SolarWinds Platform and Products—Version 2025.2 is Now Generally Available!

jvb 1 month ago 12 minute read time

We’re excited to announce general availability for version 2025.2 of the SolarWinds® Platform, SolarWinds® Observability Self-Hosted as well as the Orion Network and Systems modules. Version 2025.2 is now available for all customers under maintenance, so log in to your customer portal to download it. Want to see everything new? Check out the Release Notes. Release training videos for 2025.2 are also live in your customer portal.

You can see some of the new features in this video:

Here is a quick list of all the major features with links to a post with more detailed information. Highlighted items are some of your favorite requests!

Observability Self-Hosted exclusives

New Multi-Cloud Summary Dashboard
GCP: VPC, persistent disks, and active VM management
Azure: ExpressRoute and Azure Application Gateway
AWS: Direct Connect and Storage S3
PoE Monitoring
ESX Interface Monitoring

Observability Self-Hosted, Network, and Infrastructure Modules

Expanded SNMP Support for Arista Switches
Intuitive Switch Visualization for VLAN, STP and MAC
Modern Dashboard for Wireless Devices
API based polling for Aruba Central Switches
Improved Cisco NCS 5500 Monitoring
Storage: HPE MSA Devices now polling through API

SolarWinds Platform (available to all products)

Recurring Maintenance Windows
HA Multi-Pool Configuration UI
My Deployment page enhancements
Modern Dashboards: Custom Property support in Global Filters
Intelligent Maps improvements
Scalability: Up to 1000 Agents per Poller
Windows Polling: gMSA support and more WinRM
Performance Improvements
Updated SSL Certificate Monitor to support Server Name Indication (SNI) and include more certificate information

Observability Self-Hosted Exclusives

New Multi-Cloud Summary Dashboard

The new Cloud Summary Dashboard is based on modern dashboard UI components and displays overview of alerts, events, counts and main statuses of cloud services across individual cloud providers, including the topology of cloud assets across all supported clouds (Azure, AWS and GCP).

Extending GCP Coverage

We're excited to announce the next phase of our Google Cloud Platform (GCP) integration enhancing support in the following ways:

Enhanced GCP discovery with support for selection from drop-down list of accounts
Manage GCE instances (stop/start, reboot, and delete)

Monitor VPC (VPC, VPN) metrics
Support for Persistent Disks (except for orphaned disks)
Support deployment of Observability Self Hosted on GCP GCE and Google SQL

Support for Azure ExpressRoute

Support for monitoring Azure ExpressRoute, the cloud service that enables users to create private, dedicated network connections between their on-premises infrastructure and Microsoft Azure data centers. Azure ExpressRoute monitoring can proactively indicate potential issues and allows customers to ensure optimal service levels, avoiding downtime and improving service availability. Monitoring of Azure ExpressRoute helps to detect anomalies such as unexpected traffic spikes, packet loss, or changes in availability.

Support for Azure Application Gateway

Application delivery services / load balancers such as Azure Application Gateway play important role in ensuring that applications are responsive, scalable, and highly available. Continuous monitoring allows to maintain optimal performance and resilience. By tracking operational and health indicators, customers can gain valuable insight into how traffic flows through their applications and how backend resources are responding.

Support for AWS Direct Connect

We are glad to introduce monitoring for AWS Direct Connect - cloud service that enables users to establish a dedicated, private network connection between their on-premises data center and AWS. Visibility into network health, redundancy, throughput, and overall link quality of AWS Direct Connect provides essential insights for maintaining a robust and resilient network. Monitoring of AWS Direct Connect allow to ensuring optimal performance and stability of the service. By keeping track of key performance indicators and system attributes, customers can identify potential issues before they escalate into service disruptions or degraded performance.

Support for AWS S3 Cloud Storage

Our cloud monitoring now includes AWS Storage S3 - highly scalable, durable, and secure object storage service that allows to store and retrieve any amount of data at anytime from anywhere on the web.

To ensure seamless operations of S3 storage, it's essential to actively monitor bucket usage and performance, allowing you to understand how much data is stored and how many objects are being managed, helping you to avoid unexpected cost overruns and maintain optimal storage configurations.

PoE Monitoring in Switches across Multi-Vendor Environments

PoE (Power over Ethernet) monitoring offers complete visibility into power consumption in switch monitoring across multi-vendor networks using public MIBs. This is available exclusively to Observability Self-Hosted customers. Key Features:

PoE Ports on Node: Detailed power status and consumption for each PoE-enabled port.

PoE Device Groups: Aggregated views of devices organized by power groups for easier analysis.
Top PoE Groups by Average Consumption: T op power-consuming groups and optimize power distribution.

ESX Interface Monitoring

Physical network interfaces on ESX hosts are now polled via vCenter API. This is available exclusively to Observability Self-Hosted customers.

Observability Self-Hosted, Network, and Infrastructure Modules

Expanded SNMP Monitoring for Arista Switches

Expanded SNMP capabilities for Arista switches, offering richer, deeper insights into Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) monitoring along with Layer 2 and Layer 3 metrics monitoring. Key capabilities include:

Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF) Monitoring: Track VRF and VRF interface status (up/down), traffic statistics, routing table integrity, resource utilization (CPU/memory), and protocol performance within each VRF instance.
Layer 2: MAC Address Table Utilization, VLAN Configuration and Usageand LLDP Topology.
Layer 3: IP Routing Capabilities, ARP features, and Routing Topology.
Hardware Health: Advanced hardware health monitoring for Arista switches.

Intuitive Switch Visualization for VLAN, STP, and MAC

New widgets deliver a smoother experience when diagnosing Layer 2 network specifics that helps significantly in reduce troubleshooting time and gain faster insights into VLAN, STP, and MAC-related network issues. Key capabilities include:

Navigate through aggregated and summarized data for VLAN configurations, Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) states, and MAC address tables.
Consolidated views of Layer 2 metrics for faster and more precise troubleshooting.

Wireless Monitoring: Modern Dashboard

The wireless monitoring experience has been redesigned with a modern, intuitive dashboard, providing clearer visibility and faster insights into wireless network operations. Key highlights include:

Overview of all Wireless LAN Controllers (WLCs) and Access Point (AP) status (Up, Down).
Comprehensive lists of Controllers, APs, and Clients.
Traffic views: Top APs by Usage, Top Clients by Usage, and Top Applications by Traffic.
Application Insights: Top Applications by Clients, Tx/Rx Bytes, and Application-Specific Traffic Patterns.

API Polling for Aruba Central Switches

API-based polling for Aruba Central switches to provide detailed metrics at both the node and interface levels.

Node-Level Metrics:

Core device details (IP Address, Device Type, Dynamic IP, Caption, System Name).
Device identifiers (SysObjectID, Vendor, Machine Type).
Health indicators (CPU memory, Load, Response Time).
IPv4 configurations, MAC addresses, and Subnet Mask information.

Interface-Level Metrics:

Detailed interface identification (Interface Name, Index, Type, Status).
Interface-specific traffic and performance data.

Cisco NCS 5500 Monitoring

Discovery for Cisco NCS 5500 series devices has been significantly improved to ensure complete and accurate network mapping across high-density, modular Cisco NCS environments. This enables discovery and monitoring of IPv6-enabled interfaces. Key enhancements include:

Broader detection and classification of physical and logical interfaces.
Improved interface attribute capture in Cisco NCS for better inventory and performance management.
Enhances device topology mapping through LLDP neighbor information.
Provides physical inventory details, including module and chassis-level attributes.

Storage Resource Manager only: Support for HPE MSA Devices – API polling

HPE has deprecated the SMI-S connection. Polling has been moved to an API. The MSA connection will also work for: Dell PowerVault ME4/ME5, Seagate Exos X, and Quantym QXS

SolarWinds Self-Hosted Platform (available to all products)

Recurring Maintenance Windows

Build recurring maintenance windows to mute or unmanage your nodes on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can still do one-shot windows manually and continue to use your scripts to define your maintenance windows. More features for Maintenance Windows are planned for future releases.

Improvements to Modern Dashboards

Custom Property support in Global Filters for Modern Dashboards

Improvements to Intelligent Maps

We continue to invest in maps to improve functionality and parity with Network Atlas.

Multiple links between entities (Network Atlas Feature Parity)
Background color now supported in text boxes. (Network Atlas Feature Parity)
Hyperlinks for lines now supported. (Network Atlas Feature Parity)
Dark Mode Supported in Maps.
Pills on connections can now be disconnected from the connection to improve map readability.

Improvements to My Deployment and HA Pool management

HA Multi-Pool Configuration UI:

Updated management of HA Pool set up wizard to make it easier manage.
Adding more than two members to a High Availability Pool is an Observability Self-Hosted Enterprise feature.

My Deployment page enhancements:

Redesigned the Server tab (former HA status and configuration page) to show all servers related to your SolarWinds deployment. It will show information for the Main Polling Engine (MPE), Additional Polling Engine(s), Standby MPE and APEs that are part of an HA pool, Additional Web Servers, and Observability Remote Collectors (ORC).
Added a new Pool tab which is where you’ll find HA Pool Management. This was rebuilt from the ground up for better visibility and insights into all of your HA pools.

Scalability: 1000 Agents per Poller

Scalability was increased, supporting up to 1000 agents per poller, handling up to 60K SAM components. For large environments, this reduces the number of pollers you need to deploy to collect from your agents. As always, depending on the load on the poller, your scalability may vary.

Windows Polling: gMSA and more WinRM

Using gMSA for credentials is now supported for most WinRM polling, including nodes, volumes, interfaces, asset inventory, hardware health, and module functionality. Check documentation for all the supported features and exceptions.

WinRM based polling was extended to IPAM and SRM functionality.

Performance Improvements

We’ve been working on improving GUI and DB speed, here are some places you should see improvements. Note that the larger the environment, the more improvement will be visible.

Pages – Perfstack, AppInsight for SQL
Widgets – Alerts, Components, Process and Services, Top XX Components
Database Maintenance – NPM, HWS, UCS
Forecasting – Volume Capacity

SSL Certificate Improvements

Updated SSL Certificate Monitor to support Server Name Indication (SNI) and include more certificate information. This will make it easier to see more data pertaining to a certificate and give you the ability to monitor certificates by Common Name (CN) or Subject Alternate Name (SAN). Supports multiple certificates that are stacked on the same IP Address.

Alerting

We’ve added new alert variables that help you understand what ‘downstream’ entities are affected during an outage. These variables will include the entity dependencies in a list format, which can include links.

${N=SwisEntity;M=NodeDependencies}
${N=SwisEntity;M=NodeDependenciesWithLinks}

Security Always

We focus on securely coding, building, and delivering software to you. SolarWinds Aims to Set New Standard in Software Development with Next-Generation Build System. Our choices 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

2025.2 is fully tested, supported and is ready to install on a new server or update your current one.

For all current Observability Self-Hosted 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 download it.
If you don’t own Observability Self-Hosted 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 2025.2 first and use the instant evaluation feature to try Observability Self-Hosted for 30 days with a click of a button. You can switch back to your modules anytime.

To see everything included in the release, check out the Release Notes.

Not Quite Ready for 2025.2?

If you aren’t ready to upgrade to 2025.2, a 2025.1.1 Service Release is available – see the 2025.1.1 Release Notes for all the details.

What’s Next?

The 2025.2 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 Self-Hosted platform and products.

—The Observability Self-Hosted Team