SolarWinds Platform features

The SolarWinds Platform is the core of the SolarWinds IT Management Portfolio. It provides a stable and scalable architecture that includes data collection, processing, storage, and presentation. The SolarWinds Platform provides common features, such as user accounts and groups, views, dashboards, reporting, alerting, and more that you can use across all SolarWinds Platform products and access from the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Pre-installation hints

Before you install your SolarWinds Platform products, review the following details:

Requirements

Hardware, software, and port requirements for the SolarWinds Platform server and SolarWinds Platform database.

Licensing

Licensing differs among SolarWinds Platform products. Activate, add, upgrade or assign licenses with the License Manager in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Installation or upgrade

Use the SolarWinds Installer to easily install or upgrade multiple SolarWinds Platform products simultaneously.

While installing your SolarWinds Platform products, you might need to configure SSL for the SolarWinds Platform Web Console or enable FIPS.

Common features

The following features are available in SolarWinds Platform products.

Learn the basics

Log in to your SolarWinds Platform product in a web browser and meet the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Review Events to find out what is going on in your environment.

Use the Log Viewer in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console to see an overview of syslogs or SNMP traps.

Get alerts about issues in your environment.

Generate reports to present the status of the monitored environment.

Review Performance Analysis dashboards, also known as PerfStack™.

Create, edit, and maintain SolarWinds Platform Web Console user accounts - set user rights, reset passwords, limit access to network segments, and enable authentication with Active Directory.

View monitored objects on Intelligent Maps in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

View other map options in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console - display objects with their location specified in the geocode format in a widget, or create maps the Network Atlas tool and display them in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Add devices for monitoring and manage monitored devices

Specify which devices to monitor and the information you need, then select the way you get this information. See Discover and add devices.

Add single nodes, use Active Directory domain controllers to add nodes, or discover devices on your network automatically.

Available polling methods include ICMP, WMI, SNMP, or agents deployed on Windows, Linux, and UIX devices.

Manage monitored devices - edit properties, set the polling method for monitored devices, toggle monitoring on and off, or mute alerts for nodes.

Customize your SolarWinds Platform Web Console

Customize SolarWinds Platform Web Console - customize dashboards, colors, logo, views, widgets and charts. Learn how to limit what objects users see on views, or specify what you want to see on views for specific device types.

Create custom properties - create custom fields to associate with monitored network objects and display custom information for monitored devices.

Create groups and dependencies - organize how monitored data is presented in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. Set up dependencies to better represent the relationships between network objects and account for constraints on the network.

Set thresholds - specify thresholds for monitored metrics. Customize general thresholds or use baselines.

Use the flexible modern dashboarding framework to improve the performance of your SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Monitor additional metrics and devices

Monitor hardware health - get insight into hardware issues on the network. Monitor hardware health based on hardware sensors, such as fan status, power supply status, or temperature.

Monitor virtual environments - monitor your virtual networks (VMware® ESX and ESXi servers, VMware vCenter®) in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

Quality of Experience - use packet analysis sensors to see packet-level traffic information about key devices and applications on your network.

Monitor cloud instances/VMs with your SolarWinds Platform, such as Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Monitor containers on Linux nodes.

Expand the SolarWinds Platform functionality or scale your deployment

Use SolarWinds High Availability (HA) to provide failover protection for your SolarWinds Platform server and additional polling engines to reduce data loss.

Do you need to scale your deployment? See Scalability Engine Guidelines.

Review the tips for optimizing your deployment.

Balance the load on polling engines by specifying nodes to be polled by individual polling engines.

Manage Additional Polling Engines.

Troubleshoot your SolarWinds Platform database.

Extend monitoring to include non-standard devices using custom pollers.