Documentation forSolarWinds Observability

Getting started with DEM

The guide for getting started with DEM picks up right after you have accepted an invitation to join your organization in SolarWinds Observability and created your user account. See SolarWinds Observability Getting Started Guide.

SolarWinds Observability can monitor the performance of your websites services for applications. See Digital experience monitoring (DEM).

Verify open access to SolarWinds Observability.

Verify your firewall settings allow communication from SolarWinds Observability probe server IP addresses. See Probe servers and associated IP addresses.

Add your website entities to SolarWinds Observability.

  1. Click the plus button in the top-right corner of SolarWinds Observability, and click Website.
  2. Type a Name for your website and enter a valid URL for your website.
  3. Select a protocol, locations from which to test the website, and enter a test interval.
  4. Optionally, add custom request headers to send with the tests.
  5. To verify the webpage contains specific text, click Check for string, select whether the webpage should contain or not contain text, and enter a string of text.
  6. To keep track of when your SSL/TLS certificate will expire, click to select SSL/TLS certificate monitoring. Click Next.
  7. Review the website details and click Add Website.

Add your URI entities to SolarWinds Observability.

  1. Click the plus button in the top-right corner of SolarWinds Observability, and click URI.
  2. Click TCP/IP or Ping to define the protocol to use when testing the URI.
  3. Enter the IP address or domain of the URI, a port number if necessary, and a name for your URI entity.
  4. For TCP/IP URIs, optionally enter a string to send and a string to receive as part of the test.
  5. Select locations from which to test the website, and enter a test interval.
  6. Review the URI details and click Add URI.

Observe monitored DEM entity.

Information collected for your website or URI entity is available in widgets in the Entity Explorer, area overviews, and custom dashboards.

  • Click DEM in the side navigation to see an overview of all your monitored DEM entities.

  • Review an individual entity's details, including the entity's test results, in the Entity Explorer.

See Observe entities.

Enable real user monitoring (RUM) for websites

RUM measures user experience with your website and also tracks user activity.

  1. Locate your website in the Entity Explorer and click the vertical ellipsis to Edit the website entity.

  2. Click to toggle Real User Monitoring on and click Next twice to advance to the RUM page.

  3. Click to move the slider to the time in seconds you want to consider a satisfied load time for your website

  4. Click to copy the RUM JavaScript code to your clipboard and insert the copied code into the HTML of every page of your website. Click Next and Save.

Analyze individual metrics.

Click Analyze > Metrics to see a list of metrics for all entities in the Metrics Explorer. Use the search field to find metrics for your website or URI entities. Click a metric to see a history of measurements collected for your entities.

Check out triggered alerts.

  1. On the Home page, click View All Alerts in the Active Alerts widget. This opens the Active Alerts view.

  2. Click an entity with issues to go to the entity details page for more information.

See Alerts.