SolarWinds has added a service management capability to its portfolio as part of an effort to make it simpler for IT teams to align support services with specific functions.
At the same time, SolarWinds has updated its SQL Sentry observability tool for databases and DataOps workflows to add query-level wait statistics along with a revamped web portal and dashboard for tracking the overall health of a database environment.
SolarWinds Enterprise Service Management (ESM) makes it possible for IT teams to manage IT services based on the ticketing systems, knowledge bases, service portals and request catalogs available for specific departments such as marketing or human resources.
Kevin Kline, senior staff technical marketing manager for SolarWinds, said that as IT management continues to evolve, there is a greater need to streamline and optimize workflows based on the insight from observability platforms. As a result, there is now a need to apply observability more broadly to include database platforms alongside DevOps and other IT workflows, he noted.
The overall goal is to eliminate the blame game that results when IT platforms are managed in a more siloed fashion, added Kline.
Most IT teams are still relying on monitoring tools to track a set of predefined metrics in the hope that an alert will enable them to proactively address an issue before it leads to a major disruption. However, as IT environments become more complex, there is a growing need for observability platforms so IT teams can launch queries and surface issues that predefined metrics aren’t likely to identify. Initially, observability platforms were embraced by DevOps teams, but it’s rapidly becoming apparent that this capability needs to be applied to every IT process. In effect, organizations are on the cusp of democratizing observability, noted Kline.
Achieving that goal will also become simpler thanks to the rise of machine learning algorithms capable of predicting issues and generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools that will make it simpler to craft queries.
In the meantime, there is already no shortage of observability platforms, but the SolarWinds approach is different in that, in addition to DevOps workflows, the company has integrated its platform with multiple database platforms to provide a more comprehensive approach, said Kline.
It’s not clear just yet how observability platforms might impact the way IT teams are structured, but the need for specialists such as database administrators (DBAs) isn’t likely to go away anytime soon, noted Kline. Instead, the level of collaboration across various IT teams should substantially improve.
In the meantime, IT teams might be well-advised to define an observability strategy today before multiple teams start implementing approaches that might be optimized for a relatively narrow range of use cases. After all, trying to reconcile insights generated by multiple observability platforms may very well defeat the purpose of investing in observability in the first place.
