SolarWinds recently announced a series of enhancements to its full Cloud product portfolio, including updates to the AppOptics, Pingdom, Papertrail, and Loggly offerings. To learn more about the new features of the SaaS-based products and the impact the updates may have on SolarWinds customers, I spoke with Christoph Pfister, Executive Vice President of Products at SolarWinds.

VMblog:  What are the key updates included in the recently announced upgrades to AppOptics, Pingdom, Papertrail, and Loggly?

Christoph Pfister:  Overall, the enhancements are designed to deepen visibility across both cloud infrastructure and applications to help simplify full-stack monitoring for DevOps and IT Ops professionals, and enable a more integrated user experience for customers using more than one product. AppOptics now offers a unified view that can help to quickly identify outliers and usage patterns through new host map and host list view capabilities, and includes support for seven programming languages, now including Ruby, Go, and Node.js-ultimately deepening visibility into infrastructure and applications.

Pingdom now provides up to 13 months of data to deepen digital experience monitoring and enables users to generate shareable online reports to support more effective communication across teams. Papertrail updates build on the product's usability and help add additional value through a new event viewer, new velocity graphs that are designed to let users visualize the error rate and quickly determine the extent of the problem, and dashboard improvements that can accelerate troubleshooting. Loggly now offers preconfigured dashboards based on log types to help simplify monitoring across complex environments. 

VMblog:  How do these updates simplify full-stack monitoring for DevOps and IT Ops professionals?

Pfister:  Extending comprehensive monitoring capabilities across infrastructure and applications ultimately helps to simplify full-stack monitoring for technology professionals. Using these tools can allow customers to see a full picture of traces, metrics, logs, and the digital experience, improving the responsiveness of their applications. While it can be difficult and expensive for DevOps and IT Ops professionals to comprehensively monitor the performance of modern applications in their environment, using SolarWinds tools can help streamline monitoring and management at an affordable price.

VMblog:  How do the enhancements enable a more integrated user experience for customers leveraging more than one product?

Pfister:  Tighter integration is designed to enable a better user experience for customers leveraging multiple products within the portfolio. Cross-launching among SolarWinds Cloud products means DevOps professionals can now move from a dashboard that highlights load time issues on a web page, for example, into a detailed log view to troubleshoot an application infrastructure issue. Specifically, the AppOptics integration with Papertrail and Loggly is intended to make logs available to provide contextual information for troubleshooting.

VMblog:  How do the upgrades help technology professionals manage their environments with the introduction of new technologies and increasingly complex environments?

Pfister:  With cloud computing hitting critical mass in the IT market, compelling new technologies have emerged to address the need for application portability and overall infrastructure agility. We believe that one of the most important innovations is containers, increasingly deployed through Docker and Kubernetes among other technologies. Containers can make it much easier to move and run workloads virtually anywhere, capturing the highest efficiency and performance, while adapting quickly as needs and cost factors change.

The benefits can be powerful, but containers and other advancements also bring new challenges and requirements to IT management. DevOps professionals must retain the ability to aggregate logs within and across containers and monitor application performance running in containers. At SolarWinds, we're addressing this challenge and helping ensure our products are compatible with widely accepted container technologies to support a more comprehensive visibility. Our Cloud offerings now support services and platforms such as Istio, Kubernetes, Fluentd, Docker, and Prometheus. SolarWinds also recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), aligned with the AWS launch of Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). With this partnership, existing SolarWinds AppOptics users have immediate access to partner-integrated capabilities.

VMblog:  How do the upgrades support SolarWinds' mission to deliver technology management products that are effective, accessible, and easy to use?

Pfister:  Technology professionals today must navigate unprecedented complexity to develop and manage applications effectively, and deliver the reliability and availability expected by their users.  In our experience, virtually all environments are now hybrid and typically require multiple tools and processes to monitor and manage different resources located in the cloud or on-premises. It is our mission with the SolarWinds Cloud portfolio to help solve this problem, by finding ways to unify management processes across the hybrid IT landscape and helping to speed access to insights that help solve performance problems quickly.

The latest enhancements in our Cloud portfolio are designed to move us closer to our vision of delivering a set of comprehensive, simple, and affordable full-stack monitoring solutions that empower customers to solve complex performance and reliability problems quickly. They can enable broader visibility through a more integrated work process. By enabling a single view of infrastructure, applications, and digital experience, SolarWinds helps its customers solve their toughest IT management problems quickly and seamlessly.

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Christoph Pfister, Executive Vice President of Products, SolarWinds

Christoph Pfister is the Executive Vice President of Products at SolarWinds, leading strategy, product management, and product marketing to drive growth and expansion for SolarWinds' portfolio of IT management products. He brings a wealth of relevant experience building world-class software products, having served in a variety of executive positions at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, most recently as the Vice President and General Manager of a $1B+ software division. Prior to HP he was a founding partner of a database consulting and tools company in France, and worked at Oracle Corp. Pfister received his bachelor's degree in engineering from FHT Esslingen in Germany and a master's degree (DESS) from the University of Lyon in France. He is a graduate of the Stanford Executive Program.