Documentation forSolarWinds Platform Self-Hosted

Monitor cloud instances and VMs

This topic applies only to the following products:

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted

IPAM — NAM — NPM — SAM — VMAN

To support hybrid environments, the SolarWinds Platform (SolarWinds Platform) can retrieve data from the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure cloud service platforms to track availability, performance, applications, and more for instances and VMs. Examples of data gathered include status, storage capacity, memory usage, and IP addresses.

What can I monitor on my cloud instance/VM?

Available cloud monitoring options depend on the SolarWinds Platform products you have installed, on your cloud solution, and on the data gathered by your SolarWinds Platform products.

How is the data polled?

  • To retrieve status and metric data for monitored clouds (cloud metrics), the SolarWinds Platform sends API requests to the cloud service. The first 1 million requests per month are free, extra requests are charged by your cloud provider.
  • If you want to gather specific OS data for memory or poll additional data using other polling methods (Orion Agent, WMI, or SNMP), manage your cloud in the SolarWinds Platform as a node.

» Learn more about polling

SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted: Azure databases and Azure load balancers

With SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted, you can monitor Azure SQL Database and Azure Load Balancers.

IPAM: Monitor Azure DNS Cloud zones and Amazon Route 53 records

With IPAM, you can view your Amazon Route 53 and Azure DNS zones and corresponding records.

NPM: Monitor Azure V-Nets, V-Net Gateways, and Site to Site Connections (Only Microsoft Azure)

With NPM, you can monitor traffic on Azure Network Gateways and Site-to-Site Connections.

SAM and VMAN: Monitor Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS

Using API requests, you can:

  • Manage hybrid environment metrics and status through a single console. Displaying on-premises, virtual, and cloud systems together helps you compare performance, locate bottlenecks, and better plan capacity and resource allocation.
  • Track end user and business context for performance by using SAM to gather extended metrics that provide visibility into cloud and on-premises systems.
  • Dynamically monitor cloud instances and VMs to better handle resource churn during provisioning. Instances and VMs can be removed as needed to support expanding environments or performance peaks.
  • Determine usage trends and troubleshoot issues. Captured metrics over time provide historical references to track trends for resource consumption (such as CPU spikes and lulls) and help determine when those trends become issues.
  • Use cloud monitoring data, Orion alerts, and the Performance Analysis dashboard (PerfStack) to review historical performance and pinpoint when significant usage changes began to trigger issues.

To enhance cloud monitoring, use Orion Agents, WMI, or SNMP to poll special OS metrics.

This requires that you configure cloud instances/VMs as managed nodes in the SolarWinds Platform.

  • Poll specific metrics beyond the basic metrics gathered by cloud service APIs, including OS, memory, and other detailed metrics retrieved by SAM application monitors.
  • Use SAM application monitoring templates to poll cloud-based applications and services.
  • Display cloud instance/VM details in AppStack for quick troubleshooting across your environment.
  • Develop and deploy custom script monitors for PowerShell, Nagios, Linux/UNIX, and Windows.
  • Use SAM API Poller templates to monitor metrics for Azure, Office 365, and SolarWinds products such as AppOptics and Pingdom.

How do I configure it?

  1. Review recommendations and requirements for cloud monitoring.
  2. Configure your cloud account to interact with the SolarWinds Platform: AWS or Microsoft Azure
  3. Gather credentials in your cloud console.
  4. Add the first cloud account to the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

What does it look like?

After you have configured your cloud account both in the cloud and in the SolarWinds Platform, you can explore cloud instances and VMs on the Cloud Summary page.

Learn more

In addition to the SolarWinds Platform Administrator Guide, check out these resources to learn more about cloud monitoring with SolarWinds products: