SolarWinds Closes the Market’s Hybrid IT Observability Gap, Accelerating Transformations for Customers

SolarWinds (NYSE:SWI), a leading provider of simple, powerful, secure observability and IT management software, has announced the launch of the next generation of SolarWinds® Observability, now available in self-hosted or SaaS options.

Building on its over 25 years of leadership in network and infrastructure monitoring, the company has expanded its network, infrastructure, and cloud observability capabilities, offering customers exceptional value and uncompromising flexibility in deployment. These enhancements include broader on-premises infrastructure monitoring, expanded cloud infrastructure observability, and enhanced artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities. 

“This next generation of SolarWinds Observability closes the hybrid visibility gaps we’ve heard voiced by IT practitioners and leaders around the world,” said Cullen Childress, SVP of Product at SolarWinds. “They’ve told us they’re struggling to find a solution that provides the level of visibility they need over both their on-premises and cloud-native ecosystems. SolarWinds is ending their struggle today.”

According to research conducted by GigaOm®, complex, distributed hybrid IT environments present visibility and management challenges for most organizations today. In fact, 85% of those surveyed say application complexity and volume are operational challenges — and 67% say it’s the primary challenge in running legacy or virtualized applications on physical infrastructure. Flexera® recently found that 73% of organizations utilize a hybrid cloud architecture, and Gartner® says 50% of critical enterprise applications will reside outside of centralized public cloud locations through 2027. The hard truth is that our IT reality remains a hybrid one.

Unfortunately, most existing monitoring and observability solutions in the market focus on on-premises or cloud deployments, forcing IT organizations to prioritize one over the other. This creates a hybrid IT observability gap for the vast majority of organizations still managing hybrid architectures. SolarWinds Observability gives customers the choice of what to monitor and observe and how to do it in a way that best fits their needs. SolarWinds offers what every observability vendor should: a solution that provides expansive visibility and AI-driven insights, helping customers manage modern IT environments efficiently, enhance performance, ensure flexible deployment, and optimize IT costs and resources.

“We believe customers should decide how they monitor and manage their hybrid IT infrastructures — not vendors dictating their choices,” said Krishna Sai, SVP of Technology and Engineering at SolarWinds. “SolarWinds meets customers where they are in their hybrid IT journey so they can explore and adopt our offerings and modernize and move to the cloud confidently and at their own pace.”

SolarWinds continuously engages with its customers, its THWACK® online user community, and the broader IT industry to understand the challenges of managing hybrid IT environments. These insights directly informed the product enhancements and roadmap.

“With SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, customers can observe their on-premises and cloud workloads from a single pane of glass. Similarly, with SolarWinds Observability SaaS, they can observe their cloud-native workloads and still observe their on-premises infrastructure,” Childress said. “So, no matter where they are today — or where they’re headed next — they have the precision they need in whatever way works best for them.”

“SolarWinds provides you with the deepest and most comprehensive hybrid visibility possible from ground to cloud and everywhere in between.”

New and expanded capabilities for SolarWinds Observability SaaS and Self-Hosted include:

  • Broader on-premises infrastructure monitoring: Monitor critical server components, such as bandwidth, availability, and response time, which can negatively affect server performance. SolarWinds Observability can now also identify when server resources reach warning and critical thresholds through relevant metrics.
  • Expanded cloud infrastructure observability[1]: Significant expansion of AWS, Azure, and Kubernetes observability capabilities, which enables out-of-the-box cloud services and containerized infrastructure monitoring.
  • More comprehensive network performance, traffic flow, and path analysis: Scan, discover, and map devices and applications to gain performance metrics, including latency, jitter, and throughput, that help to detect and remediate issues early.
  • Coverage for more devices and significantly increased scale[2]: Support for more SD-WAN solutions, including Fortinet, Meraki, Viptela, VeloCloud, Prisma, and Aruba Silver Peak, as well as next-generation wireless infrastructure. Expanded device support for the Vulnerability and Risk Dashboard. Increased poller capacity can reduce the infrastructure costs of your pollers by up to a third — meaning a lower total cost of ownership without sacrificing anything.
  • Built-in intelligence and AI/ML capabilities: Enhancements to smart, anomaly-based alerts and AlertStack™ reduce alert fatigue and accelerate incident management. Customers who opt into IT Service Management (ITSM) can leverage AI-assisted ITSM capabilities, enabling more proactive troubleshooting, problem identification, and remediation, meaning even faster mean time to detect (MTTD) and resolve (MTTR). Based on internal analysis, 60% of SolarWinds ITSM customers who enabled our GenAI features achieved a 30% year-over-year improvement in MTTR[3].
  • Enhanced SolarWinds Platform Connect: Eliminates the need for a disruptive rip-and-replace migration, offering greater flexibility and control over their observability journey. Customers can start with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted and then try and adopt the SaaS solution with just a few simple clicks. SolarWinds future-proofs your investments today.

SolarWinds customers are seeing significant results from these solutions: L&F Distributors, a wholesaler for Anheuser-Busch brands and 164 craft breweries, wineries, distilleries, and non-alcoholic beverage suppliers, has reduced issue resolution time by 60-80%. Silverback Systems, a developer of intelligent ordering, procurement, and supply chain software solutions, has eliminated 75% of IT issues with SolarWinds by gaining visibility into their infrastructure, consolidating their tools, and successfully monitoring and managing their network and server configurations.

SolarWinds Universal Database License

SolarWinds also announced a new combined license for its two Database Observability self-hosted products, Database Performance Analyzer and SQL Sentry®. Whether customers need the broad coverage of DPA for a variety of database types like MySQL®, Oracle®, PostgreSQL®, or the deep SQL Server® analysis and exploration of SQL Sentry, they’ll be able to buy one license and use it for either product, providing the freedom and flexibility to choose the right solution for the environment.  

SolarWinds was recently recognized as a Leader and Outperformer in the 2024 GigaOm Radar Report for Network Observability and a Leader and Forward Mover in the 2024 GigaOm Radar Report for Cloud Observability.

Learn more about SolarWinds Observability self-hosted and SaaS options at: https://www.solarwinds.com/observability/whats-new


[1] SolarWinds SaaS only.

[2] SolarWinds Self-Hosted only.

[3] SolarWinds Product and Engineering analysis conducted June 2023 to August 2024.