Documentation forSolarWinds Observability

SolarWinds Observability Getting Started Guide

Welcome to the SolarWinds Observability Getting Started Guide.

This document guides you from setting up SolarWinds Observability through the full implementation. Prior to working through the Getting Started Guide, you should have already received an invitation to join your organization in SolarWinds Observability.

If you run into problems installing one of our agents or libraries, or if SolarWinds Observability is not receiving data from an agent or library, see the following topics Troubleshooting SolarWinds Observability.

Accept the invitation and create an account.

  1. Check your mailbox for a You have been invited to... email, and click Accept invitation.
  2. Follow the instructions to set up an account.
  3. Log in to SolarWinds Observability using the new account.

Start monitoring Website entities.

With digital experience monitoring (DEM), you can track the performance and availability of external websites.

Add a website

  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 a URI entity

  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 the website

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.

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Start monitoring host entities.

Infrastructure monitoring includes collecting data about the performance, stability, and overall health of your self-managed hosts in order to address and prevent issues.

Monitoring hosts requires the SolarWinds Observability Agent to provide data about the hosts.

Add a host

  1. In SolarWinds Observability, click Add Data at the top.

  2. Click Add Host to install a new SolarWinds Observability Agent, or choose an existing SolarWinds Observability Agent.

  3. Select or create an ingestion API token and select the operating system of your target host.

  4. Copy and execute the provided script(s) on your monitored host or platform as needed.

  5. Verify the information entered on the Summary tab and review your installation or deployment.

Observe a host

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

  • Click Infrastructure in the side navigation and click Host to see an overview of your self-managed host entities.

  • Review an individual entity's details in the Entity Explorer.

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Start monitoring AWS entities.

Infrastructure monitoring includes collecting data about the performance, stability, and overall health of your AWS services in order to address and prevent issues.

Integrate with your AWS account

  1. In a separate tab, sign into your Amazon AWS account.

  2. In SolarWinds Observability, click Add Data at the top.

  3. Click AWS and choose whether to configure your setup manually or using CloudFormation.

  4. Enter a display name and metrics tag name to accompany the ingested AWS data.

  5. Create your IAM Policy and Role following the steps provided for the manual or CloudFormation setup and click Next.

  6. Select the AWS regions to monitor and, if desired, select the Elastic Compute Cloud to monitor AWS cloud hosts. Click Next.

  7. Select the AWS services to monitor and click Next.

  8. Verify the information entered on the Summary tab and review your deployment.

  9. Optionally, send logs from AWS to SolarWinds Observability.

Observe your AWS services

Information collected for your cloud platform entities are available in widgets in the Entity Explorer, area overviews, and custom dashboards.

  • Click Infrastructure in the side navigation to see an overview of your AWS and Azure entities.

  • Review an individual entity's details in the Entity Explorer.

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Configure alerts.

  1. Click Alerts in the left column, then click Alert Settings.

  2. Click Create Alert in the upper right corner.

  3. Provide a name and description for the alert.

  4. Specify severity and select whether the alert should be enabled.

  5. Set up the condition.

      1. Select Metric Condition, and then select Host in the Entity type box.

      2. Search for system.cpu.utilization in the metric box and set Trigger when metric is to higher than 80%.

        Set During last to 5 minutes and aggregate on average.

      1. Select Metric Condition, and then select Host in the Entity type box.

      2. Search for system.memory.utilization.aggregated in the metric box and set Trigger when metric is to higher than 70%.

        Set During last to 1 minutes and aggregate on average.

  6. Complete the Create Alert wizard.

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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.

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Send logs with syslog.

  1. In SolarWinds Observability, click Add Data in the upper-right corner.

  2. Click Logs, select or create an API token, select Syslog and click Next.

  3. Select your Operating System, install the CA certificates on your machine, and follow the instructions provided to create a config file that includes the API token created earlier.

  4. Restart the rsyslog or nxlog service.

  5. Click Analyze > Logs to review logs.

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Start monitoring Azure entities.

Infrastructure monitoring includes collecting data about the performance, stability, and overall health of your Azure services in order to address and prevent issues.

Integrate with your Azure account

  1. Integrate your Azure account with SolarWinds Observability using the Azure CLI v2.0 or Azure portal.

  2. In SolarWinds Observability, click Add Data at the top. Click Azure.

  3. Enter a display name and metrics tag name to accompany the ingested Azure data.

  4. Enter the appID in the Client ID field and the tenantId in the Tenant ID field (for accounts integrated with the Azure CLI) or the Client Secret in the field provided (for accounts integrated with the Azure portal) and click Next.

  5. Select the subscriptions you want to monitor for the integration and click Next.

  6. Select the Azure service regions to monitor and click Next.

  7. Select the resource types to monitor and click Next.

  8. Optionally, configure a lambda function and a trigger to send Azure logs to SolarWinds Observability. Click Submit.

Observe your Azure services

Information collected for your cloud platform entities are available in widgets in the Entity Explorer, area overviews, and custom dashboards.

  • Click Infrastructure in the side navigation to see an overview of your AWS and Azure entities.

  • Review an individual entity's details in the Entity Explorer.

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Connect to Kubernetes clusters.

Infrastructure monitoring includes collecting data about the performance, stability, and overall health of your Kubernetes cluster in order to address and prevent issues.

Monitoring Kubernetes clusters requires a Prometheus server and the SWO K8s Collector to provide data about the cluster.

Add a Kubernetes cluster

  1. In SolarWinds Observability, click Add Data at the top. Click Kubernetes.

  2. Enter your Prometheus URL and Kubernetes namespace in the fields provided.

  3. Select or create an ingestion API token, then copy and execute the provided command in the kubectl command line tool.

  4. Create a values.yaml file with the provided configuration content, then run the provided command to deploy the helm chart to your environment. Click Next.

  5. Wait for the SWO K8s Collector to send data to SolarWinds Observability or click Skip Verification.

Observe your Kubernetes entities

Information collected for your Kubernetes cluster and node entities are available in widgets in the Entity Explorer, area overviews, and custom dashboards.

  • Click Kubernetes to see an overview of your Kubernetes cluster and node entities.

  • Review an individual entity's details in the Entity Explorer.

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Start monitoring Service entities.

With application performance monitoring (APM), you can observe performance metrics from the services powering your application and create distributed traces that follow the path of individual transactions through the entire application stack.

  1. Click the plus button in the top-right corner of SolarWinds Observability, and click Services.

  2. Type a Name for your service and select the language for your operating system. This name will be used as part of your Service key.

  3. Create a new or select an existing API token to use with the new service. The API token will be used as part of your Service key.

  4. Follow the instructions on the screen to install the library for your service on your host. See these topics for instructions specific to your language and operating system:

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Start monitoring Database entities.

Collect data about the performance, stability, and overall health of your monitored databases. Database monitoring enables you to address and prevent issues, and provides deep database performance monitoring to drive speed, efficiency, and savings.

  1. In SolarWinds Observability, click Add Data in the upper-right corner.

  2. In the Add Data dialog, click Database, select the database type, and complete the wizard.

  3. Click Databases in navigation on the left.

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Invite users.

This requires that you are an Admin.

  1. Click the Settings icon (bottom-right), and click Users.
  2. Click Invite user, and provide an email to send the invitation to.

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Start monitoring Network device entities.

Network monitoring observes the performance and availability of your network devices. Performance metrics are gathered from the different network devices in your environment.

  1. Deploy a Network Collector.

    1. Click Add Data > Network Device, and download the installation file.

      You will need an API token in the installation wizard. Click Settings > API Tokens and copy or create an ingestion API token.

    2. Transfer the installation file to the server that will host the Network Collector and complete the installation wizard.

  2. Log in to the Network Collector Web Console and add devices for monitoring. If the Discovery wizard does not start automatically, click Settings > Discover Network, complete the wizard, and import nodes to observe in SolarWinds Observability.

  3. In SolarWinds Observability, click Network in the Navigation bar on the left.

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Enable real user monitoring (RUM) for your 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.

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Integrate OpenTelemetry data.

To observe OpenTelemetry data in SolarWinds Observability, configure the OTel integration:

More details: