SolarWinds Roadshow 2024:Unveiling the Future of Hybrid Cloud Observability
The SolarWinds Observability Roadshow 2024 held on September 4th at the Marriott Hotel Melrose Arch in Johannesburg, was a key event for IT experts and enthusiasts. Organized in collaboration with ATS Network Management the African distributor, the roadshow provided in-depth insights into the latest developments in IT monitoring and observability.
The event began with a keynote address by Frank Lynch, Director of Sales at SolarWinds, and Glenn Lazarus, CEO of ATS Network Management. They highlighted how SolarWinds’ solutions can optimize performance, ensure availability, and reduce remediation time across both on-premises and multi-cloud environments.
Mark Dorney, Manager of Solutions Engineering at SolarWinds, discussed the technical components of observability solutions, focusing on managing complex hybrid cloud setups. As organizations strive to modernize their technology stack to improve efficiencies, reduce costs, and meet growing customer expectations, they are increasingly adopting hybrid IT infrastructures that combine on-prem data centers, multiple cloud instances, and SaaS applications. The resulting distributed and complex hybrid IT environment presents visibility and management challenges for IT organizations. Dorney’s presentation, Hybrid Cloud Observability: How to Manage Complex Hybrid Cloud Setups, discussed these challenges and best practices for optimizing such environments with observability.
Sascha Giese, SolarWinds’ Global Tech Evangelist for Observability, delivered an engaging presentation on the future of IT monitoring and the critical role observability plays in managing complex IT infrastructures. He began by explaining how observability has evolved beyond traditional monitoring, noting that while monitoring tracks individual metrics and alerts, observability offers a more holistic view of an IT system. This broader perspective helps IT professionals understand the internal state of systems based on the data they generate, leading to faster issue resolution and improved system performance.
Giese’s presentation focused on the unique challenges of managing hybrid cloud infrastructures. He explained how SolarWinds Observability provides unified visibility and management across diverse IT landscapes, making it easier to manage resources spread across multiple cloud platforms and on-premises environments. He introduced the latest enhancements to SolarWinds’ unified observability offerings, which integrate logging, tracing, and monitoring into a single platform. Giese also shared real-world examples of how these technologies can help organizations reduce downtime and enhance customer experiences.
Giese further discussed the practical benefits of observability, highlighting case studies of organizations using SolarWinds Observability to streamline IT operations and optimize cloud resources. He predicted that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) will play a significant role in the next generation of observability tools, enabling more proactive and predictive IT management to help organizations stay ahead of potential issues and maintain optimal performance.
Glenn Lazarus, CEO of ATS Network Management, also shared success stories and his experiences using SolarWinds solutions, further emphasizing their value in today’s IT landscape. Lazarus expanded on the role Observability has to play in provide greater shared value to the corporate ecosystem. Observability must enhance operational agility providing real time cross functional collaboration, trust, transparency and long-term sustainability while monitoring end user experience which is crucial in a competitive landscape.
Lazarus was adamant that no enterprise can run efficiently without an Observability solution in place! It’s vital that all businesses, big and small embark on their Observability implementation to ensure services remain reliable even during times of high demand!
Audience Engagement
The SolarWinds team hosted a Q&A session, giving attendees the opportunity to ask questions and discuss their own challenges and learnings. This interactive session added to the informative nature of the event, while providing partners and end-users a chance to network and share valuable feedback with the SolarWinds team.
In addition to showcasing recent developments, SolarWinds unveiled new capabilities across its self-hosted and cloud observability offerings that are aimed at providing deeper insights and improved cloud resource management. The latest updates include enhanced dashboards for cloud entities and a modernized UI designed to improve organization and efficiency in managing cloud infrastructures.
It was a busy but successful day, highlighting SolarWinds’ commitment to innovation in IT observability and demonstrating its ability to address modern IT challenges. The future looks promising for the SolarWinds community. Users are encouraged to stay engaged via the Solarwinds community at https://thwack.solarwinds.com