What is SolarWinds Observability and how does it work

SolarWinds Observability is available in two options to suit your needs: Self-Hosted and SaaS. While both options provide comprehensive visibility across hybrid IT environments, there are differences between them.

• SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted is software you deploy behind your firewall, enabling you to optimize performance, ensure availability, and accelerate remediation across hybrid IT environments with a solution that helps you meet your security and compliance needs. It also integrates with other SolarWinds services to extend visibility and into other areas of your environment.

• SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides comprehensive monitoring and observability for hybrid IT environments from a cloud-native solution hosted and managed by SolarWinds. It is ideal for customers looking for deeper monitoring for custom and cloud-based applications and user experience and application performance management. For details, see SolarWinds Observability SaaS documentation.

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

Built on the SolarWinds Platform, these SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted capabilities seamlessly integrate to deliver a scalable and secure observability solution:

• Cloud monitoring for AWS and Azure networks, storage, compute, and database metrics
• Anomaly-based alerting powered by machine learning (requires a cloud connection)
• Free status-only nodes
• Vulnerability dashboard
• Network monitoring and management, including:
  • Network performance monitoring*
  • Flow monitoring and analysis*
  • Network device configuration management*
  • IP address monitoring and management*
  • User and device tracking
  • VoIP and network quality assurance
• Infrastructure and application management:
  • Server and application management*
  • Virtualization monitoring and management*
  • Log monitoring and analysis*
  • Server configuration management

* These capabilities are also available individually as Orion^® modules for standalone monitoring.

Self-Hosted SolarWinds Platform

The SolarWinds Platform (self-hosted) is the core foundation of SolarWinds monitoring and observability capabilities across SolarWinds self-hosted offerings. It delivers stable and scalable architectures that encompass several critical components and ensures data collection (ICMP, SNMP, WMI, API, and more), processing, storage, and presentation. SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted and associated Orion^® modules are built on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform.

A simple centralized self-hosted SolarWinds Platform deployment includes at least two servers:

• The main SolarWinds Platform server where you install your SolarWinds Platform products. This server includes the main polling engine and the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.
• A separate server to install the SolarWinds Platform database.

The polling engine requests real-time statistics from monitored devices in your environment. The data is provided through the selected polling method, such as SNMP or WMI.

Polled data is processed and stored in the SolarWinds Platform database.

Data is requested from the database and displayed in SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

See Scalability Engine guidelines for information about scaling your SolarWinds Platform products.