What’s new in SolarWinds SAM

The What’s New in SolarWinds SAM widget provides a summary of the new features of the current SAM release. Each new feature listed includes links to more information, documentation, or feature pages within the SolarWinds Platform Web Console. You can remove or add this widget anytime on the SAM Summary page.

SolarWinds Platform 2020.2.6 includes updated password policies that impact individual SolarWinds Platform accounts. After you upgrade to 2020.2.6, all passwords for individual SolarWinds Platform accounts will expire in 30 days. To learn more, see the Orion Platform 2020.2.6 Release Notes.

The SAM 2020.2.6 service release introduces the following changes:

• Disable dynamic components for AppInsight: If you know an issue will cause AppInsight for IIS or AppInsight for SQL application components to fail (for example, high index fragmentation of a SQL database), you can disable dynamic component monitors to reduce false-positive alerts and logs. See AppInsight for IIS and AppInsight for SQL for details.
• API Poller count increased by 10X: Now you can monitor 10 times as many API metrics per licensed node, as compared to the 1:1 ratio in earlier versions of SAM. For example, with a SAM100 license, you can monitor up to 1000 API metrics instead of 100.
• New API poller templates are available:
  • Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine
  • RabbitMQ
  • ServiceNow

  The following API poller templates were updated to support changes in remote APIs:

  • Microsoft Azure Active Directory (v.3)
  • Microsoft Azure App Service (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure Batch Account (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Account (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure Event Hub Namespace (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure IOT Hub (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure SQL Database (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure SQL Database Elastic Pool (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics (formerly SQL Data Warehouse) (v.2)
  • Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set (v.2)
  • SolarWinds AppOptics Monitored Services (v.2)
  • SolarWinds SAM License Usage for Component-based licensing (v.2)
  • SolarWinds SAM License Usage for Node-based licensing (v.2)

    Recreate existing API pollers based on these templates to use the latest version. Otherwise, polling stops.
    

• Container Monitoring updates: Secure container-related data with a new type of SolarWinds Platform credential — SolarWinds Tokens. Other changes include a simplified deployment flow, the ability to edit container services, and improved handling of short-lived, ephemeral containers.

  If upgrading from an earlier version, update all existing container services to use SolarWinds Tokens. Otherwise, container monitoring stops.

• Application monitor polling improvements:
  • Display the number of active component monitors polling per node: To provide more insight into scalability, a new Active Component column on the Manage Assigned Application Monitors page shows how many components are currently collecting data. This value is useful if analyzing heavy loads for AppInsight applications in large environments with component-based licensing.
  • Fetching Method Skip Fallback: For many component monitors, you can already set the default method to collect data according to your needs. Now you can save time and reduce polling by disabling specific fallback methods for component monitors also. If the selected protocol fails, no fallback occurs. This new option is also available for Performance Counter Monitors.
  • Ignore certificate errors during WinRM polling: Configure SAM to ignore invalid certificates by enabling the new WinRemoteManagementIgnoreCertificateErrors setting.
  • Faster AppInsight for SQL polling: Increase the number of open SQL connections on polling engines for large databases instances. Now you can use up to five connections.
• Improved algorithms boost Application Dependencies performance: Algorithms pull more data directly from the database instead of the SolarWinds Information Service (SWIS) data layer, resulting in higher recommended monitoring limits.
• In addition to updated password policies, SolarWinds Platform 2020.2.6 removed guest account functionality. To learn more about those improvements and other changes, see the SolarWinds Platform 2020.2.6 Release Notes.

Previous SAM releases

Following is a recap of currently supported versions of SAM:

SAM 2020.2.5: Includes the following improvements.

• Expanded integration with SolarWinds AppOptics: If you use SAM and either AppOptics or the APM Integrated Experience, you can track service status and metrics on the new APM Services page.
• Manage Credentials page: Use this new page as a centralized place to manage API Key, Basic Auth, Bearer Token, and OAuth 2.0 credentials for API pollers, and SolarWinds Cloud Tokens for the new APM Services page.
• API Poller improvements: Save response headers for use as variables in subsequent requests, which can be helpful if you need to reuse cookies included in set-cookie headers.
• Increased automation: The CreateApplication verb in the SolarWinds Platform SDK supports AppInsight applications so you can use PowerShell to interact directly with SWIS and add AppInsight templates to nodes.
• Application Dependency updates: Queries and connection-matching algorithms were revamped to improve performance. Polling no longer occurs on Additional Polling Engines; it’s restricted to the Main Polling Engine so you see the latest data sooner.

SAM 2020.2.4: Includes security enhancements and is signed with a new digital code-signing certificate.

SAM 2020.2.1: Use the new Manage API Pollers page to add, import, edit, copy, reassign, delete, or export API pollers. Chain multiple API requests to save a value from one request for use as a variable in subsequent requests. Use Orion Remote Collectors (ORCs) to distribute load in your environment by deploying lightweight polling engines with SolarWinds Platform agent technology to communicate with the SolarWinds Platform. Expand Active Directory monitoring from 50 up to 200 domain controllers with the new Enable Domain Components option.

SAM 2020.2: API Poller improvements include support for OAuth 2.0, Bearer Token, and API Key authentication, and new API Poller templates were added. WinRM is the now default transport method for data gathered by WMI-based component monitors (for example, Performance Counter Monitors) in SAM templates and application monitors.

SAM 2019.4.1: This service release introduced localized SAM application monitor templates in German and Japanese that are automatically available when you select one of those languages when running the SolarWinds Platform Installer to deploy SAM in your environment.

SAM 2019.4: Use the API Poller feature to monitor external REST APIs and gather metrics for nodes and applications in your environment, providing an easy way to collect data from a modern application stack in a simplified manner. Starting in this release, you can also monitor hardware health for Nutanix clusters.

SAM 6.9: This release added cloud monitoring for AWS instances, the Performance Analysis dashboard (PerfStack), the ability to import nodes from files, an updated SolarWinds Platform agent for Linux, plus critical and warning status for alerts.

SAM 6.8: This release added AppInsight for Active Directory to the suite of AppInsight applications so you can monitor physical and virtual AD environments to identify issues about domain controllers, replication, and more. Improved Cisco UCS device monitoring is also included.