Documentation forSolarWinds Observability SaaS

Migrate from AppOptics to SolarWinds Observability SaaS

SolarWinds recommends that AppOptics users migrate completely from AppOptics to SolarWinds Observability SaaS.

To sign up for a free, 30-day evaluation of SolarWinds Observability SaaS, go to https://www.solarwinds.com/solarwinds-observability/registration. For more information about available plans, contact your SolarWinds Observability SaaS sales representative (swo-sales@solarwinds.com).

Benefits of migration

Like AppOptics, SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides the following application monitoring functionality:

  • Collects traces and basic metrics for instrumented services
  • Monitors on-premises and cloud infrastructure (such as hosts, Kubernetes, Azure, and AWS)
  • Provides integrations to monitor third-party applications including:
    • Web servers (such as Apache and NGNIX)
    • Databases (such as MySQL and PostgreSQL)
    • Caches (such as Redis and Varnish)
    • Message brokers (such as Kafka and RabbitMQ)
    • Virtualization tools (such as Docker and Kubernetes)
  • Provides integrations with external monitoring tools (such as Prometheus and StatsD)
  • Enables the collection, storage, and visualization of custom metrics
  • Provides alert templates, and allows users to configure custom alerts
  • Enables users to configure custom dashboards
  • Supports user-defined composite metrics

In addition, SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides the benefits described in the following sections.

Ongoing development

SolarWinds Observability SaaS is constantly being improved with new features and enhancements, while AppOptics is no longer under active development.

Full-stack observability

In addition to application performance monitoring, SolarWinds Observability SaaS provides detailed information about entities across your environment, including websites, databases, hosts, and network devices. When you migrate services monitoring to SolarWinds Observability SaaS, you can connect the services data to other SolarWinds Observability SaaS data.

Monitored entities are automatically linked whenever possible, helping you identify connections and troubleshoot issues. If you collect logs from services and enable trace context in logs, you can view your logs in the Logs Viewer and associate those logs with a service. You can also integrate APM and DBO to understand how the database server impacts the your services' queries and to see correlated data within the two modules.

Modern dashboards provide high-level overviews, which you can use to quickly assess overall health and identify potential performance issues. You can then drill down to find detailed troubleshooting information and root cause assist.

Stand-alone Traces Explorer

Use the Traces Explorer to understand what happens as a request moves across multiple hosts and services, identify upstream and downstream service dependencies, assess performance at every step in the request, and troubleshoot issues such as errors or high latency. Select the request type, apply filters, and use the smart search to locate specific traces.

Topology map

The topology map shows you which services are talking to each other, with arrows to indicate whether the communication is inbound or outbound. The map also provides a visual representation of other entities related to a service, such as databases, clusters, and hosts. Each monitored entity is color-coded to reflect its health score. You can click an entity on the topology map to display more information about it in the right pane.

Enhanced integration with logs

If you collect logs from services, you can add trace context to application logs to correlate the log messages from a traced transaction, and, if sampled, the log messages to the transaction trace detail.

Detailed Kubernetes performance insights

SolarWinds Observability offers native, first-class Kubernetes monitoring based on an OpenTelemetry collector. The SolarWinds Observability K8s collector gathers a broad set of metrics from the K8s namespaces, K8s nodes, and K8s pods within each cluster. With this data, it provides an overall view of all monitored Kubernetes entities, as well as specific information about each cluster. It summarizes the data collected from each cluster to provide an assessment of that cluster's health, and it shows detailed information about the cluster and related entities that could affect its performance.

Perform a full migration from AppOptics to SolarWinds Observability

For migration instructions and to find out more about advantages that SolarWinds Observability SaaS offers in each area, see the following topics: