SolarWinds Observability Administrator Guide
Welcome to the new world of SolarWinds Observability, which offers an extensive range of observability services for cloud, on-premises, and hybrid environments.
What we observe
Websites, databases, hosts, services, and network devices are all items, or entities, that can be monitored in SolarWinds Observability. To start monitoring your entities, see Add entities for monitoring and, if necessary, configure Firewall or access control requirements to allow data to flow between your entity and SolarWinds Observability.
Monitored aspects of a single entity, such as a website or trace, are automatically linked whenever possible. The health of your whole environment can be attained by monitoring entities in the following capability areas:
For a full list of available databases, applications, services, frameworks, and other integrations supported by SolarWinds Observability, see SolarWinds Observability Integrations.
For system requirements, see SolarWinds Observability System Requirements.
Application Performance Monitoring (APM)
Use Application Performance Monitoring (APM) to gather performance metrics from the services powering your application and create distributed traces that follow the path of individual transactions through the entire application stack.
Trace context can be added to transaction traces, providing the ability to correlate application log messages from a traced transaction, and if sampled, the log messages to the transaction trace detail. See Trace context in logs.
Database Monitoring
Use database monitoring to gather data about the performance, stability, and overall health of your monitored MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Redis database instances. Detailed database performance metrics allow you to address and prevent issues, and optimize your monitored database to drive speed, efficiency, and savings.
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) tracks the performance and availability, as well as the real user experience of external websites. Use website metric data to observe variations in the availability of your website at different locations over time.
Infrastructure Monitoring
Infrastructure monitoring collects data about the performance, stability, and overall health of self-managed hosts, Kubernetes clusters and nodes, or cloud providers in order to address and prevent issues. Use self-managed host, AWS, Azure, or Kubernetes metric data to track performance, health, resource usage, and responsiveness. Server, application, and virtual entities are available if Platform Connect is used to integrate Hybrid Cloud Observability data.
Network Monitoring
Network monitoring observes the performance and availability of the network devices crucial to your network. Use Network Collectors to collect performance metrics from the different network devices in your environment and pivot easily between metrics, traces, and custom data to quickly solve performance problems.
Collect logs
To monitor logs with SolarWinds Observability, configure your application or host to send logs directly to SolarWinds Observability via HTTPS or syslog, or from your cloud provider with an AWS lambda function or Azure event function. To collect logs for a services entity monitored by an APM library, you must configure the library to include trace context with the application logs and the logs must be sent using HTTPS or syslog.
Observe data
To explore your high-level and detailed information about any or all of your observed entities, see the Entity Explorer. When you select an entity in the Entity Explorer, widgets in the entity details view show the entity's health score, health history, and other key metric data.
Dashboards may be automatically created (depending on the entities monitored) or can be manually created and customized by members of your organization. New widgets can be created based on any monitored metric and added to a custom dashboard.
Analyze telemetry data
You can analyze your telemetry data with the following:
- Logs Explorer: Use the Logs Explorer to view activity and analyze trends in logs from your applications, hosts, and other monitored entities.
- Metrics Explorer: Review your entity's metrics in the Metrics Explorer to evaluate an entity's or group of entities' performance or identify potential problems.
- Traces Explorer: Follow the path of a single request or query through an application with the Traces Explorer and gain insight into the performance of each transaction.
- Queries Explorer: Review query details, including related metrics and raw query samples, in the Queries Explorer to analyze the root cause of poor query performance.
- Profiler: Use the Profiler to identify troublesome queries or queries that need optimization.
Manage alerts
Setting up alerts enables you to be notified when a specified attribute of an entity changes. You can review the list of your active alerts, manage alerts, or review detailed information for each alert that has been created on the Alert page.
Manage users, organizations, and security settings
With a SolarWinds Observability user account, you can access all organizations you are a member of without having to manage multiple SolarWinds Observability user credentials across different organizations. Depending on your user role, you can either only view or both view and manage users and their access to organizations.
To configure layers of security for your SolarWinds Observability organization, see the following topics: