As SolarWinds positions itself to support hybrid environments I am curious about the future of LEM? I love and am a huge advocate for LEM; however, as we move more and more into managing hybrid environments (specifically focused on Azure) I find LEM becoming more challenging to work with.
Currently as best I can tell the only deployment method for LEM is on-prem which isn't very supportive of a hybrid environment. I would like to see a LEM that I can provision in Azure and I am sure the folks that use AWS would like to see it for that as well. An option for this would be to have LEM licenses that can be applied to a LEM that has been deployed from the Azure/AWS marketplace.
Also, I don't have the ability to ingest any data from Azure as LEM is limited by the connectors that SolarWinds has created. One option may be for SolarWinds to create a connector that connects to the Azure service fabric via the API to collect such data as I have suggested in THIS feature request. Another option would be to allow clients to build their own connectors (as I have suggested with THIS feature request) and leave it to them to write code to pull the data down and then have a connector to ingest the data.
Because we need a solution for capturing Azure data it looks like a decision has been made to use Splunk. I would personally like to have LEM fill this role and not bring in another tool as I fear at some point they will want to just replace LEM with Splunk and that is a bad day for me as I really enjoy working with LEM. Having LEM be able to ingest more of the unstructured data via client created connectors seems in the critical path for the long term success of the product as it doesn't seem sustainable for SolarWinds to continue to support and grow the number of supported connectors.
I am not writing this with any expectation to have these questions answered but more to stimulate conversation around the topic of LEM in a hybrid environment going forward. I would love to hear from both Thwack community members as well as folks from SolarWinds; thanks in advance for any thoughts or feedback!