Host monitoring
Host monitoring collects data about the performance, stability, and overall health of your hosts in order to plan out services and quickly fix issues before they have time to grow. Hosts that can be monitored include both cloud-based virtual machines and standard servers.
Any server with a supported operating system can be monitored as a host by installing the SolarWinds Observability Agent on the server. The SolarWinds Observability Agent monitors the host and gathers performance metrics. The metrics on these self-managed hosts are then sent to SolarWinds Observability SaaS. See Add a self-managed host.
Using Platform Connect, server nodes can be brought into SolarWinds Observability SaaS as server entities. See Server monitoring with SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.
Integrate your AWS or Azure account with SolarWinds Observability SaaS to monitor any of your AWS services or Azure resources. When adding the cloud account, select the AWS EC2 service or Azure VM to send your cloud host metrics to SolarWinds Observability SaaS. For even more observability into your cloud service or resource, install the SolarWinds Observability Agent on your cloud host. These hosts can be found in the Entity Explorer by their entity type name (the cloud service or resource name) or under the Hosts group.
Monitor hosts
When you have added the host for monitoring, you can monitor it.
- Use the Entity Explorer to view a list of your observed infrastructure entities. The collected health and performance metric data for your self-managed host is available for analysis as widgets in the infrastructure entity's Overview tab.
- Review and further analyze gathered measurements in the Metrics Explorer.
See Remove host monitoring from an Agent if you want to remove host monitoring.
Download Remote Desktop Connection file for Windows hosts
When you monitor Windows hosts and the IP address for the host is stored with the entity, you can download the RDP file with the IP addess of the host for easier access.
The RDP file does not include credentials. You need to add the credentials manually to connect to the host.
- Find the Windows host in hosts overview page or open the entity details page for the host, click the vertical ellipsis and select Download RDP.
- The RDP file is downloaded. Double-click it to initiate an RDP connection to the host.
Hosts widgets
In addition to standard visualizations of metric data, the following widgets display detailed insights into your self-managed hosts.
Architecture
The Architecture widget shows the name and number of different operating system architectures used within your hosts.
Details
On the Overview tab, the Details widget shows general device information, such as platform and operating system, and agent information, if a SolarWinds Observability Agent is installed on the host.
Other infrastructure widgets
Hosts monitored with the SolarWinds Observability Agent are categorized as "Other Hosts".
Operating Systems
The Operating Systems widget shows the name and number of operating systems used within your hosts.
Other Hosts
The Other Hosts widget shows a visual summary of the health state and names of your Other Hosts.
Other Hosts Active Alerts
The Other Hosts Active Alerts widget shows an overview of the active alerts triggered by Other Hosts, categorized by severity. Active alerts are alerts that have been triggered but not cleared. This includes acknowledged alerts.
Other Hosts Health
The Other Hosts Health widget shows the overall health and performance of your hosts monitored through methods other than a cloud integration, such as with an installed SolarWinds Observability Agent. The health displays as a number based on the number of instances.