Server & Application Monitor v6.7 GA – Meet the Features

The latest version of Server & Application Monitor (SAM) is now generally available. SAM v6.7 adds some very exciting and cool new features, which I will walk through in this post. If you are an existing customer, head on over to the customer portal to get the latest bits.

Outside of product releases, we’re also working on creating new or enhancing existing application template content for use in SAM. We recently published some content on THWACK, which I covered here and here.

As always, we love to hear your feedback and how you would like to see them enhanced and evolve to help us continue to make SAM a better product.

Container Monitoring:

Available in both SAM and Virtualization Manager (VMAN), we have added our first version of container monitoring for Docker, Kubernetes, and Mesos. With this enhanced visibility, SAM can now provide insight into not just your physical infrastructure, but also virtual, cloud, and now container-based workloads.

Serena wrote up a document on this, going step-by-step through the configuration and deployment process, but essentially what we are doing is deploying a monitoring container within the container environment you wish to monitor. The information we are collecting is available in both AppStack and PerfStack for real-time troubleshooting.

In a future post, we will walk through how you can use SAM application templates to monitor applications in those containers.

Orion Maps and AppMap with ADM

The Orion Maps team is on a roll coming off the initial release of Orion Maps in Q2, and this quarter they have added a bunch of new features, including support for leveraging the Application Dependency functionality added in SAM 6.6 to illustrate application or service dependencies in the maps.

Jeff Blank wrote up a very detailed and terrific document on these map enhancements here.

We think that these maps are fantastic because, first, they’re dynamic. Second, besides understanding the infrastructure relationships, the maps can help you understand which services and applications are talking to what and where.

Below is a screen grab from Jeff’s article illustrating these dependencies in an Active Directory environment.

SolarWinds APM Integration

For those who have been around SolarWinds for some time, I need you to put on your amnesia hats for a minute. I know back in the early days, SAM used to be called APM as well, but this is application performance management as defined by market analysts to give you code-level visibility into your custom applications.

SolarWinds APM is a new product we are offering. It is designed to offer a very tight integration with SAM, giving users insight into their IIS-based, .NET applications natively within the SAM web console. SolarWinds APM is a cloud-based product based on SolarWinds AppOptics. In the screenshot below, we are pulling that data in real-time from the APM cloud service via API into the SAM console with the SAM look and feel from a charting and visual perspective.

When we were first considering this product and integration, we spoke with many SAM customers about their interest in functionality like this and how this typically flowed process-wise in their environments. The overwhelming feedback from folks was that with SAM and the other Orion Platform products, they had solid visibility into the infrastructure and off-the-shelf applications, but limited visibility into custom apps. When end users would report issues about these applications, it was hard for them to determine if it truly was a problem with the application or with something else.

If you upgrade to SAM v6.7, under the Settings page in the product, there is a new UI option called APM Deployment Summary. If you are interested in trying this product out, you can sign up for a 30-day trial directly from within SAM. The integration will be set up for you with your SAM deployment. SolarWinds APM can also be leveraged standalone as well if that is your preference—the option is yours.

The team is already hard at work on the next version of SAM, as you can see covered here in the “What We are Working On” post. Also, please keep the feedback coming on what you think and what you would like to see in the product in the ideas section of the forum.