Documentation forServer & Application Monitor
Monitoring your applications and environment is a key capability of Hybrid Cloud Observability and is also available in a standalone module, Server & Application Monitor (SAM). Hybrid Cloud Observability and SAM are built on the self-hosted SolarWinds Platform.

Use Quality of Experience

With Quality of Experience, you can:

  • Compare statistics like network response time (TCP Handshake) and application response time (Time to First Byte) to determine if a perceived bottleneck is actually on your network, or if you need to call the server team.
  • Use data volume trends to pinpoint traffic anomalies and investigate the cause.
  • Monitor "risky" types of traffic.

There are three steps you must complete to start monitoring traffic on your network:

  1. Deploy Packet Analysis Sensors (network and/or server) to Windows nodes where you want to collect traffic data.

  2. In the SolarWinds Platform Web Console, specify the nodes and applications for which you want to collect traffic.

    Packet Analysis Sensors do not automatically discover nodes and applications. You must indicate the nodes and applications to monitor before you will see traffic data in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.

  3. Allocate appropriate CPU cores and memory for the traffic load for each sensor.

Traffic data is captured using packet analysis sensors. These sensors collect packets using either a dedicated Windows SPAN or Mirror port monitor or directly on your Windows server. Packet Analysis Sensors capture packets from the local network interface (NIC) and then analyzes collected packets to calculate metrics for application performance monitoring. These metrics provide information about application health and allow you to identify possible application performance issues before they are reported by end-users.

With the ability to analyze packet traffic, QoE provides real observed network response time (NRT) and application response time (ART). In addition, Packet Analysis Sensors can classify and categorize traffic for over 1000 different applications by associated purpose and risk-level.