple virtual machines located on one or more hypervisors and accessing one or more datastores. Each of those components uses some level of storage that can either be direct or network attached.

AppStack allows an application owner or IT operator to quickly identify the key infrastructure elements that might be impacting application delivery.

The Orion Platform

Let’s take a quick look at how SolarWinds products are architected in the first place. SolarWinds has a large portfolio of products that can be separated into two main categories. The first category contains all the products primarily focused on monitoring various parts of the IT infrastructure and run on top of the Orion Platform. The second category is composed of all the other tools that are not running on top of Orion. AppStack is related to the products belonging to the first category, such as Server & Application Monitor (SAM), Virtualization Manager (VMan), and Storage Resource Monitor (SRM).

The Orion platform provides a core set of services that are used by the various products that run on top of it. Some of the most important services exposed by the platform are alerting, reporting, security, UI framework, data acquisition, and data storage

—as shown in the following diagram:

The products that run on top of Orion are plug-ins that take advantage of those services and are sold individually.

How does AppStack work?

AppStack is not a new product by itself, but rather, it extends the capabilities of the Orion platform in various ways, allowing all the products running on top of Orion to take advantage of those new features.

One of the key enablers of AppStack is the information model that is being maintained by the Orion platform. In the background, Orion maintains a very rich representation of how the entities monitored by the various products relate to each other. This information model is maintained by the Information Service which exposes a set of APIs (SOAP and Restful) to allow easy access to this information. The information model has been a key foundation of each individual product for several years and is now being leveraged to another level by AppStack.

As the following diagram shows, the metadata model is extended and populated by the different products installed on top of Orion. By default, Orion ships with a very minimal model. Its sole purpose is to serve as the foundation of the product models. One key aspect of the model is that it does not require different products to know about each other, but still allows them to extend each other as they are purchased and installed by our users over time. For instance, Server & Application Monitor does not need to know about our Virtualization Product in order for the Application entity to be related to the Virtual Machine entity.

Having a good set of entities is a good start, but the key to success is to ensure that the relationships between those entities are also captured as part of the model. AppStack exploits the presence of those relationships in the information model to tie together the different pieces of infrastructure that support an application.

In the AppStack dashboard, every time the user clicks on one of the entities displayed, behind the scenes AppStack retrieves the list of entities that are directly or indirectly related to that selected entity and highlights them in the user-interface. This provides a very intuitive way of troubleshooting application delivery issues.

An important point to mention is that all of this happens without any prior configuration of the user.

This blog post provided you a quick overview of what AppStack is and how it works behind the scenes. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to me on twitter at @jdolisy.