SolarWinds Updates Server, Application Monitoring Platform

Information technology management software specialist SolarWinds announced a series of major updates to the company’s Server & Application Monitor (SAM) platform, designed to improve IT professionals’ monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities for Linux environments.

The platform features out-of-the-box monitoring templates for more than 200 enterprise applications with access to hundreds more through the company’s THWACK user community and the ability to monitor custom or homegrown applications by defining custom metrics or modifying existing templates.

Users can also isolate root causes of issues by visualizing application relationships with underlying infrastructure layers and monitor server hardware health, perform capacity forecasting and manage asset inventory, according to the company.

Other features include the ability to remediate server issues remotely with built-in troubleshooting tools and integration with the SolarWinds Orion platform.

This integration allows server and application performance data to be incorporated with data from the company’s Storage Resource Monitor (SRM), Virtualization Manager and DPA into the platform’s AppStack environment view, the company noted.

Additional new capabilities include next-generation high availability to simplify deploying SAM and other Orion platform-based products in a redundant configuration for critical workloads.

The platform also can monitor Linux processes in real time and identify which are consuming the most CPU/memory and start/stop processes remotely.

Other features include faster discovery of servers and applications through directory services and additional visibility into network interface metrics, such as bandwidth throughput, packet and error counts, according to the company.

Rounding out the package are a Web-based SSH client for remote console management of Linux servers directly from the Orion platform interface and automatic identification of Linux distributions, which simplifies the configuration of distribution-specific monitoring templates.

When all the products are used together, database performance data is integrated into the Orion platform’s AppStack environment view, according to the company. This enables IT departments to be alerted when a database operation deviates from a historic baseline and informed of the potential impact to specific applications supported by the database.

The correlation of database and other systems data can also lead to faster identification of the root cause of the slowdown.

According to a recent CDN survey, 71 percent of respondents indicated their current application performance management tools provide hints, but rarely identify the root of problems, and more than three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents indicate manual gathering and analysis of log data frequently is necessary to diagnose the issue.

The vast majority of respondents (84 percent) reported investing in database monitoring tools, with a majority reporting that they rely on DBAs to perform performance monitoring.