Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Unlocking the power of today's observability (PRT018)

Summary

• SolarWinds, a well-known company with a global presence, has launched a new observability product.
• The product is designed to help businesses manage the complexities of modern digital transformation, including scale, technology variability, and rapid software development.
• Observability is defined as an end-to-end, full-stack understanding of what's happening in an environment from an application and service perspective.
• The new SolarWinds observability product is cloud-native, built on AWS, and integrates digital experience monitoring, log management, distributed tracing, network and infrastructure visibility, and database monitoring into a single solution.
• The product aims to simplify the management and maintenance of observability tools, reduce the learning curve, and provide easy deployment and value.
• It supports modern applications, ensuring service level objectives (SLOs) and stability, and provides insights into infrastructure, databases, and application health.
• The platform uses AI and ML to prioritize alerts based on their impact on user experience, rather than just system metrics.
• A unique feature called "health score" is introduced, which is a derived metric indicating the health of an application, service, or device.
• The new platform is compatible with existing SolarWinds products (referred to as the "blue" system), allowing data from on-premises systems to be integrated into the cloud-based "green" system.
• The platform is comprehensive, covering various aspects of observability, and is OpenTelemetry native, integrating with existing telemetry tools without requiring proprietary agents.

Insights

• The emphasis on a single pane of glass for observability suggests a market demand for simplified and integrated solutions that can handle the complexity of modern IT environments.
• The integration of AI and ML for alert prioritization reflects a trend towards intelligent automation in IT operations, which can help reduce noise and focus on issues that truly affect user experience.
• The concept of a "health score" is an innovative approach to abstract complex metrics into a simple, actionable indicator, which can be particularly useful for non-experts to quickly assess system status.
• The compatibility with existing SolarWinds products and the ability to integrate on-premises data with cloud-based analytics demonstrates a recognition of hybrid cloud environments as a common architecture in enterprises.
• The native support for OpenTelemetry indicates a commitment to open standards and interoperability, which is increasingly important for organizations that want to avoid vendor lock-in and ensure flexibility in their observability strategies.