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.