Documentation forSolarWinds Observability SaaS

SolarWinds Observability SaaS release notes

These release notes describe the new features, improvements, and fixed issues in SolarWinds Observability SaaS.

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March 2026

The following new features, improvements, and fixed issues were made to SolarWinds Observability SaaS during March.

DEM new features and improvements

Added new Digital Experience reports

Digital Experience added the following new reports.

  • Website Real User Monitoring report — Performance data based on real usage of your websites.

  • Synthetic Transactions Configuration report — Configuration details for Synthetic Transaction entities.

  • Synthetic transactions monitoring report — Synthetic transaction performance metrics.

  • URI availability monitoring report — Monitoring data of your TCP, Ping, DNS and UDP checks.

To add a new report, click Reports. Click the vertical ellipsis for the Digital Experience report you want to add, and then click Create Schedule. Fill out Create Schedule wizard to add your Digital Experience report.

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APM new features and improvements

OpenTelemetry adoption for PHP (Alpha)

The APM PHP library version 9.x now uses OpenTelemetry for collecting and exporting telemetry data for your PHP applications, aligning PHP instrumentation with the OTel standard. See PHP library release notes, and Use the OpenTelemetry-based SolarWinds APM PHP library (Alpha) for more information.

Tail-based trace sampling

APM libraries that export via OTLP now support tail-based sampling. This approach evaluates complete traces and retains the most relevant data based on your custom sampling policies before sending to SolarWinds Observability. See Tail-based sampling, for more details.

Other application performance improvements

  • Improved the Service Instances History widget on the Service Overview:
    • The KPI value now reflects the current number of active instances instead of the total unique service instances in the selected time range.
    • Added annotations with clickable rows for each started instance, linking directly to instance details.

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Network new features and improvements

Compliance updates

  • Added a new Compliance Overview dashboard that summarizes compliance results to help users quickly identify potential compliance violations.

  • Added a Compliance tab that shows entity-level details for nodes with enabled configuration monitoring (NCM nodes).

  • Introduced data retention mechanism for cleaning up assessment results.

Support for Cisco Firepower and Fortinet FortiGate firewalls

Added monitoring support for Cisco Firepower and Fortinet FortiGate firewalls.

Network Discovery: interface and volume filtering

Added support for filtering interfaces and volumes during discovery. This helps reduce noise by excluding non-critical items and improves focus on business-critical links, such as uplinks or inner-site trunks.

Windows Scheduled Tasks

Added support for viewing Windows Scheduled Tasks running on hosts monitored by a Network Collector in SolarWinds Observability SaaS. When you add a host through a Network Collector, scheduled tasks appear on the Scheduled Tasks tab in the host details view, including their current status.

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Infrastructure new features and improvements

SolarWinds OpenTelemetry Collector

Added an option to install the SolarWinds OpenTelemetry Collector by using the installer in the Add SolarWinds OTel Collector wizard.

AWS VPC Flow Logs

Added monitoring support for AWS VPC Flow Logs.

GCP log monitoring

Added monitoring support for GCP logs.

IP column on Agent Management page

A new column displaying IP addresses is available on the Agent Management pages.

Collect logs pop-up for single Agent

A new Collect logs pop-up is available for individuals Agents. Users can choose which types of logs to collect and are given the option to exclude logs from specific plug-ins when needed.

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February 2026

The following new features, improvements, and fixed issues were made to SolarWinds Observability SaaS during February.

Database new features and improvements

Historical visibility for removed databases

When a monitored database instance was removed, Database Observability previously retained historical data for only 30 days after monitoring was stopped. Historical data is now retained for 18 months after monitoring was stopped. The Databases Overview page displays this historical data if the selected time range includes some or all of the active period. The Plugin status and Last seen columns indicate when collection stopped and telemetry was last received.

The Profiler page and related query views also show historical data when the selected time range includes some or all of the active period. For any historical time range when a removed database was active, you can still see its queries and the associated metrics from the removed entity. This change keeps investigations consistent across the Overview, Profiler, and query-centric workflows.

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Network new features and improvements

SD-WAN orchestrator views

SD-WAN views have been redesigned. Updates include:

  • New SD-WAN orchestrator details views
  • New SD-WAN network overviews
  • Redesigned SD-WAN edge details view

Edit network device types

Users can manually map automatically detected network devices to specific device types via the Edit Network Device dialog or using the bulk edit option.

Switch stack support

Added support for switch stack monitoring. Users can view all relevant data on the Switch Stack tab in the entity details view.

Custom pollers on the UnDP tab in the entity details view

Users can see custom poller details on entity details views for network devices and hosts polled by a Network Collector. Users can create pre-configured alerts based on custom metrics from metric details widgets.

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Infrastructure new features and improvements

Agents page moved under Data collection

The Agents page is now available as a first-class entry under a new Data collection section.

Entity tags visible on Agents page

Tags are available as an optional column on the Agents page and can be modified through the Action menu or the inspector panel tab.

Smart search of Agents page

The existing search bar has been replaced with the standardized search and filter components already available in the Entity Explorer. Filtering is available by Health score, Agent status, version, platform, and configuration source.

Windows service monitoring on host entity details page

A new tab is available on the host entity details page for hosts using Windows. The Services tab is located under the Processes tab and displays all Windows services running on the selected host.

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New features and improvements to general features

Unlinking legacy authentication for Papertrail and Pingdom

Migrated customers can now unlink Papertrail or Pingdom from legacy authentication. When unlinked, users authenticate directly with SolarWinds Observability SaaS credentials. This enables full use of SolarWinds Observability SaaS account features that require a password, including MFA backup code regeneration and email updates.

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January 2026

The following new features, improvements, and fixed issues were made to SolarWinds Observability SaaS during January.

APM new features and improvements

AI Assist for APM Errors

AI Assist for APM Errors provides AI-powered analysis of application errors. It inspects error events, traces, stacktraces, and service context to generate an instant error summary and step‑by‑step resolution guidance directly in the APM UI.

Use AI Assist for APM Errors to:

  • Reduce time to triage application errors
  • Improve production reliability by highlighting likely root causes and impacted services
  • Decrease mean time to resolve (MTTR) with guided next steps
  • Increase engineering productivity by reducing manual investigation

Predefined dashboards for runtime metrics

New predefined runtime metrics dashboard for Python and Java applications surface OpenTelemetry-based runtime, process, and system metrics in a single, preconfigured view.

These dashboards provide:

  • Immediate visibility into service health with language- and service-specific signals
  • Insights for garbage collection (GC) tuning and understanding the impact of GC pause times
  • Detection of thread leaks and thread-pool exhaustion
  • Differentiation between CPU saturation and application-level bottlenecks
  • Identification of per-instance hotspots and “noisy neighbor” services
  • Warm-up and deployment regression analysis
  • Better capacity planning and rightsizing decisions

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Database new features and improvements

Historical visibility for removed databases

Database Observability now models each monitored database instance as a normal entity and shows removed databases on the Databases Overview page whenever the selected time range includes their active period. The Plugin status and Last seen columns indicate when collection stopped and telemetry was last received.

Profiler changes

Profiler and related query views follow the same time-window behavior, so for any historical time range when a removed database was active, customers can still see its queries and associated metrics from that removed entity, keeping investigations consistent across Overview, Profiler, and query-centric workflows.

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Infrastructure new features and improvements

Support for new GCP entities

Added support for the following GCP entities:

  • BigQuery Clustered Table
  • BigQuery Dataset
  • Firebase Realtime Database
  • Firebase Hosting

Support for Azure SQL Managed Instance

Added support for Azure SQL Managed Instance entities.

Global Auto Update policy for newly-installed Agents

Users can now access a centralized Auto Update global setting that controls the default Auto Update state for all newly-deployed Agents.

SWO Agent report

Users can now generate a report listing all SWO Agents, including the following information: host name, version, operating system, and platform.

Other hosts improvements

  • Plugins are able to retrieve the state of SWO feature flags via SWO Agent.
  • Bulk operation to set Auto Update toggle for multiple Agents at once.

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New features and improvements to general features

Squadcast integration

Added identity integration with Squadcast to enable Single Sign-On (SSO) across both platforms, along with automated organization and license provisioning and seamless user identity and session continuity.

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Legal notices

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