SolarWinds recently announced a pair of product updates for its Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) and Server and Application Monitor (SAM) solutions, bringing them each to version 6.6.  The updates offer broader and deeper performance monitoring capabilities across physical and virtual infrastructures, particularly in hybrid environments. To dig in deeper, I spoke with Brandon Shopp, Vice President of Product Strategy for Systems Management at SolarWinds.

VMblog:  What are the key updates included in the recently announced SAM 6.6 and SRM 6.6 updates?

Brandon Shopp:  The new updates to SolarWinds' Storage Resource Monitor (SRM) include extending support to a broader range of leading all-flash arrays, including Dell EMC Unity, HPE Nimble Storage, IBM AIX FlashSystem 9000, and INFINIDAT InfiniBox. With this, SRM 6.6 enables resource monitoring across more infrastructures in multi-vendor environments for a wider set of customers. The extended support also gives SolarWinds a broader set of options for deploying hyper-converged infrastructure. 

SolarWinds' Server and Application Monitor (SAM) 6.6 provides end-to-end visibility and performance monitoring of server and applications across multiple data centers, remote locations, or the cloud. The latest enhancements deliver application dependency functionality that allows customers to automatically discover network-based relationships, between applications and servers, by connecting communications at the application process level.

VMblog:  What additional capabilities do SAM 6.6. and SRM 6.6 offer users beyond the built-in functionality provided by vendors?

Shopp:  SRM 6.6 offers users a multi-vendor approach, normalizing data across many vendors, and showcasing this data in one dashboard with a user-friendly web interface and alerts. Unlike traditional storage resource management solutions, SRM is easy to use and provides functional depth at a reasonable price. With SRM, users can quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve storage performance problems and outages. It's easy to use and maintain, so users can spend more time managing infrastructure. The latest enhancements in SRM 6.6 extend these features to a broader set of leading all-flash arrays. 

SAM 6.6 offers a similar streamlined value, helping users monitor the performance of server and application across a variety of data centers, remote locations, or the cloud. IT professionals can typically download and deploy SAM in one hour, and its ease of use eliminates the need to invest in personnel training and management overhead. Organizations experience a return on investment typically in a few months, including reduced cost and impact of downtime, faster time to resolution, and time savings in diagnosing application issues through proactive alerting.

VMblog:  How can SAM's new application dependency visualization capability impact the overall performance of business applications?

Shopp:  IT professionals can leverage the new connection details function, a unique capability to visualize server and network metrics of specific application connections within an environment. This function gives users a fast way to visualize data on metrics such as packet loss, latency, network status, and more, helping to reduce time required to identify the root causes of application issues. 

For example, a customer running a large implementation of SAP can view the dependencies between the SAP instances (application layer) and associated Oracle DB instances (database layer), to understand if performance issues are associated with server resource utilization or application to database connectivity.

VMblog:  How do the upgrades to SRM and SAM enhance SolarWinds' Orion platform overall?

Shopp:  SolarWinds' Orion Platform is designed to be a modular enterprise software. Users can start with the product they immediately need and add more as desired, all while maintaining consolidated metrics and data in one view, with advanced alerts that enable quicker root cause identification. Separately, the Orion Platform is also scalable, allowing users to monitor hundreds of thousands of elements across multiple locations.

SRM 6.6 and SAM 6.6 are integrated with other SolarWinds products, including Virtualization Manager, through the Orion Platform. This data integration enables end-to-end relationship mapping from application and virtualization through storage.

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Brandon Shopp, Vice President of Product Strategy for Systems Management, SolarWinds

Brandon Shopp has been SolarWinds' Vice President of Product Strategy for Systems Management since February 2018. He served as SolarWinds' Director of Product Management since November 2011, assuming the title and responsibilities of Senior Director of Product Management in July 2013. Previously, Shopp was the Vice President of Product Management at AlienVault, from August 2016 until February 2018 and the Senior Director of Products at Embarcadero Technologies, from July 2015 until August 2016. Shopp has a proven success record in product delivery and revenue growth, with a wide variety of software product, business model, M&A, and go-to-market strategies experience. Shopp holds a B.B.A. from Texas A&M University.