SolarWinds announced updates to SolarWinds Server & Application Monitor (SAM) that improves IT professionals’ monitoring, alerting and reporting capabilities for Linux environments.

Now with both agentless and agent-based monitoring capabilities for Linux systems, SolarWinds SAM is ideally suited to help improve the performance and uptime of both Windows- and Linux-based applications within a single console wherever they are deployed — on-premises, whether physical or virtual, or in the cloud.

“IT is becoming increasingly distributed, being driven in large part by the need for geo-redundant deployments and hybrid IT,” said Gerardo Dada, VP, Product Marketing, SolarWinds. “At the same time, IT departments are increasingly responsible for managing heterogeneous environments that include both Windows and Linux systems. Some compromise between effectiveness and efficiency by managing such environments with two or more separate toolsets, often leveraging open source tools for monitoring their Linux-based applications. With this update, SolarWinds SAM now empowers IT professionals with the capability to ensure the performance of both Windows- and Linux-based applications and servers—regardless of where they may be may be — with a single tool.”

With new agent-based monitoring for Linux systems, SolarWinds SAM empowers IT professionals with detailed performance metrics and alerting for their Windows and now Linux-based applications deployed in geographically disperse datacenters, remote offices or in the public cloud, including Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Rackspace.

In addition, the latest updates make SolarWinds SAM especially helpful in monitoring performance, health and resource utilization of applications during the transition to the cloud as well — ensuring the right workloads are hosted where they perform the best and proper resource provisioning to prevent downtime and performance degradation.

While over 80 percent of application performance issues are database related, many IT departments have inadequate visibility into what happens inside a database, limiting their ability to troubleshoot why a query may be slow or how to improve the speed of a database operation. The latest version of SolarWinds SAM also includes improved integration with SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) to present detailed database wait-time analytics in context of application, server, virtualization and storage performance.

Now, when these products are used together, database performance data is integrated into the SolarWinds Orion platform’s AppStack environment view. Among other benefits, this enables IT departments to be alerted when a database operation deviates from a historic baseline and simultaneously informed of the potential impact to specific applications supported by the database. The correlation of database and other systems data can also lead to faster identification of the root cause of the slowdown.

Additional new capabilities include:

· Next generation high availability to simplify deploying SolarWinds SAM and other SolarWinds Orion platform-based products in a redundant configuration for critical workloads.

· Faster discovery of servers and applications through directory services.

· Monitoring of Linux processes in real time and the ability to identify which are consuming the most CPU/memory and start/stop processes remotely.

· Additional visibility into network interface metrics, such as bandwidth throughput, packet and error counts.

· Web-based SSH client for remote console management of Linux servers directly from the SolarWinds Orion platform interface.

· Automatic identification of Linux distributions, simplifying the configuration of distribution-specific monitoring templates.

SolarWinds SAM Highlights

· Out-of-the-box monitoring templates for more than 200 enterprise applications plus hundreds more available through our THWACK® user community.

· Monitor custom or home-grown applications by defining custom metrics or modifying existing templates.

· Isolate root cause of issues by visualizing application relationship with underlying infrastructure layers.

· Monitor server hardware health, perform capacity forecasting and manage asset inventory.

· Remediate server issues remotely with built-in troubleshooting tools.

· Integration with the SolarWinds Orion platform, allowing server and application performance data to be incorporated with data from SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor (SRM), SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and SolarWinds DPA into the platform’s AppStack environment view.