SolarWinds Improves Efficiencies with Updates to Cloud Portfolio

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IT management software provider SolarWinds Tuesday announced a series of enhancements to its cloud portfolio that aim to make life easier for technicians.

The updates are all about improving efficiency, which has become a big concern among managed service providers (MSPs) as they scramble to support more clients and endpoint devices with the same amount of resources. SolarWinds’ efficiency strategy centers around improved integrated user experience (UX) and increased visibility across cloud applications and infrastructure.

Complexity is the enemy of efficiency, and being an MSP has never been more complicated than it is today. A recent survey by CompTIA shows that nearly half of those partners polled said operating their business is more complex than it was just a couple of years ago. There are more data streams to manage and analyze, more business lines and models to adjust to, and more emerging technologies to integrate into existing offerings.

That’s why partners are clamoring for vendors to make it easier and less time-consuming to use their products. MSPs know they have a long way to go when it comes to operational efficiency, and that it’s critical to creating solid profit margins. It doesn’t really matter how much you sell; if it takes you too long to service or manage a customer, you’re going to be leaking profits.

The commercial software platforms such as those provided by SolarWinds help automate time-consuming processes and boost efficiency, and the updates announced Tuesday reflect the demands partners are making of the company and other IT management solution providers. This refresh includes updates to several SolarWinds SaaS-based IT management products designed to simplify the lives of DevOps, IT Ops and MSPs by further integrating the UX for customers using more than one product. The company says users will now see the full picture of traces, metrics, logs and the digital experience, improving application responsiveness.

SolarWinds’ AppOptics upgrades are all about visibility, geared toward helping techs more quickly identify outliers and usage patters with a new unified view and support for seven different programming languages. The platform integrates with SolarWinds’ log analysis and monitoring tool Loggly, which now offers preconfigured type-based dashboards, and its cloud-hosted log management product Papertrail, which touts a new event viewer, velocity graphs and dashboard improvements.

Signiant’s Dave North

“The power of Papertrail is in its simplicity,” said Dave North, director of DevOps at Signiant, a U.S.-based media and entertainment company. “The new features build on the product’s usability and add real value; for example, being able to favorite groups in the dashboard saves me time. The new velocity graphs are especially valuable, as they let us visualize the error rate, and quickly determine whether we have a small or large problem.”

Finally, the company gave its reporting platform Pingdom a boost by giving it the capability to provide up to 13 months of data as well as allowing users to generate shareable online reports to improve communication.

The company says it’s also worked to provide tighter integration within the portfolio so techs can cross-launch among SolarWinds Cloud products. Giving DevOps the ability to move between applications more easily helps them make the most of their time and get that much closer to the Holy Grail of peak operational efficiency.

The enhanced offerings are available immediately, with pricing beginning at $7.50 per month for AppOptics, $9.95 per month for Pingdom, $7 per month for Papertrail, and $99 per month for Loggly.