This post is live-blogged from the Solarwinds presentation at #VFD4. The structure and organization will undoubtedly be poor, since this is all captured on the fly from our chat.
Overview
The Solarwinds presentation focused on AppStack, which intends to provide insight all the way through the stack from the application to the storage. The Solarwinds software portfolio in general is massive, and they do an exceptional job of exposing data from all pieces to all the other pieces. Orion is the foundation, and all the other products basically extend Orion. Products can operate without each other, but they work best in tandem.
Deep-Dive/Demo
So AppStack is a common interface to tie together the different extensions like NPM, SAM, etc. AppStack is built into Orion, which means that it already has access to all the good stuff. Because AppStack has access to all the data, we can easily identify issues down the stack that may be impacting upstream components. They were very careful about the phrasing surrounding correlation/root cause analysis. Obviously, accurate root cause analysis is very hard, even for people, much less in software. The good news is the massive amount of data provided, so even though automated root cause analysis isn’t possible, the tool can absolutely highlight some places to start looking. Of course, another part of this picture is identifying anomalies, which via baselines (both automatic and manual, as I understand it) this tool is able to do.
Honestly, the demo moved quickly and we were very engaged, so I didn’t have time to capture much of it here. Oops 🙂 Kudos to Solarwinds for being the first presenter at this TFD to do a whole session with no slides. We used only a whiteboard and a live UI to get through this two hour session, and although that’s not as easy, it’s what we want as delegates. Well done!!
Last session of the day coming up in a bit with CommVault! Looking forward to this one!
