I think every engineer or sysadmin wants the one monitoring tool that does it all.  It is elusive and many vendors claim they can do it.  You see in a lot of scenarios, that I have product vAwesome that monitors just my VMs.  Product PLENTYOFIOPS monitors storage.  Product iNEVERSLEEP monitors my network.  Then there’s overlap with SCOM, vCOPs or whatever product the DBA team has chosen.  There are probably monitoring tools in your environment that you aren’t aware of, that are running because teams just want something that works for their particular area of expertise. Eventually, there is so much chatter that people ignore the alerts.

At Virtualization Field Day 4, Solarwinds demonstrated how many of their monitoring tools now integrate with AppStack, the ‘single pane of glass’ into your environment.

First, everything is based on their Orion platform.  It maintains the schema for the visualization into the UI.  Then there are integration pieces like Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), Server and Application Monitoring (SAM), Web Performance Monitoring (WPM and formerly pingdom). Also, through a Hyper 9 acquisition, they created Virtualization Manager(VMan) and integrated it into Orion. Solarwinds really has so many offerings, I can’t cover them all here.  Once a component is integrated with Orion, it becomes part of a powerful tool set.  There is now a definite SOAP API which I believe is moving to REST invoked with JSON.  There might be some PowerShell and Python down the road.  I’m seeing more and more Python around lately.

 

 

Server & Application Monitor
The 6.2 version now enables monitoring of server and application performance hosted in IaaS cloud providers such as Amazon EC2, Rackspace, and Microsoft Azure. It  can combine the data it collects along with your on site server and application statistics all with one tool.  It now also features AppInsight for IIS.  Previously, only SQL and Exchange were available for AppInsight.  Most monitoring tools are agentless, using WMI and SNMP to gather data.  However,  SAM does use agents, in order to see your SQL queries, buffer size, etc.

Here is VMan with the AppStack view alongside it:

I can bring up the AppStack view and hit Spotlight to bring up pertinent alerts.

Yellow is not great, Red is bad, you know the drill.  Get more information on AppStack goodness.

My Take
If you already own these products, taking advantage of AppStack is a no-brainer. I think this is a good first approach by SolarWinds to bring so many pieces of a large puzzle under one roof. I look forward to seeing more products integrated into AppStack.  It not only brings monitoring to the sysadmin, but also maps out the underlying dependencies and infrastructure to help bring about swift resolution.