Item: SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

- It's used for day-to-day alerting on our infrastructure so that relevant teams can take action items before becoming a problem. - Its main use is for infrastructure monitoring, server and network equipment & is used lightly with some application monitoring. - The Long term goal is to make more use of the product, as we have a number of modules that are currently not being taken advantage of.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Modern Dashboard are a big improvement over legacy Orion views.
It's really the most straight forward tool for non SME's as you can just point it at a device and monitor most things out of the box by just providing a credential.
Having all aspects of monitoring under one tool is a really nice touch and while SW isn't the best in every single aspect of the stack it does a pretty good job at most things which helps eliminate tool sprawl.

Cons

Please fix the time zones issue. Events are in UTC, Charts in the user's Local Time, Alerts come in through with Main Server timestamp - it's all over the place & it's been like that for so long. We are a large corp, the teams span time zones and trying to work with teams across the globe is made so difficult by this.
The inability to ingest the tags from AWS Cloud watch and the countless posts / feature requests on thwack complaining about this that just get ignored. It's such a basic feature of Cloud & I don't want to have to own a different product to use such an fundamental part of cloud.
Maintenance Windows - why can we not set a reoccurring window from the web ui in 2022?
SAM - Manage applications, why is there no search bar to filter through applications. When you scale out to enterprise size this is so annoying trying to guess which page to land on to find the application / device I'm looking for.
http://hostname/Orion/APM/Admin/Applications/Default.aspx
Half baked features being released - Log Analyzer shipped with no resources for the node details page. The Free version from 2016 had more available in it.

Most Important Features

Server / Network Monitoring.
Alerting + Basic Reporting.

Return on Investment

In a crowded market, it's getting less and less easy to say Solarwinds is considerably better value for what you get compared to other industry leaders.
The release of the new Observability product is pricing itself in line with products like Datadog and Dynatrace but these are typically tools users are getting away from due to the cost. The advantage of SW was it was always the best value for your $$.

Alternatives Considered

Datadog, Dynatrace, Micro Focus SiteScope and AppDynamics

Solarwinds has the best overlap of the two others I've mentioned - the other two tools (Datadog and Dynatrace) are great in their own way but Solarwinds is just good at everything; if I had to pick one tool of the above, it would be Solarwinds for the compatibility and ease of use, the other tools are more focused on being great at certain things while Solarwinds is the jack of all trades.

Key Insights

Do you think SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability's feature set?

Yes

Did SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy SolarWinds Hybrid Cloud Observability again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Datadog, Micro Focus SiteScope, OpsRamp

Likelihood to Recommend

- For small teams serving big organizations - it's a really simple tool to install and set up relatively quickly. - the new installer is also great - I don't have to understand what modules need to be installed; it's all streamlined. - The HCO Licensing allows you to run the Additional polling engines at a scale where the previous licensing model didn't. We can deploy APEs in locations now, which would not have been worth the investment in previously as there weren't enough devices in that location/region to spend the $$$$ on an APE License.

Comments

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Jack of all trades...