Today’s observability movement pits newbies fresh out of a few consulting gigs against established performance players with the “burden” of long-time customers. Established performance players have revenue, but they surf choppy waters.
The long-time performance players come to the fray with strong roots in tooling for applications, web monitoring and so on.
They continue to update their offerings in pursuit of observability. The observability software space is heavy on the metrics that can derive from log monitoring and, increasingly, full-out to include cloud native development, shift-left security, and multicloud support. This keeps vendors busy.
SolarWinds is among the performance incumbents that have embraced logs and gone cloud native. The company is building toward observability from foundations in mostly mid-market network performance and management products and services.
The company boosted its log analytics efforts markedly in 2018, with its acquisition of Loggly, which it has continued to field as an independent entity, even as it has integrated Loggly capabilities into its SolarWinds Observability platform.
Bridging the cloud gap
We spoke recently with Jeff Stewart, vice president for product management at SolarWinds. Under discussion were recent updates to SolarWinds Observability, originally released in 2023 to cloud-native and on-premises observability offerings.
The moves build on the 2022 release of SolarWinds Observability, which takes on application, infrastructure, database, network, log, and user experience observability, in the form of a SaaS platform.
Recent updates include query-oriented database monitoring enhancements, as well as improvements to visual explainer plan software.
The company is building out to the cloud at the same time that some users are reacting to rising cloud costs by more carefully picking what will be cloud bound. They will also judge what will be most closely monitored.
Said Stewart:
Customers are in different camps on their journey to the cloud, and migration of cloud workloads from on-premises to clouds like Azure or AWS. We’ve seen customers that have gone full steam to the cloud, only to figure out that maybe it wasn’t the best idea to move all of their workloads, and that they should have been more selective based on security needs, budget needs or even performance needs, depending on where the application sits. And then there are people that have been very successful with their migration to the cloud. For existing customers that need visibility into different clouds, whether Azure or AWS, we’ve added capabilities in our hybrid cloud observability offering to support them on that journey. But we’ve also enabled them, as they make a decision to go more into the cloud to instantaneously start to send their data up to our SaaS offering.
What has appeared is a visibility gap on networks and security as users enter the realm of multicloud, according to Stewart, who touts Solar Wind’s lineage in network monitoring here. He said:
When applications or workloads are deployed across multicloud, we see some configurations where a part of the application is talking to another part of the application in a different cloud, which becomes very cost prohibitive. So, providing visibility into how traffic is traversing multicloud environments, as well as traffic that’s going from on-premises to the cloud, is a visibility gap that we see and are working to address with our offerings.
Database visibility
Clearly, visibility of database performance is no longer an isolated, on-premises event. And the database query in the multicloud space can introduce new complexity. The runaway query, which was a feature of early client-server’s darkside, is taking on a new tenor as hybrid and multicloud use grows wider.
Stewart said Solar Winds’ background in database performance positions it to deal with the new distributed computing paradigm. That’s where a variety of databases are in place, with locations that can span the globe.
Now, even high-level executives can view this activity, as observability metrics are rolled up. In e-commerce on-line selling, where efficient customer facing applications directly translate into revenue, they find query issues particularly telling.
My Take
Despite clear interest in observability tooling, the complex demands for monitoring modern systems challenge vendors and users alike.
Deeper and wider hybrid cloud environments can cause costs to rapidly escalate, requiring that IT users carefully pick and choose what they monitor.
Like others in the market, SolarWinds faces the challenge of keeping best-of-breed tools fresh for compartmentalized networking and database users, while building out an ever-broader platform of capabilities intended to run across broad multiclouds. – Jack Vaughan