There are two products here - Solarwinds Observability SaaS and Solarwinds Observability Self Hosted. This review is for Self Hosted because it's the product I'm most familiar with. We've used Orion/HCO/SWOSH for nearly 10 years and it's been the cornerstone of our monitoring for customers. Once you learn how to drive it you can get all the informationabout your estate that you need, with more and more functionality added as time has gone one. The reporting is good and the ability to create your own dashboards based on node metrics is straightforward. If you learn the SWQL query language and Solarwinds Information Service for Powershell it gets more powerful allowing you to completely customise the end-user experience.

I can't currently say that I like anything about Observability SaaS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

For Self Hosted my only bugbear at present is that the search widget can't be turned off per user account - it's a global setting which prevents us from allowing customers read-only access to their estates because of the risk of data leakage.

Observability SaaS has many major holes, not least the gaping security hole that is a public API key being allowed full access to the platform. Admin/Member/Viewer permissions are weak and not suitable for a multi-customer environment, though I believe this is being worked on. Lack of nested groups is also causing issues as you can't properly group customer environments. The reporting is nothing like we're used to with SWOSH because it's literally a PDF of a dashboard. The documentation is poor with the concepts and various component relationships not explained, how metrics are made up is poorly explained and elements of the GUI keep moving during updates. This week I lost my custom dashboards in a meeting because how they're accessed changed from last week to this. The product seems to be updated monthly, and to my mind is a cloud-first application that has had VM and on-prem solutions bolted to it. The network collectors are poorly thought out and include a lot of features like AppInsight which can be applied to nodes on that collector, but the metrics will never surface in the SaaS Portal because there isn't a 1:1 relationship between the two. Finally, API polling is restricted to GET requests only which means they're useless to us as we use POST requests with a JSON body. I believe this is being worked on too. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Rolling all the modules into the product has definitely improved and we're seeing improvement of new product releases (features not bug fixes) in recent releases. There has been a definite uptake in feature requests being ticked off that we hadn't seen for some time, so this is good.

AI additions are good but focus needs to remain on the many requests still outstanding from the community. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Licensing tiers and cost is offputting, and competitors have had time to catch up. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Solarwinds has been in our environment for a very long time. It provides excellent near real-time reporting on events in our infrastructure from disk space alerts to network connectivity issues to down services and resources. The interface is very friendly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Solarwinds out of the box is not very useful. There is constant tuning and adjusting of monitors required. With the latest update, we have also seen WMI issues and SNMP issues with certain devices. From time to time, remote networks also tend to block Solarwinds due to the noise it tends to generate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like most about SolarWinds Observability is its unified visibility across infrastructure, applications, and logs in a single platform. The dashboards are intuitive, and the alerting capabilities help quickly identify performance issues before they impact users. It also integrates well with cloud environments, making monitoring and troubleshooting much more efficient. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Some advanced configurations and dashboards require a learning curve, and customization options for alerts and reports could be more flexible for complex environments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

This platform offers comprehensive observability across public cloud, on-premises, network, and hybrid environments. It makes it easy to monitor metrics like CPU, memory, and network latency, and the dashboards are simple to customize. Integration with automation and ticketing tools is supported. The addition of AIOps features such as correlation and forecasting provides extra value. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The initial deployment and configuration can be challenging, as it demands a high level of technical expertise. At present, it only supports ServiceNow ITSM out of the box, so integrating with other ITSM platforms requires custom work. Additionally, the pricing might be a concern for customers with smaller budgets. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Solarwinds offers a wide range of plugins and widgets that can be used effectively for seamless monitoring. It has a good UI and provides a very smooth overall experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There’s nothing specific when it comes to checking error logs, and there isn’t an easy way to understand the logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Its unified view across infrastructure, applications, and databases makes it easier to pinpoint issues quickly. The real-time monitoring, customizable alerts, and intuitive dashboards help reduce troubleshooting time and improve overall system performance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The platform can feel complex at times, especially when configuring advanced features or navigating multiple modules. The pricing structure may be high for smaller teams, and occasional alert noise requires fine-tuning to avoid unnecessary notifications. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The unified dashboard makes it easy to monitor infrastructure, applications, and network performance in one place. Proactive alerting helps us catch issues before they impact end-users, and integration with existing tools is straightforward. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The UI could be more intuitive in some areas, and occasionally the interface feels a bit slow when loading large datasets or complex queries across multiple environments. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SolarWinds Observability is also good with monitoring multiple services and resources in one central dashboard, that allows us to act proactively instead of constantly reacting to situations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I have not used it long enough to discover serious dislikes that would be worth meantioning. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use SolarWinds Observability to monitor all my infrastructure in networking, servers, and applications. I really like the audit security feature. It works well for me, and overall, this space is something I enjoy. The initial setup was so easy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find the connection to monitoring WAN on SD-WAN services potentially problematic. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.