In today’s quickly changing IT landscape, businesses face the big challenge of being able to manage and monitor their IT infrastructure effectively. SolarWinds, which has been a long-time fixture in the management and monitoring space, offers a wide range of solutions to help address these business challenges. By deploying SolarWinds’ products, businesses can gain visibility and control over their IT operations.
In this post, I dive into some of the features and capabilities of SolarWinds’ products, their use cases, and how they can benefit businesses across various IT focus areas.
Understanding SolarWinds’ IT Focus Areas
SolarWinds offers a large number of products to help organizations manage their IT infrastructure and services. These products are designed to provide visibility, monitoring, and control over all areas of IT, from the network to the applications and databases. SolarWinds’ products are used by organizations of all sizes to help improve performance, security, and compliance.
All of these products are organized into seven key IT focus areas. Each area covers a range of tools and solutions, and they include:
Network Management
SolarWinds offers a set of network management tools that help businesses monitor and manage their networks effectively. This area is the original focus area for SolarWinds. Its first products were designed to help with Cisco networks but has since expanded to include other types of networks. These tools show you how your network is performing in real-time, so your team can quickly find and fix issues to keep your data flowing smoothly without any big disruptions.
Systems Management
SolarWinds’ systems management tools help you keep an eye on your servers, virtual machines, and applications. They give you a clear picture of how your systems are performing, how well your resources are being used, and how your applications depend on each other. This helps IT departments quickly spot potential problems and keep things running smoothly.
Database Management
SolarWinds’ database management products help you to monitor and optimize how your databases perform. This helps keep your important data safe, secure, and reliable. These tools show you how your databases are performing in real time, so you can quickly find and fix issues, like slow queries, to keep your data transfers moving.
Application Management
SolarWinds’ application management tools help IT teams keep an eye on how applications are performing. With these tools, you can quickly pinpoint application problems and fix them before they impact users. You’ll also have access to detailed information on application performance, including any bottlenecks or problems users might be experiencing.
IT Security
SolarWinds’ IT security solutions help IT teams keep their systems safe from cyber threats by providing tools to analyze logs, monitor security events, and evaluate system vulnerabilities. With these tools, you can quickly identify and respond to security incidents, and you’ll have a better understanding of your overall infrastructure’s security, or lack thereof.
IT Service Management
SolarWinds’ IT service management solutions help IT teams manage all their IT service desk tasks more efficiently, including incidents, requests, and assets. With SolarWinds, you can improve the quality of your service, make your technicians more productive, and keep your customers or users happy.
Observability
SolarWinds’ observability solutions are a relatively new set of tools that help IT teams get a deeper understanding of their IT environment. This goes beyond traditional monitoring to provide a more comprehensive view of the infrastructure, its applications, and its services. It helps your teams collect and analyze data from various sources to understand system health, performance issues, and their impact on user experiences.
Unveiling SolarWinds’ Products and Capabilities
When it comes to IT management and monitoring, SolarWinds sticks out with its many suite of products for specific needs. There are currently over 40 products that SolarWinds offers. Each of these products addresses an aspect of IT operations, helping businesses to gain visibility, optimize performance, and ensure the availability of their IT infrastructure. Let’s talk about a few of these products now.
Network Performance Monitor
There’s Network Performance Monitor, or NPM. This product helps you monitor network performance in real-time to detect any issues. With NPM, you can proactively find and fix network issues before they can affect your users or applications. NPM also provides insights into network traffic patterns and trends to help optimize network performance.
Server & Application Monitor
Another product is Server & Application Monitor, or SAM. SAM monitors servers, applications, and virtual machines to ensure optimal uptime and performance. You can use it to more quickly and efficiently troubleshoot problems, minimizing downtime and maximizing productivity. With SAM, you also get proactive monitoring and management for a variety of OSes, like Windows and Linux.
Database Performance Analyzer
Next is Database Performance Analyzer. This product analyzes database performance to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. With it, you can optimize database query execution to improve efficiency and responsiveness. Also, DPA provides detailed insights into database performance and resource utilization.
Pingdom
Another product is Pingdom, which SolarWinds purchased many years ago. Pingdom monitors website and web application performance to ensure optimal user experience. With it, you get insights into user experience, including metrics like page load times and errors. Pingdom also finds potential web application problems before they affect users, helping you troubleshoot more proactively.
Security Event Manager
The SolarWinds Security Event Manager product collects and analyzes security logs from various sources to detect suspicious activities and potential threats. It can help your team with rapid response to potential threats by providing real-time alerts and comprehensive analysis. This product also helps businesses comply with security regulations and standards by providing an audit trail.
Service Desk
And the last one I’ll mention is Service Desk. This product streamlines IT service desk operations by providing a centralized platform for incident management, problem management, change management, and knowledge management. With it, you can improve your team’s efficiency and cost optimization with automation and self-service features. Service Desk also helps raise the bar for the user experience by providing a single point of contact for IT support and a personalized service experience.
All of the above, and the other, products address a wide range of use cases, helping businesses overcome various IT challenges, from ensuring network stability and optimizing virtualized environments to enhancing database performance and proactively managing application performance. SolarWinds’ solutions also strengthen your organization’s IT security position and elevate IT service delivery. This can ultimately lead to improved efficiency, minimized costs, and a better UX.
Exploring SolarWinds’ Use Cases
Because SolarWinds has so many products, it naturally can cater to many diverse use cases to help businesses address their various IT challenges. Let’s talk about some of these SolarWinds use cases.
Ensuring Network Stability
Picture a situation where your network is experiencing constant outages and slowdowns, which are affecting business operations. SolarWinds’ network monitoring tools provide real-time visibility into network performance, enabling IT teams to quickly identify and resolve network issues, ensuring smooth data flow, and preventing service disruptions.
Optimizing Virtualized Environments
In today’s virtualized world, managing virtual machines and optimizing resource allocation can be a big task. SolarWinds’ virtualization management solutions help to simplify this process by monitoring virtual machines, identifying resource contention issues, and optimizing VM placement. This enhances performance and availability, and ensures efficient utilization of resources.
Strengthening IT Security Posture
With constantly increasing cybersecurity threats, protecting your confidential data and the systems they run on is critical. SolarWinds’ security solutions help organizations collect, analyze, and respond to security events effectively. They help detect and mitigate threats, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of critical data and systems.
By using SolarWinds’ products and addressing these use cases, your organization can gain key visibility, optimize performance, ensure availability, and proactively address challenging IT issues. This ultimately leads to improved efficiency, cost optimization, and an experience that your users just might love.
Empower Your IT Infrastructure with SolarWinds
SolarWinds offers a comprehensive suite of solutions, products, and capabilities that span network management, systems management, database management, and other key IT areas. Their solutions help businesses overcome challenges in ensuring network stability, optimizing virtualized environments, and proactively managing application performance. SolarWinds can also help strengthen IT security and improve IT service delivery.
By using SolarWinds’ products and implementing use cases like the ones mentioned, your IT team can improve efficiency, optimize costs, and have happy users.
If you’re interested in learning more about SolarWinds’ products and solutions, you can check out my course on Pluralsight called SolarWinds: The Big Picture. This course covers many of SolarWinds’ products in much more detail and discusses many more use cases you can implement in your IT environment.
Happy monitoring!